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Shō Poetry Journal

Established in 2002, revived in 2023

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Close-up of a reddish-hued oil on canvas painting by Tanya Rastogi

Shō Poetry Journal is a nonprofit print journal emerging from a 20-year hibernation. We publish an eclectic range of poetry twice a year and publish audio features on a rolling basis. We strive to champion voices that have been historically underrepresented or overlooked. Browse a list of our contributors and follow us on Instagram for updates.

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A girl in a long white dress and a bird head mask sits on a bough under a full moon in a night forest landscape. Her hands are folded in her lap and her feet can't be seen. Text says: Shō Poetry Journal No. 7 Summer 2025.

CURRENT ISSUE

Shō No. 7

SUMMER 2025

This issue features 67 poems by 48 poets, including:

– Christian J. Collier (Winner, Shō Poetry Prize)
– Aldo Amparán (Shō Poetry Prize Runner-Up)
– Ohia, Ernest Chigaemezu (Winner, Sita Martin Prize)
– Nina C. Peláez (Sita Martin Prize Runner-Up)

Cover art: “Interim” by Tanya Rastogi.

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Online Features

  • Jun 27, 2025

    Nina C. Peláez – Doubt [Sita Martin Prize Runner-Up]

  • Jun 27, 2025

    Aldo Amparán — Symptoms of Ghosts [Shō Poetry Prize Runner-Up]

  • Jun 24, 2025

    Audio Feature: Rosemarie Dombrowski

  • Jun 16, 2025

    Audio Feature: Allisa Cherry (Shō No. 6)

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Past Issues

Shō No. 6

Winter 2024/2025

Shō No. 6 features 57 poems by 40 poets.

Cover art: “In Gilded Walls” by Tanya Rastogi.

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Shō No. 5

Summer 2024

Shō No. 5 features 68 poems by 47 poets.

Cover art: “Lucy” by Harim Choi.

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Shō No. 4

Winter 2023/2024

Illustration of girl wearing a large deer head mask with antlers. She is clothed in a dark blue tshirt and pants and stands in a high desert landscape, holding plastic flowers. A ghostly girl’s head is placed beside her in the grass.

Shō No. 4 features 73 poems by 47 poets.

Cover art: “Girl with Deer Mask” by Harim Choi.

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Shō No. 3

Summer/Fall 2023

Shō No. 3 features 62 poems by 42 poets.

Cover art: “Grandfather Autumn” by Juanita Violini.

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Shō Poetry Journal on Instagram

shopoetryjournal

100% recycled padded mailers are more expensive th 100% recycled padded mailers are more expensive than plain unpadded envelopes, but we use them because (1) we know how it feels to receive a contributor copy that’s been knocked around, and (2) we don’t have the subscriber base to meet bulk mail rates anyway (yet? 🌝)

@_johnnycordova has spent the last couple of days addressing envelopes by hand, or sticking addresses on them. Shoutout to the patient folks at the Chino Valley, AZ post office for manually processing our stacks of Media Mail. (One day, we will automate this process).

Thank you to everyone who has ordered a copy! 💚
Shō Poetry Journal's Summer 2025 issue is here an Shō Poetry Journal's Summer 2025 issue is here and features two poems by Amber Adams. Read the poem “Okinawa, 2016” online or in print.

About this poem: This poem begins with the appearance of a kijimuna, which is a Japanese spirit particular to Okinawa. It is a mischievous, child-like yokai, and statues of them (which look like little red-haired woodland fairies) are all over the island. I was thinking about them in relation to my brother and how, in the years before he died, he became more easy-going, boyish after he moved there—almost an embodiment of a kijimuna. In this poem, I was trying to capture the kind of adult sibling relationship we had which was compassionate but not overly demonstrative. There was often a subtext to our expressions of care that were rarely verbalized. Like in the final line of the poem, where the ordering of uni was a sly response to the encounter with urchins previously experienced in the poem, or the buying of shisa dogs which was an acknowledgment of my misfortune and an attempt to protect me from evil spirits. These were nonverbal extensions of the clipped conversation about life, but they were actually more conversant than a deep heart-to-heart conversation.

Amber Adams is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and the author of BECOMING RIBBONS (Unicorn Press, 2022) which was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, American Literary Review, Narrative, Witness, and elsewhere. She received 	her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. She lives in Longmont, Colorado.

#litmag #contemporarypoetry #shopoetryjournal #poetrygram #readapoem #writingcommunity
Shō Poetry Journal's Summer 2025 issue features t Shō Poetry Journal's Summer 2025 issue features three Sugar Baby Sonnets by Paige Passantino. Read the entire poem online or in print.

About this poem: At the start of 2025, I found myself exploring the sonnet form and how it has come to be utilized in contemporary dialogue. While I read many collections and crowns of sonnets, it was to my great surprise that it was in reading Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets I became inspired by the sonnet as a stage, or a mode of performance. This provided me with what felt like the perfect space to explore my relationship and experience with sex-work. I found that the assigned disguise, or costume, of the sonnet allowed me access to truths I hadn’t been able to consider prior. The result has been an ongoing series of “Sugar Baby Sonnets” of which this poem is a part of, a series that explores the stories we tell ourselves and others, and has come to be my own personal and poetic type of drag.

Paige Passantino (@paigeellenpassantino) is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at @jhuwritingseminars. Her work can be found on Poets.org, in Pinhole Poetry, Zenaida, Emulate, and others, and is forthcoming in The Florida Review. She is the recipient of the 2023 Academy of American Poets’ Anne Bradstreet Prize, commended for the 2023 Adroit Prize, and her work has been supported by Tin House. She is an editor and reader for @themassachusettsreview.

#litmag #contemporarypoetry #shopoetryjournal #poetrygram #readapoem #writingcommunity #sonnet
Shō No. 7 | Contents Shō No. 7 | Contents
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Publishing Stats

Since our revival issue was published in Summer 2023:

260

Poems Published

170

Total Poets Published

73

Audio Features Published

28

Poems Nominated for Prizes

1

Poem chosen for inclusion in Best Spiritual Literature

Shō Poetry Journal


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