Call for Submissions: Animalia
We are so pleased to announce this year's Special Issue: Animalia, guest-edited by Sanna Wani! See the call for submissions below.
For the special issue, “Animalia,” I invite into your writing and your world the beavers and their dams, the whales and their pods, the coyotes and their scrounging. I am interested in poems that don’t use the animal as witness, but as kin; not as mirror, but as comrade or enemy, family and friend. Level the playing field: their grief must be as worthy as your grief. Their love must be as messy as your love.
The human is one of the animals I’m interested in but not the only. I’m searching for any poems, essays, and short stories that shed light on what’s important to you through the figure of an animal. The relentless pursuit of survival, rife with strange and sometimes bewildering pockets of tenderness. Enduring political conviction. Humour.
Stretch your imagination as far as you like. Animalia is a kingdom of scientific classification. The root of the word itself, *ane-, meaning “to breathe,” creates several creative offshoots and utterings: in Sanskrit, aniti, “breath”; in Greek, anemos, “wind”; Latin, animus, “the rational mind, or anima, “the living soul.” In ancient times, anything that breathed was thought to have a soul, and anything with a soul was thought to be an animal.
Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” opens, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves”—and Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Kingdom Animalia” closes, “Oh, body, be held now by whom you love.” Between Oliver and Girmay, the animals present are endless: ants, birds, crabs, donkeys, owls, moths, sharks, snails, snakes. Both poets invite me to ask: what does the soft animal of your body hold today?
Looking further to poems like “The Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin and “Unit of Measure” by Sandra Beasley, I notice there is a feeling good writing cultivates from the creaturely and I call this feeling animalia. It opens us to the earth. It gives life a new vibrancy. I dedicate this issue to this sense. I ask us to devote ourselves to the question: if writing is always somehow about life—a flawed, but interesting thesis—then what is the life of the animal and what does it have to do with us now, where we have arrived as the human animal? The form and informing; the power and potential that is available when what’s human is animal and what’s animal touches what’s human.
But aboutness is fickle. I’m less interested in writing about anything, but rather a meaningful inclusions and participation of other creatures, a decentering of what’s human for what’s of the earth and of the flesh. What breathes; what eats; what can move and grow from “a hollow sphere of cells” into something more.
You can explore a Pinterest board I created for the special issue here and contact me with any questions here.
Send work in all our regular categories to [email protected].
Deadline: September 5, 2025
Submission Guidelines: Refer to our regular submission guidelines here.
Guest Editor: Sanna Wani
Sanna Wani is a poet, translator and editor based in Tkaronto. She is the author of the poetry collection, My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi Press, 2022), finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Wani is the cohost and creator of the podcast, Poet Talk, and a member of the Daybreak Poets Collective. Her writing has been published by various literary magazines and anthologies including but not limited to Best Canadian Poetry 2020, Brick Magazine, TIME, Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, and Hazlitt. She loves daisies.
