Call for Submissions: Magma 93 Liberation 

Closing date: 31 March 2025

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Liberation

Editors Isabelle Baafi, Sohini Basak and Tim Tim Cheng are excited to invite submissions for Magma 93 Liberation. The issue will explore personal and political forms of liberation: liberation as protest and emancipation; as authenticity and self-actualisation; as holding on or letting go; as moving past, moving through, moving towards.

We encourage you to imagine as widely as possible, and to write with honesty and abandon. What does ‘liberation’ mean to you? What does it look like? How do we know when we have it? Are we ever truly free? 

Submissions may respond to one or several of the current humanitarian crises happening around the world: the structures of domination that terrorise populations in occupied regions, and/or the forms of disenfranchisement oppressing communities worldwide. 

Don’t believe our outlines, forget them

and begin from your own words.

As if you are the first to write poetry

or the last poet.

— from ‘To a Young Poet’ by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah

Poems may draw inspiration from historical liberation movements – the protests, rebellions, revolutions – or the ideas that underpinned them, the people who made them possible. 

Equally, you may choose to focus on the more personal, quotidian forms of freedom that have marked your life: the euphoric all-clear, the overdue goodbye, the bittersweet departure, the hard-won recovery, the long-awaited release:

Of lockdown, hunger time & the blackened flower —

Ain’t nothing worth knowing. Prison becomes home;

The cell: a catacomb that cages and the metronome

Tracking the years that eclipse you.

 — from ‘House of Unending’ by Reginald Dwayne Betts

…Or even the objects, people and communities who have represented liberation to you. What forms of freedom are underrated or overlooked?

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.

— Susan B. Anthony

Whose liberation should we support? How can we help to make it a reality? What does it mean to be a liberator?

We invite work that interrogates how liberation happens: how it is envisioned and eroded, how it manifests and spreads through sociopolitical echelons, phases of life, changing environments, shifting ideologies. And how does one person’s liberation affect others?

Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people.

— Paulo Freire, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos

On the other hand, feel free to veer wildly if you like, choosing instead to write poems that reflect on how difficult liberation can be to achieve, how elusive it may be, despite its significance:

My father taught me wherever you are, always be looking for a way out: this / opening or that one. Or a question. Sharp enough to slice a hole for you to / slip

through.

— from ‘Zuihitsu’ by Jenny Xie

We welcome poems that examine what it means to be trapped, detained, repressed. How do we bear it when liberation seems impossible?

Spring broke out but my soul did not. 

It kept to sleet and inwards fog. 

Forget-me-nots around the path,

 a speckled thrush; I spoke rarely

and had a sour mouth. I couldn't make love.

— from ‘Fly’ by Fiona Benson

Don’t feel like you have to use the word ‘liberation’, and don’t be afraid to think outside the box: what is the price of freedom? Who pays it? 

the children of haiti

are not mythological

we are starving

or eating salty cakes

made of clay

because in 1804 we felled

our former slave captors

the graceless losers sunk

vindictive yellow

teeth into our forests

— from ‘mud mothers’ by Lenelle Moïse

And once we are free, what then? What do we do with the remnants of our struggle, or our former selves? What does it mean to be free in the face of memory? What does moving forward look like?

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

— from ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World’ by Adam Zagajewski

Poems may draw from various genres, appear in unexpected ways, or utilise traditional forms – or all of the above, or none of them. But ultimately, they should release you from your own predetermined limits. We are interested in the apparent, necessary concepts of liberation, but equally we welcome submissions that push the boundaries of what liberation means and how we understand it. 

Surprise us, incite us, enlighten us. We can’t wait to read what you send.

Isabelle Baafi, Sohini Basak and Tim Tim Cheng

Editors Magma 93 Liberation

HOW TO SUBMIT 

• The submissions window for ‘Ownership' is open 1st – 31st March 2025
• We welcome poems that have not been previously published in print, online, or broadcast.
• We accept simultaneous submissions, but please withdraw your submission or contact us if it is accepted for publication somewhere else first.
• You may submit up to 4 previously unpublished poems: ONLINE via Submittable in a single Word or PDF document, OR BY POST to Magma 93 Submissions, 23 Pine Walk, Carshalton, SM5 4ES. Postal submissions are accepted from the UK and Ireland only. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.

THE EDITORS

• Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025) and Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020), which won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London and has edited issues of Poetry Wales, Magma, Skin Deep and Tentacular. 
• Sohini Basak is a writer of fiction, poetry, and the in-between. Her poems have been anthologized widely, most recently by Penguin Press (India), Red Hen Press (USA), Emma Press (UK), and Math Paper Press (Singapore). She has held editorial roles HarperCollins India, Asymptote and Words Without Borders.
• Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Glasgow and London. Her full collection The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a co-editor of Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (VERVE, 2023).