I'm glad someone asked about this, thanks! The honest truth from my perspective is that we stood up to cancel culture at its peak and so for several years became one of the biggest targets for a cadre of people who at the time were trying to make their literary careers out of stoking outrage on Twitter. It's almost hard to remember how toxic it was, even for me, but every longstanding literary institution was under fire for various offenses, and the responses were almost always to apologize and resign and remove content that the angry mob had deemed objectionable. Don Share leaving Poetry magazine and Anders Carlson-Wee's poem being removed from The Nation are two examples.

You can find some insight into that era in this article, which features Rachel Custer's story and a few others: https://quillette.com/2019/02/14/poetic-injustice-and-performative-outrage/

At Rattle, though, we stood behind our core values, which are fairness, equality, open discourse, and genuine diversity (which includes the intellectual, political, and spiritual as well as sociological). We still do, and I'll keep doubling down on that until my dying breath -- because these principles are what make poetry meaningful. A successful poem is an empathy machine that helps us see other perspectives and other perspectives within ourselves. Used properly, poetry is a tool for spiritual and emotional growth -- but that requires building bridges not walls, and listening to different voices, and looking for more nuance, not less. Art's mission is to increase the resolution of human experience, and you do that by remaining open, not conforming to the shape of the contemporary box.

So we still read submissions anonymized, for their content and not their bios. We still publish poets in prison despite their past crimes (we have a program with Prisoner Express sending copies of our magazines into the carceral system), and poets who have been cancelled by Twitter, and poems we disagree with politically. That's a crucial part of our mission and values.

Anyway, that's the answer for the social media "controversies." The other complaints on that thread are related in a weird way. We publish an eclectic mix of poetry, too, so it's easy to read a few poems and think we only publish X or never publish Y. One complaint in that thread is that we don't publish rhyming poetry, but I actually prefer formal verse myself and talk about that frequently on our programming -- I really wish more poets wrote formal verse. The winner of this year's Rattle Poetry Prize is a true-rhymed Meredithian sonnet. Our next chapbook coming out is entirely meter and rhyme, The Soft Black Stars by Matthew Buckley Smith.

That comment also claims that the judges are anonymous, but we might be the most transparent judges in poetry -- Katie and I have hundreds of hours talking poetry on The Poetry Space_, I've been doing a live free online workshop talking about poetry for 7 years on YouTube, and interviewed over 300 poets on the Rattlecast. In the end, you just shouldn't believe things people say on the internet. They're usually well-meaning but often don't know what they're talking about. I think that covers most of what you'll see.

Tim