SONTAG MAG
SONTAG MAG
Sontag Mag is a literary magazine publishing poetry, poetry-in-translation, and interviews triannually.
SUBMISSIONS
Sontag Mag accepts submissions of poetry and poetry-in-translation in January, May, and September.
SPRING/SUMMER 2026
COLUMNSSontag Mag will publish columns beginning in 2026. The first, “Off-Season,” is a space for contributors to share insight into their reading and writing lives, from resolutions to dialogues to contemplations, and is published in our “off-season,” or outside of our regularly scheduled volumes.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
The Sting of Empty Bitterness and its Pleasure
“So here do I lie, / spent and flaccid as a lake in the sunset, / a blush of birds kissing nocturne from its surface.”
That Night, We Walked along the Dan River
“the wooden waterwheels, the peach blossoms, / that mirror themselves by the water. / These small things of the ages / all know us.”
Instructions for Having a Mother
“Look, this is / my sweet home. Tell the teacher / it’s abandoned, impossible, scary / to enter because of a bad monster / living inside, hungry for me.”
thisbe on the walls
“Once, a man in Afghanistan commanded his wife to be veiled from sound entirely. Once, a person can enter a house / only to find there is no door behind them, just a vast endless corpse of wood blocking their way.”
Good Grief Ghazal
“My mother makes a midnight mass of girlhood grief. / I am her devoted disciple by God and umbilical. / Like Isaac, not listening will do me no good, grief.”
i’ve always wanted to fistfight god a little
“i withstood hell — lovers, / mostly — for the promise of heaven and was doled / out a second dose of hellfire. then a third, a fourth.”
Accidental Geometries
“I think of all these people leaving / themselves in brief windows. / How some ascensions are linear.”
Navigating the Night
“I wonder if the black bear / I glimpsed earlier, roaming fields / of wildflowers, prowls now, seeking / a midnight feast.”
Dear Pine Forest II by Gustav Klimt,
“I never wanted children so naturally / I had them. All my daughter cells hate me. / All the places I’ve kissed bad men / have closed down.”
Amarys Dejai in Conversation with Chinese-American Writer and Filmmaker Haolun Xu
“I often write under the rule that poetry is best written as a way to document life both inside and outside of the poet.”
Durga’s Homecoming
“At the cusp of Ashtami and Navami, / the Goddess slays the Asura. In the fields, / corpses of adolescent girls sway / under the branches of peepul, / as gently as the flowering grass.”
Uncollected love letter (sunflower)
“People ask what i’ve been reading and i say the beats so they’ll go away bukowski might also work i / just want to walk with you not in some time warp but here where the trees break the sidewalk into / dips and precipices”
WINTER AND THE RIVER
“The stars look down / with neither discomfort / nor sympathy, / and the friends I had, / I now rarely see.”
How to disappear a heart
“Forget languages have meaning beyond the lines / you can see on the map. Bear in mind, a heart is a piece no one has / ever seen before, do not try to describe it, do not try to speechify the gaps.”
Meet the Sontag Team
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Asheley Nova Navarro
FOUNDING EDITOR
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Aiman Tahir Khan
ASSOCIATE POETRY EDITOR
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Aanji Sin
POETRY READER
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Aanya Mehta
POETRY READER
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Anna Erre
POETRY READER
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Jai Michelle Louissen
POETRY READER
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Suzanne Claridge
POETRY READER
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Amarys Dejai
STAFF INTERVIEWER
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Rishi Janakiraman
STAFF REVIEWER
Sontag Mag Est. 2023
Sontag Mag is a literary magazine appearing triannually and devoted to fostering a community of poets and translators and promoting works exceptional in craft.