There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from writing badly, but from writing well into silence.
You finish a piece. It is honest. It cost you something. You send it out or you post it and then — nothing. Or almost nothing. A few likes from people who already know you. No new doors opening. No editor sliding into your inbox. Just the quiet that follows good work when good work has no infrastructure behind it.
Read MoreForget trends—write poetry that lasts. Learn how to tune out the noise, embrace your authentic voice, and create work that resonates deeply. Perfect for poets who want to focus on truth over fleeting popularity and build a lasting creative legacy.
Read MoreThere is a system. You already know this. You have always known this — maybe since you were a child watching the wrong people get the gold stars, the scholarships, the microphones. The system does not reward what is true. It rewards what circulates. And circulation has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with who you know, where you studied, whose dinner table you sat at, whose name you can drop like a key into a lock that was never built for you.
Read MoreYou don’t need to chase visibility to build a meaningful poetry career. The strongest work isn’t created for algorithms — it’s created for connection. In this piece, I write about building a poetry press slowly and intentionally, and why the right readers (and the right opportunities) will find your work when it’s ready.
Read MoreIn Another Place Altogether, Candice M. Kelsey navigates the fragile boundaries between personal memory and political reality. This review examines how the collection intertwines feminism, motherhood, trauma, and contemporary history, while questioning the possibilities and limits of confessional poetry in an age shaped by capitalism and war.
Read MoreIn this in-depth interview article, poet Kate Gough reflects on her poetry collection Childhood Lore, exploring themes of childhood myth, purity culture, trauma, chronic illness, anger, and storytelling as resistance. Published by Sunday Mornings at the River, the conversation reveals how fairy tales, domestic spaces, and bodily experience shape her poetic language and challenge romanticised ideas of innocence and girlhood. A powerful insight into contemporary poetry, feminist themes, and the politics of memory.
Read MoreA reflection on what happens when you step away from visibility, metrics, and performance — and return to creating without witnesses. On poetry, slowness, and remembering why the work mattered before it needed an audience.
Read MoreWhy do some voices circulate widely while others remain unread, regardless of their urgency or intellectual rigor? This essay explores the politics of visibility in writing, examining how power, class, and institutional structures shape whose words are amplified, whose anger is legible, and whose truths remain structurally excluded from cultural circulation.
Read MoreWildflowers in Oyster Stone by Claire Thom is a poetry collection rooted in the landscapes of Cádiz, written in haiku, tanka, and haibun. Through vivid images of coast, village life, and changing climate, Thom explores place, memory, and environmental fragility with quiet precision. Her poems capture fleeting moments of human and natural life, revealing how attention, landscape, and belonging intertwine. This collection offers a lyrical meditation on nature, time, and the politics of noticing in contemporary poetry.
Read MoreSunday Mornings at the River is boycotting Black Friday — not out of moral superiority, but because we believe in affordable books all year round. No flash sales, no pressure, no artificial discounts. Just a small, independent poetry press choosing a slower, more honest way of making and sharing art.
Read MoreWhen someone slid into my DMs to “warn” me that a small poetry press I love was using AI, I realised how misplaced our collective anger has become. On AI, Small Presses, and the Hypocrisy of Misplaced Anger is a reflection on how fear, privilege, and purity politics are tearing apart the creative community while corporations quietly profit from our division. I write this as a nurse, a working-class writer, and the founder of a small press — to defend those who are building something meaningful with the few tools available to them, and to ask a simple question: where are we aiming our fire?
Read MoreGive yourself permission to write bad poems and embrace imperfection. Learn why bad poems are essential to creativity, growth, and finding your voice as a poet. Perfect for writers seeking freedom from self-judgment and perfectionism.
Read MoreA powerful review of Colleen S. Harris’s poetry chapbook Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current press, 2025). Harris, a disabled poet living with chronic illness, writes with visceral clarity about the body, grief, resilience, and survival. Discover why this collection belongs in the conversation on disability poetics and contemporary feminist grief writing.
Read MoreSome books hum beneath your skin long after you’ve put them down. Invisible Wasp doesn’t just hum — it stings. It pulses. It lays its eggs in your memory and then flutters away, leaving you to figure out what’s grown inside you.
Read MorePoetry exists in the spaces between the noise. It isn’t designed to compete with the endless stream of notifications, trends, and metrics that dictate modern life. And yet, it holds a kind of power that no algorithm can quantify.
Read MoreSometimes, you have to break your own rules. That’s exactly what we did for Sascha Luinenburg. We first met Sascha at one of our spoken word events and were immediately drawn to his work. So when he handed us his Dutch manuscript, we knew we had to publish it—despite our usual focus on English books.
Read MoreWe are looking for poems that pierce the illusion of capitalism as the only possible system forward. Poems that rage and mourn. Poems that imagine a world outside this system, where people and the planet are more than resources to be exploited. Whether you write about the personal toll, the global consequences, or the sparks of resistance you see around you—your voice belongs here.
Read MoreWe’ve been sold a story about success. It’s loud, it’s instant, and it’s measurable. It looks like follower counts, viral moments, and applause from a faceless crowd. But what if success isn’t any of those things?
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