Ink Sweat & Tears is a UK based webzine which publishes and reviews poetry, prose, prose-poetry, word & image pieces and everything in between. Our tastes are eclectic and magpie-like and we aim to publish something new every day.
We try to keep waiting-time short, but because of increased submissions, the current waiting time between submission and publication is around twelve weeks.
If you have come here looking for more information on our ‘Uprising & Resistance’ Project in conjunction with Spread the Word and Black Beyond Data, please go here.
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Featured Poetry/Prose of the Day
Previously featured
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Recent Prose
Recent Haiku
News
‘Wallpaper’ by Joseph Blythe is the May 2025 Pick of the Month. Hear it read here now!
‘Vivid, precisely imagined, powerful’
‘This poem is the rawest I’ve read in a while.’
Word & Image
Jonathan Edis
Like macabre isobars
the plaster cast lines
of the Old Doctor’s hand
Filmpoems
Katie Beswick
Asemic (adjective): using lines and symbols that look like writing, but do not have any meaning.
Featured Poetry/Prose of the Day
News
‘Wallpaper’ by Joseph Blythe is the May 2025 Pick of the Month. Hear it read here now!
‘Vivid, precisely imagined, powerful’
‘This poem is the rawest I’ve read in a while.’
Word & Image
Jonathan Edis
Like macabre isobars
the plaster cast lines
of the Old Doctor’s hand
Filmpoems
Katie Beswick
Asemic (adjective): using lines and symbols that look like writing, but do not have any meaning.
Previously featured
Amirah Al Wassif
Beneath my armpit lives a Sinbad the size of a thumb.
His imagination feeds through an umbilical cord tied to my womb.
Now and then, people hear him speaking through a giant microphone—
Singing,
Cracking jokes,
Mark Smith
In the portacabin that morning, men smoked
and looked at last week’s paper again.
There was no water to fill the urn.
The first job – to get connected
Recent Prose
Recent Haiku
Picks of the Month
Read, and Hear, Eve Chancellor’s ‘Two Girls on a Greyhound’, the IS&T Pick of the Month for March 2023
It's a fine piece of short, sharp poetry which instantly creates two believable characters and a tense drama in a few lines. EXCELLENT You loved the story behind the poem. You loved its mystery....
‘The Old Fishing Village’ by David Gilbert is the IS&T Pick of the Month for February 2023
the sense of loss and ending Words that capture voters' instinctive response to David’s authentic, elegiac ‘The Old Fishing Village’ and saw this poem voted as Pick of the Month for February 2023....
Shakiah K Johnson’s ‘What Comes After Death?’ is the IS&T Pick of the Month for January 2023. Read and hear it here!
Written beautifully with a deep message and theme that crosses multiple paradigms A spare elegant poem but one with deeper meanings. And a duck. This unique poem made voters think. They kept going...
Reviews
In Praise of: JP Seabright reviews ‘Violet Existence’ by Katy Wareham Morris
Violet Existence by Katy Wareham Morris Broken Sleep Books, £6.50 (40 pages) Sparking with electricity and a dextrous fluidity, this pamphlet takes the reader from the hospital ward to...
In Praise of: Claire Booker reviews ‘Sometime, in a Churchyard’ by Louise Warren
Sometime, in a Churchyard by Louise Warren Paekakariki Press £12.50 (16 pages of poetry, 17 illustrations by Charlotte Harker) If you wander a short way from St Pancras International, you’ll find...
The School of Try Again: In Praise Of Chen Chen’s ‘Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency’
The School of Try Again: In Praise Of Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (Bloodaxe, 2022) by Helen Bowell When I read Chen Chen’s first book, When I Grow Up I Want To Be...