Thirdhand Books promotes experimental writing with core commitments to the lyric, which is equipment for exploring the nature of human experience at the limits of language. We’re interested in hard-to-classify hybrid work that challenges poetic conventions for representing selfhood, especially from emerging and marginalized writers. We look for books that are open in several directions at once, as a field is open but not infinite, a fold. Folds are territories for the flourishing of small communities. We seek work that prioritizes communion over communication as a broadcast technology—that is to say, the two-way work of tradition instead of the one-way transmission of statements made with certainty. Our books carry something in them that has passed through many hands, something tarnished and strange, not sure of its origins, but sure at any rate that it has weight and that it can be held out for the taking.  

Thirdhand Books is an imprint of Bull City Press.

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Kylan Rice, editor

Kylan is the author of An Image Not a Book (Parlor / Free Verse Editions, 2023) and Incryptions (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021). He is the associate editor of the Missouri Review. He holds a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Missouri.

Lindsey Webb, editor

Lindsey is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024) and the chapbooks Perfumer’s Organ (above/ground press) and House (Ghost Proposal). Her writing has appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Submit

Thirdhand Books welcomes unsolicited book-length poetry manuscripts (48-80 pages). Please use the Bull City Press submission manager to send a Word or PDF version of your manuscript along with a cover letter and biographical note. Make sure that you select “Thirdhand Books” as the genre, and please also indicate that your submission is intended for Thirdhand Books in your cover letter. We look forward to reading your work! Our response time is about 5 months.

You may also query us via email at 3rdhandbooks@gmail.com.

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