Poetry and Short Fiction to Read Online

Poems, short fiction, essays, excerpts and translation, put up by the people who wrote them. Some pieces are here in full text. Others are an extract with a link out to the book or magazine that carries the rest. Everything is dated and attributed, and nothing is chosen by an editor.

The text appears as the writer set it, line breaks intact, which matters more in poetry than anywhere else. Alongside it there may be a recording: the poem read by its author, a slam set filmed from the back of a room, a podcast segment. Cover images and manuscript pages go up the same way.

A link to a poem opens the whole poem, for anyone, with no wall and no sign-up. That is worth saying because prose and verse are what most often sit behind a paywall elsewhere. Passing a piece on is the main thing readers do with it, and the writer's own contact details sit on the profile if a magazine or a festival wants them.

Literature sits oddly in a portfolio site because the work is the text, not a photograph of it. A painter posts an image of the painting; a poet posts the poem. That is why the pieces here are readable in place rather than reduced to a thumbnail, and why translation gets listed as work in its own right, with the original named.