You are weird. Goes from you are different, to you are destiny.
WYRD Press exists for poets from the margins: queer poets, disabled and neurodivergent poets, poets whose voices publishing has historically filed under “niche” instead of “necessary.”
The name comes from the Old English wyrd: fate, destiny. It’s the root of the word “weird,” before centuries of drift turned a word for the uncanny and the chosen into a word for wrong. Shakespeare’s “weird sisters” were never oddities. They were fate itself, given form.
We think it’s time the word, and the poets it’s been thrown at, got that meaning back.
WYRD Press is an incorporated, artist-run initiative: poets and artists making the decisions, not a company deciding what poetry is allowed to say. Read more about the community we’re building.
Our mark is a dotted diple, an old manuscript symbol scribes used to flag a line worth disagreeing with. We liked that a punctuation mark for dissent could become a colophon for a press. Every book we publish is, in some sense, an argument in the margin of the canon.
What we publish
Poetry only. No prose, no fiction, no memoir. If it isn’t a poem, we don’t publish it.
Full-length collections
Debut to career poets with a spine and an argument.
Chapbooks
Short, sharp, letterpress-minded objects. A single obsession worked to the end. Made to be read at a reading and carried home in a coat pocket.
Accepted chapbooks are published in gatherings of two to four, paired with others of kindred tone and theme so the books talk to each other rather than just share a spine. Once we’ve proposed a pairing, you’ll see who you’d be bound with, and you’re free to say no.
Voices we want
Relatable is the gentlest rejection in poetry. It means an editor couldn’t picture the reader who’d need this — so the poem goes home: too specific, too strange, too far from a centre it was never trying to reach. Whole lives get filed under niche because the person holding the manuscript hadn’t lived one like it.
We think relatability is the wrong test. A poem doesn’t have to be relatable to be true; it has to be exact. You don’t need to have lived a thing to be undone by it; you need it rendered so precisely you can’t look away. That’s the poem we’re reading for: the one only one person could have written, published for everyone else.
We especially want to hear from poets the mainstream keeps at its edges: queer, trans and gender-diverse writers; neurodivergent and disabled poets; First Nations writers; poets writing from mental illness, chronic illness, or the parts of a life that don’t resolve neatly. If you’ve ever trimmed the strangeness out of your work to make it easier to place, send us the untrimmed version. You don’t need a track record, an MFA, or a tidy bio. You don’t need to have been published before, or under this name. Bring the poems that are most yours, and we’ll meet them there.
If your work came back with “beautiful — but I couldn’t see the audience,” you’ve found it.