Featured Poets
Celebrating Contemporary Voices
Breadcrumb Scabs has been privileged to publish work from dozens of talented poets who share our commitment to honest, unflinching verse. These are writers who refuse to sanitize human experience, who trust their readers with difficult truths, and who find beauty in unexpected places.
Emerging Voices
We take particular pride in discovering new poets whose work challenges conventional literary expectations. Many writers have published their first poems in our pages before going on to wider recognition. We believe part of our mission is creating space for voices that might not fit easily into mainstream literary publications.
The contemporary poetry landscape, as documented by the Poetry Foundation, increasingly values diverse perspectives and experimental approaches. We've been committed to this ethos from our founding, actively seeking work that expands what confessional poetry can be.
Queer Poetry & LGBTQ+ Voices
A significant portion of our published work explores queer experience in all its complexity. Our featured poets have written powerfully about coming out, queer desire, gender fluidity, chosen family, and the intersections of identity and sexuality. These poems resist both assimilation narratives and stereotypical representations, offering instead nuanced, authentic explorations of LGBTQ+ life.
We've published poets examining the messiness of queer desire, the complicated relationships between queer individuals and their families of origin, the ways gender performance both liberates and constrains, and the particular forms of grief and joy that come with living outside heteronormative expectations.
Women Poets & Feminist Perspectives
Women's voices have been central to our editorial mission since our founding. We've published unflinching explorations of female desire, motherhood's ambivalence, body image struggles, reproductive politics, sexual assault and survival, and the particular forms of rage that women are often told to suppress.
Our featured women poets write about subjects traditionally deemed "unpoetic" - menstruation, body hair, aging, abortion, caretaking labor, the violence of beauty standards. They reclaim confessional poetry's radical origins, refusing to make themselves palatable or acceptable.
International Contributors
While many of our poets write in English and live in North America, we've also published work from poets around the world. These international voices bring diverse cultural perspectives to universal themes of love, loss, identity, and survival. Poetry's power to cross borders and speak to shared human experience remains one of our core beliefs.
Thematic Explorations
Mental Health & Psychological Complexity
Many featured poets have written with devastating honesty about depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, PTSD, and other mental health challenges. These poems avoid both romanticization and clinical detachment, instead finding language for experiences that often resist articulation.
Addiction & Recovery
We've published powerful work about substance abuse, recovery, relapse, and the ongoing negotiation between self-destruction and survival. These poets write about addiction without moralizing, recognizing both the appeal of escape and the damage it causes.
Family & Origin Stories
Poets exploring complicated family relationships find a home in our pages. Work about abusive parents, absent fathers, complicated mothers, sibling rivalry, generational trauma, and the ways family shapes and scars us appears frequently in our issues.
Love & Desire
We publish love poetry that acknowledges love's cruelty and complexity. Our featured poets write about desire that confuses, relationships that damage, breakups that devastate, and the ways we keep trying anyway. This isn't Valentine's Day poetry - it's poetry that looks honestly at what we do to and for each other.
Craft & Style
While united by thematic interests, our featured poets demonstrate remarkable formal diversity. We've published tightly controlled sonnets alongside sprawling free verse, prose poems, experimental forms, and traditional structures bent to contemporary purposes.
What unites this work is attention to language - precise imagery, musical lines, moments of surprising metaphor that illuminate rather than obscure. Our poets trust in poetry's fundamental tools: specific details, careful diction, rhythm, and the white space that surrounds words.
Building Community
Publishing in Breadcrumb Scabs connects poets to a community of writers who share aesthetic values. Many of our contributors read and support each other's work, attend readings together, and continue the conversations our magazine starts. We've helped foster a network of poets committed to honest, risk-taking verse.
For Readers
Exploring our archived issues offers the best introduction to the range of voices we've featured. You'll encounter poets at various career stages, working in different styles, but all committed to confessional poetry's radical honesty.
We encourage readers to seek out these poets' other work, attend their readings, and support their collections. The contemporary poetry ecosystem relies on readers willing to engage seriously with challenging work.