SIDEKICK SUBMISSIONS CALLS 2026

Current: Ten Poets Do Their Bit For the Secret Service and Ten Poets Lose Themselves in the Land of the Fae

DEADLINE: 28 FEBRUARY 2026

Volumes 8 and 9 in our hit 10 Poets series, set for Easter and early summer releases respectively, attend to two great realms of popular and folk imagination. On the one hand, we have spies, espionage and secret agents – think John le Carré, but also Diana Rigg, Mata Hari, listening devices and grappling hooks, masks and martinis. On the other hand, we have faeries, trolls, hobgoblins and hidden people – the rich lore of magical, dangerous forest kingdoms.

 

What kind of poems are the editors looking for?

We want writing that responds to the prompt embedded in the title – or, more accurately, writing which enacts what is proposed by the title! While this should, of course, have the general character of a poem or poem-adjacent text, it does not have to be a straightforward lyric piece. It could be a prose poem, vignette, short lyric essay – in fact, we encourage you to think in terms of longer, looser forms, of up to 500 words. This follows the trend established over our previous anthology series, which mixed and combined poetry with elements of essay, guidebook, puzzle, flash fiction and so on.

The titles in this series allude to broad themes from popular culture, and our intention is to subvert the usual stereotypes about what poets write about. But they’re a starting point – while each piece of work should technically fit within the remit, the series showcases how far a good writer can run with (and/or swerve from) a simple concept, while also investing it with unexpected depth. Feel free to submit what is in essence an advertisement for your own style and set of preoccupations.

It might be a good idea to look at previous books in the series for a clearer notion of the kind of work we favour, and also to get a feel for the dimensions and layout of the books. Pages are 130x185mm with a 16mm margin, and poems are typeset in Libre Baskerville 9pt. We try to give individual pieces space to breathe and space them out over a few pages, but poems with long lines can be tricky to accommodate.

Is there any payment?

At the moment we aren’t funded by the Arts Council or any other arts charity funding, and as we otherwise tend to operate on a break-even basis, we aren’t in a position to pay contributor fees this time. If your poem is selected for inclusion, however, you will receive contributor copies of the book and a discount code for all Sidekick titles.

I’ve already been in a 10 Poets book. Can I submit again?

For now, we’d like to have it so each book in the series contains a unique set of poets. This way the series will eventually, with a fair wind, grow to be a window onto the work of a significant number of contemporary writers.

I’m worried my poem is going to be too similar to other submissions!

This is something to bear carefully in mind. We aim for variety over the course of each short book, so while we will cover, or at least touch on, some of the more obvious set-ups and associations, we’re especially looking for poems that take the prompt in unexpected directions. We’ve had to say no to some very excellent poems in the past, simply because they’re so similar in theme and imagery to other excellent poems vying for the same spot.

Be especially careful with pastiche and pop culture references. We can’t fill out our spy book with seven poems that deploy the line “shaken, not stirred” and three that feature George Smiley.

How do I submit?

Send one piece only as an attachment to contact@sidekickbooks.com, with the subject line ‘Ten Poets Submission: Secret Service’ or ‘Ten Poets Submission: Fae’. No need to include a bio at this stage – just a short covering note. The deadline is 23.59 on 28 February 2026.

UPCOMING: &Friends Series

SUBMISSIONS OPEN: 1 APRIL 2026

For the first time ever, Sidekick plan to work with full manuscripts supplied to us by single authors – something close to, but not exactly, traditional single-author poetry collections. What we’re looking for more precisely is books of amalgamatic poetry, to be published in the following format:

• Pocket-sized and perfect bound (11 x 16cm, the same size as our Hipflask Series, or Everyman’s Pocket Library books).
• 60-120 pages.
• A clear theme or thread of subject matter. That is, each book should explore a particular tangible theme.

Hold on. What is ‘amalgamatic poetry’ exactly?

Amalgamatic writing, or just ‘amalgamism’, is a literary style which is conspicuously hybrid or patchwork in appearance, not just in terms of mixing genres and tones but also in terms of drawing on the work of multiple authors and/or editors, including comment and criticism alongside creative writing, utilising elements of non-literary media, and blurring the line between writer and reader.

A work of amalgamatic poetry, therefore, is a combination of original composition, editorship, adaptation, commentary and curation. At the heart of the book or manuscript is the author/s own poetry. This is supplemented by some combination of: 1) work they have solicited or borrowed from other writers; 2) previously published work (preferably in the public domain) that they have remixed and recontextualised or otherwise reworked; 3) passages of editorial reflection and other kinds of writing that are adjacent to but distinct from lyric poetry.

This submissions call will be updated with examples before it goes live, so remember to check back!

If the proposal contains collaborations, or curates/reuses other people’s work, is it really a single-author collection?

The core of the work and the arrangement of the book should be your own, and you will therefore be recognised as the main author, but we will attribute the book to ‘Your Name & Friends’ (hence the name of the series!) and list the names of additional contributors/artists on or after the title pages.

When you open for submissions, what should we send you?

• A working title and description of your proposed book.
• An explanation of the amalgamatic elements (particularly if this isn’t apparent from your accompanying writing sample).
• A sample of 5-10 pages.
• A short bio (100-200 words).

Why aren’t you just doing normal poetry collections?

When we first set up Sidekick 15 years ago, we decided that we would focus solely on collaborative or polyphonic texts. This is in part because we wanted to challenge the image of the poet as lone, elevated speaker – an archetype that has never sat quite right with us. So most of the books we’ve published so far are anthologies of some kind. We now want to further explore the possibility of a hybrid of the anthology and the single-author book.

Poetry is inherently combinatorial; it seeks to ‘join up’. Stylistic traditions in poetry involve finding equivalences between the specific and the general, or patterns across and between multiple distinct contexts. Collaboration and amalgamation is an obvious extension of this, and much, if not most, published poetry already owes a clear debt to other writers. Amalgamism follows from the principle that we should allow more crossover and interweaving to occur – not just between writers, but between different kinds of text and book.

What next?

We’ll add more details to this submissions call in the coming months. For now, we wanted to give everyone a head’s up. Stay tuned!