Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press

Friends,

Thanks for getting this far!  To know if your work fits with moral injury as our theme, you need to know--if you don't already--what we mean by moral injury.

First, the experience of trauma, no matter how severe, does not necessarily (or even usually) lead to moral injury.

Moral injury occurs in two categories of circumstances. 

In the first, an individual engages in an act that is a transgression of that person’s own moral code and which has serious, even grave consequences. Or, the individual fails to do something when their moral code demanded they act with, again, serious consequences.  In the second category, a person is morally injured by seeing others engage in immoral behavior (with serious consequences). For example, combat military may have seen their colleagues or their superiors do egregious things.

In any case, moral injury occurs when the trauma causes a loss of faith or trust, or even hostility, toward authority, institutions, and even one’s perception of human morality. It has psychological, social,  and spiritual aspects.

The field of moral injury has been applied to combat veterans. Consider a Vietnam veteran who kills a noncombatant. Or who sees his or her own military leaders engage in incompetent, careless, reckless behavior that got people hurt or killed. That doesn’t just cause PTSD. It is an assault on the person’s moral faculties. 

Or consider a police officer whose line of work exposes him regularly to the worst kinds of conduct in human beings.

Another: Someone works for a government child protection office. They also see very bad human behavior, victimization of children, but also work in a system that doesn’t necessarily take good care of children and families.

Another: A driver engages in behavior in their car that distracts them and they cause an accident in which an innocent person is severely injured or killed. Subsequently, the driver realizes they had a moral duty to be attentive when driving and due to their negligence, terrible harm is done.

I have no length guidelines for poems. Previously published work will be considered, as long as we can quickly resolve any permission to reprint issues."  

Questions to me at dalewisely@gmail.com.

Thanks for submitting!  

Dale

We read 6 weeks on and 6 weeks off. Here's our current schedule.

We accept submissions:

• Nov 1 - Dec 15 for our January issue
• Feb 1 - Mar 15 for our April issue
• May 1 - Jun 15 for our July issue
• Aug 1 - Sep 15 for our October issue.

Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play. Or to crash on the couch for a while after breaking up with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
 

WHAT TO SUBMIT:
We seek prose poems. We do not publish lined poetry. Our strong preference is for a single block of text, maybe two, per piece. More than that, we start arguing about whether it's a prose poem! Don't make us argue. Some of our editors are already dangerous.

To get some idea of the kind of content we like, check out current and past issues. 

The editors of Unbroken seek prose poems that transcend the boundaries of conventional storytelling. Of course, we believe that submissions should be coherent and intelligible, but also that coherence can be achieved through style, tone, imagery, and even transgressive methods. Linear narratives with predictable situations and language will be discounted. We want prose that smolders in the ditch. We want it to cry. Maybe laugh at inappropriate times. We want it to knock on our doors in the middle of the night and demand to be let in, fed, given black coffee, and assured that life isn’t completely insane. We want prose poems that have been fired from multiple jobs and have gaps in their resumes that cause them to perspire in interviews. Poems that listened to “Venus in Furs” daily for the entire year of 1993. We want poems that are the perfect carrot cake at your aunt’s house. We want poems that need extensive dental work because of unfortunate incidents outside bars in Phoenix or Indianapolis or Mobile. Finally, we want submission guidelines that don’t read like Dale Wisely got his hands on them.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We read 6 weeks on and 6 weeks off.
In any given reading period, submit no more than 2 pieces. If you submit more than two pieces, only the first two will be read.
We do final acceptances for each issue shortly after the end of each reading period.
 

UNPUBLISHED WORK ONLY:
We do not accept previously published works (including self-publishing and blogs). Simultaneous submissions are okay (please tell us if it is a simultaneous submission), but please let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere.
 

LENGTH:
We do not have a rigid word limit, but we tend to favor shorter, punchier pieces. If you send us something that’s more than 500 words, it really needs to sock our hosiery off.
 

COVER LETTERS/BIO:
Cover letters are not essential, but please provide a brief (around 50 words) third-person bio in your email. We reserve the right to edit bios.
 

FORMATTING:
Do not supply line breaks. We are looking for blocks of text. Hey. We see your right pinky creeping toward that RETURN key. Don't do it! Save yourself! Ok, we are not necessarily opposed to 1 paragraph break but prefer a single block of text. At what point will these guidelines have beaten that point to death?
 

EDITING:
If your work is accepted, we may fix at our discretion minor grammatical or spelling problems. For anything more involved, you will be contacted for clarification. We are unable to provide feedback on work we do not accept.
 

We know your rights:
 If your work is accepted, you agree to give Unbroken first serial electronic rights to your work and nonexclusive electronic and print rights in perpetuity. This means we can archive your work on our website indefinitely and include it in potential future publications and anthologies. Otherwise, all rights revert to the author upon publication.

If you publish the work elsewhere in the future, we ask that credit be given to Unbroken for first publication.

We cannot pay our contributors at this time. We do, however, promote our authors on social media and through our email list with about 700 subscribers.

How to Submit

We publish twice a year--a February issue and an August issue. 

We accept submissions: 

• Nov 1 - Dec 15 for our February issue
• May 1 - Jun 15 for our August issue.

Send up to four poems or six pieces of visual work in one document. Submit once per reading period.

Double-check to make sure you cite your source text. Work that has no source text cited will not be considered. Your citation of sources should make it possible for us to find the original online or by visiting some place and looking it up. We'd also like to know your method for crafting your found writing. We consider your method a part of your work, so drop us a note about that, as well. This will be published along with your work.

Please include a brief, third person bio of no more than 50 words that will accompany your work. Please do not include live links in your bio.

What We Want

We’re looking for found writing that first of all adheres to The Center for Media and Social Impact’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry. This means you’ve found something within a source text that is a new work, not just borrowed the existing copyrighted material. Think of it like this: remember how when you were a kid you would look up at the sky and pick animals and characters and objects out of the clouds? You didn’t just see the cloud, you saw something new, something no one else had ever seen. That’s what we want. Your found writing should not look like its source text. Beyond that, we want work that shocks us, surprises us, moves us, makes us sigh. We also like it when your work comes from interesting or intriguing sources. And we’re not really into poems that rhyme. We also love visual art pieces. If you can incorporate found writing and art, we would love to see it.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet wields his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn. ~ T. S. Eliot

We do not publish writing that is not found writing. We prefer previously unpublished work, but will consider reprints. Be sure to mention when you submit if your work is previously published. We do accept simultaneous submissions, just please let us know ASAP if the work is accepted elsewhere.

How to Submit

Cut and paste the content of your submission (up to 4 pieces) in the box provided. Or send up to four pieces in one document, with the author name in the document, as well as a title above each piece. Double-check to make sure you cite your source text.  (We would want to be able to FIND the source. But you don't have to do a line by line citations.) We’d also like to know your method for crafting your piece. 

For art subs, you'll attach files. JPG, GIF, PNG. Do not submit art in PDF form or embedded in Word documents. Please include a brief (35 words or so), third person bio that will accompany your work. Please do not include live links in your bio.

We cannot accept erasures or black-out poems submitted as text files (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt) with the erased or black-out text in the file. Please submit this kind of work as a good quality scan or a really good photograph.

More on visual projects. Which we welcome! When you submit, keep in mind there can be substantial problems presenting a scan or a photograph of physically-assembled pieces such as paper collages on computer screens, laptop screens, and particularly smartphones. As much as wish it weren't true, frankly, readers often view our issues on their phones. Be particularly attentive to text size. If it is small relative to the overall dimensions of your physical piece, we may reject it because we find it too difficult to read. Try to send scanned images rather than taking photos of your work.

Payment and Rights

We cannot offer payment to our poets at this time, but we will do our best to promote your work. Unlost acquires worldwide First Serial Electronic Rights and Nonexclusive Archival Electronic Rights, so that we may continue to archive your work. All submissions remain foremost the intellectual property of the author and rights revert to the author upon publication in Unlost. Any future publishers of works that first appear in this venue must credit Unlost for first publication.

Response Time

We aim to respond to submissions by 2 weeks after the close of a reading period. If it has been longer than two months, shoot us an email with “Query” in the subject line.