Hey, so sometimes it’s nice to submit to top-top places because I find it takes the sting out of rejection. Like trying to get into a fancy club even though—and this is true—I only own sweatpants. They are damn fine sweatpants. Old Navy, I think. So, worth a try, right? Right. And sometimes, you know what, they’re like, “Hey, we also like sweatpants!”
But more often than not they say, “Hm, no, not enough buttons.” And that’s fair. I never liked buttons anyway……Point! Yes, point is, it can’t hurt to submit to these places and you’d be surprised how many of them have wide tastes. And if you get rejected it won’t be a surprise since that’s what happens to most everyone. Even those with buttons on their pants.
So this is another statistics list, yay! I pulled the 99 most competitive poetry magazines we have on Chill Subs. Yes, it was supposed to be 100 but I am both bad at math and lazy, so you’re getting 99.
Now, I only pulled those magazines where we had more than 100 tracked submissions. And for those magazines who came to a 0% acceptance rate, I ranked them based on the total number of submissions. That is why these are “of” the hardest and not “the” hardest.
Also, if you been published in any of these, well done! It isn’t easy and you should for sure be proud of it.
For each, I’ve included a direct link to their guidelines page, a brief description, fee, pay, additional genres, and founding year. For stats, I’ve included the acceptance rate % alongside the total number of tracked submissions. Enjoy!
This is one of our paid subscriber lists this month. Our paid subscriptions are what give us the ability to gather all of this information and maintain our database. If you have the means, you can upgrade here.
Of course, we are always happy to help those in need; just let us know.