Having offered approximately 1,000 manuscript reviews (that has to be close to the actual number) during the past 27 years and having evaluated about 5,000 manuscript submissions per year, every year, I believe that I’ve learned so much about what poets seem to need most. And so, I’ve re-imagined how best to satisfy that need.
Here’s what’s new in this dazzling Vermont summer:
Every manuscript calls for a different kind of editorial attention, and over the years I’ve found myself working in two complementary ways.
The first is what I think of as a Close Editorial Reading. Here I move through the manuscript poem by poem—often line by line—attending to diction, syntax, image, rhythm, structure, dramatic movement, and revision. We ask practical questions. Where does the language become abstract? Which image is carrying too much explanatory weight? Where does the poem trust its reader, and where does it rush to interpretation? This is revision at the level of craft, and for many poets it is exactly the right approach. The goal is to help each poem become the fullest realization of its own intentions.
The second approach has gradually evolved out of my years as an editor of poetry collections. I call it an Architectural Review.
Rather than evaluating poems primarily in isolation, an Architectural Review begins by asking what kind of imagination has produced the manuscript as a whole. Every serious collection, I believe, possesses an organizing imagination that gradually reveals itself through recurring images, formal choices, philosophical preoccupations, and patterns of attention. My task is to discover that governing imagination and trace how it develops across the manuscript.
From that perspective, each poem is considered not only on its own merits but for the indispensable work it performs within the larger structure. Which poems are load-bearing? Where does the architecture gather force? Where does it lose momentum or become repetitive? Which recurring images function as structural beams rather than decorative ornament? How does the emotional and philosophical pressure evolve from one section to the next?
Editorial suggestions arise from that larger understanding. Their purpose is not to redirect the poet’s imagination but to strengthen the architecture already striving to emerge.
The two approaches answer different questions.
A Close Editorial Reading asks, How can each poem become more fully itself?
An Architectural Review asks, What larger work of art is this manuscript becoming?
Most manuscripts benefit more from one approach than the other. Some benefit from both.
Feel free to request a brief sample of each approach. These samples will give you a sense of the different kinds of conversation we might have about your manuscript.
One sample is drawn from an Architectural Review of a recent manuscript. Rather than commenting on individual poems alone, it attempts to discover the governing imagination of the collection and the larger artistic structure gradually emerging across its pages.
A second sample is from a Close Editorial Reading, where the emphasis remains on the individual poem and the practical work of revision.
Fees as follows: Close Editorial Reading: $1,500 Architectural Review: $1,750
Jeffrey Levine 
Posted on July 29, 2026
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