Experimental
Literary
Mainstream
Open to all / most themes

Fiction – We ask our fiction writers to imagine their readers navigating a story with one finger poised over a mouse button. Can your story stay that finger to the end? We have published longer stories on the belief that they succeeded, but we feel more comfortable with 1,000 words or less. Some people call those short-shorts. We call them concise. We favor fiction that is contrary in any number of ways, but typically our contrary fiction defies traditional story form. A story may, for example, bring us to closure without ever delivering an ending. And we hope for fiction as poetic as any poem. Poetry – We look for plurality of meaning, for dual reverberation on the planes of beauty and concern. Poetry is contrary by nature, always defying, always tonguing the tang of novelty. Contrary’s poetry in particular often behaves like fiction or commentary. We find ourselves enamored of prose poems because they are naturally ambiguous about their categorization – they tug overtly on the forces of narrative – but prose poems remain the minority of the all poetic forms we publish. [They rarely publish fiction over 2,000 words.]