Chapbooks

Winners of our past contests or from our open submission periods, these are books of prose or poetry less than 50 pages in length, chosen by our readers and staff for publication. Click on any title below to learn more.

In Uncensored Snapshots, the speaker(s) harnesses the power of witness to document the decades-long ethnic cleansing that has left Northern Nigeria (Arewa) in fear of bloodshed and forced migration. In a world where media is often silenced by censorship, this collection offers a rare, unfiltered account of the rise of banditry in Arewa—an aftermath of the Boko Haram insurgency. Told through a deeply personal lens, the poems—both lyrical and cinematic—confront the terror of kidnapping, the trauma of loss, and the uncertainty of survival. As each piece lays bare the wounds of a broken system—where even retaliation becomes a life sentence—the people are left with a haunting question: Will Arewa and its people survive these atrocities?

Zaynab Ilyasu Bobi’s Uncensored Shapshots

The poems in this collection hold a mirror up to massacre. The strength of Uncensored Snapshots lies not only in its ability to capture the reader but to haunt them. As each page details a new horror, we are left wondering: how much taller can cruelty become? Where do you go when everywhere kills you? This chapbook is grief in capital letters, a message to a country that runs away and toward fire. And yet, Zaynab’s language is so brightly alive. Her attention to rhythm, image, and storytelling speaks to her poetic genius, creating an entry point into the speaker’s tilted sanity. You will walk away from this book transformed. Long after reading I still feel its echo: “to hear the screeching sound of my mother’s cry. i heard it & i hated it. ya Allah, i heard it & i hated it.”
— Nicole Adabunu, MFA Poetry Graduate, Iowa Writers’ Workshop ’23 and Cave Canem Fellow ’24

In Uncensored Snapshots, Nigerian-Hausa poet Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi explores identity, displacement, and resilience with unflinching precision. Drawing from her background in medical laboratory science and digital artistry, she creates a multifaceted lens through which to examine loss and transformation. Particularly through the lens of Boko Haram’s impact, Zaynab creates tangible manifestations of fragmentation that mirror exile and dislocation. Zaynab navigates different kinds of loss with profound sensitivity, charting both grief and the greater political dimensions of conflict. Uncensored Snapshots bears witness to the search for humanity in a world marked by erasure; through Zaynab’s fearless exploration of poetic form, personal fragments metamorphose into a collective cry to be heard.
— Cara Waterfall, award-winning poet & author, Radiant Wound (Unsolicited Press, May 2025)

In Uncensored Snapshots, we witness firsthand poignant reflections by audacious speakers on personal and societal struggles saddling many communities stuck in a nexus of tragic events. Zaynab’s brilliance shines through the myriad fashion with which these poems concurrently serve as a reminder of the similarity of our realities as a people and a plea for the rehumanization of our existence.
— Abu Bakr Sadiq, author of Leaked Footages

Order anywhere with ISBN: 978-1-965158-16-6

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In Big Man Katie Kemple creates a portrait of fatherhood in the shadow of loss: the untimely death of partners, unresolved trauma as a veteran, and chronic pain. Kemple shows a father moving forward despite it all with the generosity and grace to love and be loved. He’s the teacher who gives hitchhiking students a lift to the mall, the dad who chaperones Girl Scout fieldtrips, the husband who clings to the last flame of his wife’s life. A man who stayed open to “rocks, sea glass, / shells and pinecones. Small things we / might have passed into his big hands.”

Katie Kemple, Big Man

Reading Big Man feels like sitting with an old friend on a comfy couch and exchanging stories about parents late into the night. These poems contain vulnerable vignettes: a child discovering a wedding photo of her dad with his first wife, a grown woman eating ice cream sandwiches from her father’s freezer after his death while remembering his stories of war, and many moments in between. “My dad, a bear of a guy, had a heart / of honey: sweet and stuck,” Kemple writes, and readers are so fortunate that she’s chosen to share him with us.
—Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and 28,065 Nights

Big Man guides us through an unflinching portrait of a father. But perhaps, more importantly, we witness a journey from father as mythic figure to father as human. Kemple’s masterful remembrance is a difficult one, as the people closest to us are the most difficult to catalogue because we are close observers of too much. But Kemple does just that—honors this remembrance and the many names and ways a person is remembered, recognizing all the “small things we might have passed into his big hands.”
—Su Cho, author of The Symmetry of Fish

These poems sing of the everyday world, the everydayness of life, love, and family, lifting us via the poet’s act of attention into an almost spiritual realm. In these pages, through the eyes of his daughter, you’ll fall enthralled with her father, with his “heart / of honey: sweet and stuck.” Along the journey you’ll fall back in love with your own life. If you have someone to hug, go hug them. If not, hug yourself.
—Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun

Swift—& blunt w/grief: “We opened the earth’s / lid and buried him there.” Katie Kemple’s twenty-five poem ode to her dad, Big Man, is personal, specific, vivid—“like a forest of green recycling arrows”—& full of love, such love, love the lucky of us briefly know & mourn.
—Adam Golaski, author of Voice Notes

Order anywhere with ISBN: 978-1-965158-12-8

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THERESE GLEASON, Hemicrania

In Hemicrania, poet Therese Gleason reaches out through the “half-headed pain” of the migraineur, despite (or rather, because of) “her head a cracked bell/ that wouldn’t stop ringing.” Like the two halves of the brain, this chapbook succeeds by dualities. Both thematically cohesive and formally expansive, Hemicrania tells the story, on one side, of the mostly male failures of medicine, and on the other, of the matrilineal inheritance of suffering “which women must endure.” Borrowing language from medicine but wholly rooted in poetry, the Patient is both reduced to the base elements of piss, salt, bile, and snot and elevated to the mystic, ghostly realm of saints, incantation, and prayer. Gleason asks “what angel, message, lesson” can be found in suffering. But even if, in the end, the Patient resigns, “I’m no more chosen than I am god/forsaken,” the poet has made from her suffering this simultaneously delicate and explosive contribution to the literature of women’s chronic pain.
—Cynthia Marie Hoffman, author of Exploding Head

Chronic and episodic migraine patients will agree that they’ll do anything and everything to exorcise the migraine demon. Author Therese Gleason attempts just that in Hemicrania via revelatory poems brimming with prayers, incantations, and supplications. The poet gives readers the 4-1-1 from the front lines of Migrainesville in poems that confront medical sexism and medical gaslighting—and in poems that explore the conundrum of genetic inheritance. The vulnerability and daily struggle of the person with migraine are depicted with vivid accuracy and candor. Hemicrania should reside on the nightstands of poetry lovers, patients, physicians, and caregivers.
—Rita Maria Martinez, author of The Jane and Bertha in Me

To read Hemicrania is to witness a poet contend with profound spiritual and physical agony. In found poems, hybrid forms, and collages, Gleason traces her family’s matrilineal inheritance of migraine alongside an enraging genealogy of the medical establishment’s all-too-frequent disregard for migraineurs’ suffering. And while Hemicrania is a scorching account of migraine’s brutal toll on body and mind, in its pages Gleason offers too a psalter of companionship: invocations, incantations, and charms against pain drawn from a thousand years of belief and experience. The unflinching intimacy of these poems humbled me.
—Carolyn Oliver, author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble

In Hemicrania, a gut-wrenching and aesthetically innovative portrait of the matrilineal curse of migraine, Therese Gleason renders the ineffable. Equal parts masterclass in vivifying the medical archive and gripping reportage from the patient’s vantage, Gleason’s intimate poems shatter migraineurs’ isolation to deliver spells for a painless future.
—Sarah M. Sala, author of Devil’s Lake

Order anywhere with ISBN: 978-1-965158-07-4

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ESPERANZA CINTRÓN, BOULDERS
2022 POETRY CHAPBOOK FINALIST

Crab grass and dandelions. Verdant rainforests in shattered shops. Raw music of urban life and relentless birdsong. Belle Isle, Eastern Market, Midtown, Cobo and the history of humanity, of capitalism. Absence, presence. The red-eyed nocturnal animal that will not flee your car. Grind and bump of steel, rust, wrecking balls, and yet the turquoise river, its day diamonds. Ah, such song, sensuality, breathless lists and litanies. From the chilling reality of the first poem to the crushing quote from Keynes at the end, this is a body-and-soul rocking, rapping, jiving celebration of the spirit of Detroit. Though there is grief for a lost era, and the natural world has predators whose “absolute power hungers for you,” Nature in its stark beauty triumphs everywhere. Cintrón’s electric poems will send currents through you. This collection contains a powerful energy, and like Nature itself, becomes vibrant and alive in the hands of this masterful poet.

—Zilka Joseph, author of In Our Beautiful Bones, Sparrows and Dust, Sharp Blue Search of Flame

Esperanza Cintrón’s Boulders is a celebratory lyric examining the rich beauty of Detroit. The city’s cold, its spring, its island and its birds all make appearances in this collection where the city’s natural landscape is a lively character overtaking abandoned buildings and threatening to cross the threshold of houses. Cintrón’s lush images and stunning sounds cascade throughout the book building an unforgettable love song dedicated to the history and the present of post-industrial Detroit.—Nandi Comer, author of Tapping OutLike the ‘boulders’ these poems are named for, Cintrón’s collection traces the particular urban geology and geography that predated, formed, and eventually crumbled—And in between the sidewalk cracks and sunken railways, empty plumbing stores and abandoned factories, life is teeming: a cardinal, a possum; quackgrass and honeysuckle; butterflies and bumblebees and all manner of inner-city flora and fauna (not least of all, people). From the salt mines to the Eastern Market, the stadium to the Q-Line, Cintrón’s Boulders is a suite of odes, blues, elegies, and incantations of place that “sparkle like silver talismans tossed across the strait.”

—Brandi Katherine Herrera, author of Mother is a Body

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SARA SIDDIQUI CHANSARKAR, SKIN OVER MILK
2021 PROSE CHAPBOOK CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Skin Over Milk tells the story of young Chutki and her two sisters who bear the weight of being unwanted daughters in 1990’s India. Told through Chutki’s eyes, we feel the innocence that is childhood, allowing the gratitude for a crust of bread thrown away by her brothers, or the simple joy in making prank phone calls. We meet characters, such as the father who curses their mother for giving him useless girls, the brothers who don’t seem to appreciate the luxury of education. But we also meet the loving grandfather, Dada, who will die and watch over them like a star in the sky and their beautiful, beautiful mother, Ammi, who does what she can to make all of their lives bearable. Exquisitely written with a jeweler’s eye for detail, the deftest of hands with characterization and storytelling, this is a brilliant and unforgettable read.

― Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Way of the Wind

“The summer of 1990 brought rain and more rain to our little town of Muzaffarnagar.” Thus begins Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar’s chapbook, Skin Over Milk, an elegantly written and immersive family story told over the course of twelve short chapters and through the collective point of view of the family’s siblings. We readers get a strong sense of this particular family’s joys and heartaches, struggles and traditions. Chansarkar knows how to weave her stories seamlessly and disarmingly, with heart and humor and tenderness. It is a testament to this writer’s mastery that I never wanted the story to end.

― Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

With precision and insight, these evocative stories within a story speak of rain and tears, of sisterhood and solidarity, of poverty, and growing up as girls under the lashes of patriarchy. Chansarkar evokes the poetry and brutality of small-town India with a deftness that makes it impossible to tell which is which.

― Damyanti Biswas, author of You Beneath Your Skin and The Blue Bar

In lush and incisive prose, Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar tells the story of three sisters growing up in a home and a culture that treats them as valueless, who nonetheless scheme and dream to claim space: “I sat squished between my sisters, dreaming of a seat of my own someday.” Like the secret a mother whispers in the ear of her crying baby girl to protect her from her husband’s rage, Skin Over Milk is confiding, talismanic. By turns painful and joyful, this novella transfixed me.

― Kim Magowan, author of Undoing, The Light Source, and How Far I’ve Come

Available on Amazon.