Black Sun Lit accepts 100 submissions per month for digital vestiges, an online series of fragments and ephemera, or Vestiges, a print journal of literature, art, and poiesis. Please familiarize yourself with the type of work we publish before submitting.
We allow simultaneous submissions (in the good faith that the writer will promptly notify us if their work has been accepted elsewhere) and request all writers wait until they’ve heard back from us before sending additional work (we aim to reply within 3–6 months). For past contributors, please wait at least 2 years (online) or 2 issues (print) after your work last appeared before submitting to us again (unless otherwise solicited). If withdrawing only a part of a submission, e.g. a poem, we ask that writers add a note to their submission via Submittable.
We do not accept unsolicited book manuscripts.
Black Sun Lit reserves the right to immediately dismiss—without notification—any work that does not observe our submission guidelines.
Black Sun Lit is now reading submissions for the seventh volume of Vestiges: Catachresis.
To wilt tears for an infatuation who has no name of their own. To weep rain like a sentence that passes through the unrequited glimpse. Language is the instrument of our shivers, literature the wink that slips into a wince. Out of profane necessity we dress the missing words for each circumstance in ecstatic deprivation. Anticipation and alienation. Shock and sorrow. Craving and cruelty. Elation and tension. Emotion is the borrowed absence of transferred meaning: the sensuous “legs” of a table and the sunrise that falls-in-shadow upon the “foot” of a bed. Quintilian’s “thirsty” crops that have neither tongue nor throat. Barthes’ compassed “wings” of a house. Augustine’s “piscina” in which no fish are to be found and humans drown. With delirium we endure, and delight in, the abuse of our sensibilities by the sadistic literalization of metaphor.
For this issue of Vestiges, Black Sun is seeking approximations and proximities: work which is spurred by discursive surmises, similes of illegibility, and linguistic ceremonies of imagistic insults; the inconceivably sad that succeeds in a logic of extravagance and smitten-smote laughter activated by demiurgic pranks; odes and epistles to the twilight of philological fidelity and the tremors of unstable tropes; poems and prose dying of the familiar; semantic insufficiencies and unbelongings; places and contours held open but uninhabited by writing; the detonation of denotation; catachrestic cathexis; dispossessing desires; eroticisms, erroneously—anything and everything whose process presences the impropriety of lovelorn lust.
Submissions for Vestiges will remain open until December 7. Submit in a single file either one to five works of prose (between 3,500–5,000 words), up to six poems (no more than twelve pages), or one essay (between 3,500–5,000 words). All submitted work should be previously unpublished. Work already submitted to, or currently being reviewed for, digital vestiges will also be considered for the issue: do not withdraw your pending submission and re-submit to the Vestiges form or send more than one submission during the open reading period. As is customary for BSL, there are no strict limitations regarding form, though translations and genreless poetry are of particular interest. Please note that our Submittable account closes once we reach 100 submissions in a month but re-opens/renews at the start of each month.
Thank you for allowing us to review your work—we look forward to reading.