Wine Cellar Press is a poetry press dedicated to publishing both formal verse and free-form poetry in equal measure. We celebrate poetry’s historical traditions while eagerly contributing to the continuous evolution of poetry as an art. 

Wine Cellar Press is excited by re-examining, re-imagining, deconstructing, and re-constructing traditional forms to best fit our modern discourse.  

Wine Cellar Press is interested in contrasting formal verse with free-form poetry.  

Why The Name?

Wine thrives on dichotomy: white, red; terroir, fruit-forward; old world, new world; grafted, old vines. 

But here’s the truth: no one wine style is superior to another. No one can truly say that “terroir driven wine” is better than “fruit-forward wine.”   

No one can forcefully say that “red wine is objectively superior to white wine.”  

Here’s another truth, these dichotomies are less rigid than we are led to believe (orange wine? blanc de noirs?). They’re simply delineations that we have created to help categorize wines.  

They were never made to imply the superiority or inferiority of one style of wine. 

Why? Because taste is personal. Variety should be celebrated.    

A great Sicilian vintner once told me that “great wine is wine you like.” So too is great poetry. Great poetry is poetry that you like.      

You can’t objectively define great wine. You can’t objectively define great poetry. And you certainly cannot write off half of either artform because it doesn’t fit the parameters you’ve forced upon it.   

What you can do, however, is appreciate how well it uses its materials in pursuit of the craft.   

With a wine, you can appreciate how a winemaker has taken into account the soil, the climate, the sugar + acid of the fruit, and the maturation process.   

With a poem, you can appreciate how an author has used meter, imagery, rhyme, blunt language, dialect, and honesty.   

You can appreciate how artists have borrowed from traditions of the past while experimenting with novel methods to create a truly unique and beautiful craft.  

This is why we are Wine Cellar Press: we celebrate the dichotomy between formal and free verse, championing both styles as equally valid, often overlapping, necessary expressions of poetry.