WELCOME!
Flarestack have been publishing grass-roots poetry pamphlets since 1995, and have a growing reputation for strong poetry collections in a no-frills A5 stapled format but with bags of style.
And we're still doing it.
Alongside the pamphlet programme, our quarterly new poetry magazine
Obsessed With Pipework is now in its tenth successful year.
Click on the red headings on the left-hand page to visit the various pages in this website.
One of the things Flarestack are good at is slogans: under the slogan poetry to the people (or was it for the people ? - time passes, the memory goes . . . ) we set out to find an audience for poets who have yet to establish their name and reputation but who are already writing good poems that deserve to be read.
We've resisited the temptation to become "vanity publishers" who will put out a booklet for anyone who will pay (our poets pay nothing towards our costs):
we will only consider poets whose work seems original, innovative and to speak about being human in this time. And the collection needs to hang together, to cohere in some way - it can be almost any way, but it's essential that it does: a Flarestack collection has to be more than a bus queue of poems.
We have enough manuscripts in hand to keep us busy for the next two years (and I don't want to think further ahead than that) so we are not actively looking for submissions to the pamphlet programme. BUT on the other hand I don't want to miss a brilliant new collection, SO, if you are burning to join the Flarestack stable of poets and think your work is up to it (do look at our submission guidelines elsewhere on this site) please get in touch to talk about it before you send samples of your stuff, or, worse still, shell out on stamps to send a whole unsolicited manuscript.
I would recommend that poets seeking publicaton should read these words by Marion Brown taken from the Poets House website.