Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade
Home of Fine Poetry Collections and The Bitter Oleander:
A Journal of Contemporary International
Poetry & Short Fiction
The Bitter Oleander Press has been providing the poetry reading public with a highly deep-image driven poetry since 1974. We publish those works whose imaginations open our eyes to a world we thought we knew but were often mistaken or uninformed. A world our habits and our blindness ignore everyday.
We believe in bringing our readers and writers face to face with each other, with the reality of our world today, like the one that exists in grape seeds blown by hurricanes into corner crevices.
We continue to publish the well-known, the little known and the unknown poets and writers side by side. We publish it in English and we also present a lot of it in translation from their originals. We demand a serious poetry devoid of the commonplace remark, the repetitive philosophy and prefer a heightened music of profound linguistic rhythm.
Along with the biannual publication of our journal, we publish books for this purpose and are vigilant in our looking-out for poets whose perception and language are so unique that they beg not to be over-looked.
Because we are open to all submissions from all kinds of cultures, people and languages, we regard their investment of time spent submitting and creating to be very critical. We pride ourselves on answering every request, every order, every submission, every letter of gratitude and annoyance personally because we feel there's absolutely no substitute for that one-to-one exchange which can and should take place between an editor and the writer. Building this bond emphasizes the importance such interaction can have on one's work and on one's publication. We're indebted to all those poets and writers for making us what we are, and we can't thank them enough for all the trust they've placed in us.
Council of Literary Magazines and Presses