Poems Talking to Poems: Setting Your Poetry Manuscript Apart

This handbook demystifies the process of crafting a full-length poetry collection.

Poems Talking to Poems presents practical guidance for sequencing, structure and architecture, revision, and choosing titles for sections as well as the poetry manuscript as a whole. This guide also includes insider tips about how contests work, the literary marketplace, and how you can set your work apart.

With essays by such literary luminaries as Ilya Kaminsky, Katie Farris, Kristina Marie Darling, Jeffrey Levine, and many other distinguished contributors, this anthology is a concise and comprehensive field guide to perfecting your book and getting it into print.

Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Rumor of Cortez, and Mortal, Everlasting. His many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize, and the American Literary Review poetry prize. His poems have garnered twenty-one Pushcart nominations. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, artistic director, and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic NORAD Mill in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over thirty volumes of poetry, essays, and fiction. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission and a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a 2024 Villa Lena Foundation Fellowship, a 2024 Civita Institute Fellowship, and eleven juried residencies at the American Academy in Rome. She has held academic appointments at Universidade do Porto, the European Law and Governance School, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the American Research Center in Sofia, and the Leysin American School in Switzerland. A prolific public speaker with the Ovation Agency, Dr. Darling has also lectured at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, where she leads a workshop in professional empowerment through their Continuing Studies Division, the New School, the University of Cyprus, The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European MFA Program, and Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland Campus, where she leads a biannual writing workshop for diplomats. Additionally, Dr. Darling has served on fellowship juries for the United States Fulbright Commission, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and many other awards in the United States and abroad. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between Greece, Alicante, and the Amalfi Coast.