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Although Ausable Press has a strong commitment to the work of new poets, we can publish only a few of the first book manuscripts submitted each year (hundreds). I read all the books myself. No one culls them for me. Falling in love with a book of poems is serious business. When I accept a book for publication, I'm committing myself to a lifelong relationship with it, first in correspondence with the poet, then through the design process, and finally by way of our efforts to promote and support it forever. When you submit a manuscript to Ausable, you're asking me, the editor, to consider a marriage. Every once in a great while, a mind will appear on the page, one that speaks to me in such a way that I cannot turn away because it has perceived things I have not and enabled me briefly to enter another's consciousnesss. Most of the time, though, I read language that lacks some or all of the qualities I most treasure in poetry as well as in life: love of the truth; intelligence; curiosity; passion for, and an ear for, language-music; and a ruthlessness strong enough to bend a life in pursuit of these things.

I'm astonished by the number of people who seem to have chosen Ausable Press out of the Yellow Pages. I once opened a manuscript at random to a lovely recipe for cold spiced rhubarb, which I've made each spring ever since. But it makes me think it might be worthwhile for me to say a few words outright about what I am, and am not, looking for when I pick up a manuscript. Although this unasked-for advice may sound fierce, I offer it with the hope that some poets might realize that the crucial thing is to bring the work to full realization, and that it is unwise for several reasons to attempt to publish work that is not yet fully realized.

By realized I mean that an intelligence has sent itself on an exploration and made a record of its travels in language that allows me to go there too, and further makes me want to go there, even compels me. Poets earn my trust by telling me the truth insofar as they know it about whatever is most important to them, without the obfuscations of vanity and cleverness and decoration. In so doing, they must acknowledge death, because death is our most common denominator. I'm always moved by that, no matter the subject, from napalm to nail polish. When I come across a poet working that territory, I carry his or her book around with me, testing the power of its magnet. Out of five or six hundred manuscripts, there are usually about a half dozen that make me lose my head. Of those I can marry only one or two.

Much of editing is of course subjective, though no one likes to say so. Once I have singled out the books that most captivate me, I have to confront my current and always-evolving biases and predilections. For example, my own grief and fear concerning the future of our species and planet preclude my falling very hard for books that do not in some way acknowledge those things. I'm always struck by the wonderlands some poets inhabit, in which a far-off train makes its way toward Nostalgia carrying no freight I can discern, or in which the small dramas of the self are played out ad infinitum on a stage lit by what seems an innocence of their relation to the larger human family. People send journals, science fiction sagas, prose, greeting card verse, and an infinity of heartfelt expressions of emotion. Some poets send multiple manuscripts (the record was six in one year). This tells me that the poet has not yet learned to make a distinction between his best work and the rest of it. And we receive dozens of manuscripts each year that are last year's book redux, with a new title and a beefed-up page of acknowledgments. This hopeful recycling is a tip-off that the poet has not paused long enough to thoroughly imagine me, the reader. Will I be fickle and change my mind? Is my heart a weathervane? Assuming I read the book last year, which in my case I did, it's unlikely that I'll have a radically different response to the new incarnation. Please wait and send me your next book instead.

Before you submit a manuscript to Ausable Press, read the work of the poets that we publish. If you have not read much poetry in general (that of past ages as well as contemporary) or if you write to express your emotions, to make a record of your personal life, or as a hobby, it's very unlikely that I'll be interested in your work. Manuscripts ready for publication tend to have been written and revised over a long period of time; five to ten years is not at all unusual for a first book. The competition is ferocious. Send only your very best work. If you know that some poems are stronger than others, then your manuscript is not yet finished. You'll only damage your future chances by sending work that is unripe.

Many poets become discouraged when their first book is rejected repeatedly. It disturbs me that many Master of Fine Arts programs treat theses as books rather than as what they nearly always are: a record of the first two or three years of serious apprenticeship. When I went to graduate school in the early seventies, no one even thought of trying to publish his thesis. The thesis was practice for the real thing. If your first book has been making the rounds for a couple of years without finding a home, keep sending it out if you have unshakeable faith in it, but start writing the next one. The important thing is to continue working and growing as a poet. The best work does get published. In my thirty years as an editor, I can honestly say I don't know of a single good book that came across my path that didn't eventually find a publisher.

Finally, please be aware that it's not the editor's job to provide literary feedback. Some poets are surprised to learn that their submission does not receive a personal response from me. I'm sorry that that isn't possible. These words of caution notwithstanding, I open each manuscript with the hope that it will be one of the few that surprise, educate, and haunt me to the extent that they demand passage to the audience of the larger world. It's for those that I do this work. —Chase Twichell