Poetry Consultations with July Westhale
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Poet and translator July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Their translation of the Chilean poet Rolando Cardenas’ collected works was selected for the 2026 Unsung Masters Series (forthcoming from Pleiades Press). They have work in McSweeney’s, DIAGRAM, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others.
July will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and full-length manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with them at no additional charge.
July is accepting single poems, folios, chapbooks, and full-length collections for critique. The fees and parameters for each of these categories are as follows:
- Individual Poems, up to 2 pages in length, $25
- Folios, up to 7 pages in length, not to include more than 5 poems, $55
- Chapbooks, 16-40 pages in length, $275
- Full-length collections, 45-80 pages in length $425
All manuscripts should be formatted in 12-point font. The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is June 30. July will complete their work and respond to all participants by July 31.
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July Westhale's Statement of Purpose
I read poems the way a lock picker reads a door-- I'm interested in how they work, and how they open, which is a different from admiring what they do. When I come to a manuscript, I am looking at every decision the poem has made, including the decisions made unconsciously.
It could be said that a poem carries its argument in its body. Syntax, white space, line breaks, stanza breaks, punctuation, and form are not decoration, nor are they neutral. Each one is a claim the poem is making about how meaning moves. My first question when working with another poet is whether the formal decisions are doing the same work as the content, or different work, and whether that difference is intentional. Sometimes it is! Often it isn't.
The rules of craft exist to be understood before they are broken. Still, I am not interested in policing form; I am interested in helping a poet understand what a rule is doing so that the choice to break it becomes a choice, not a drift. The white space is where the poem decides what silence costs.
As a poet, I'm a maximalist, an imagistic obsessive, someone who tends toward accumulation and has to work for compression. As Translation Editor at Pleiades, I come to poems in two languages, which means I have spent time thinking about what survives the crossing and what doesn't. It sharpens the ear. The poets I return to are Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg for the kind of plainness that is secretly ruthless, Ada Limón for earned emotional directness, Fanny Howe for the permission she gives difficulty, Carl Phillips for what syntax can carry when it is asked to carry everything.