Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about prose chapbooks that we know about published during September 2026.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Chestnut Review
Stitch, Allison Field Bell
Allison Field Bell’s debut flash fiction collection careens through California, Utah, Indiana, and the Southwest. In these stories, a woman transforms herself into a statue, two friends are suspended in a moment of grief, a video game date sours, a backyard bonfire turns abusive. There’s the eve of election night, an amusement park, an oak tree, a fire. Here, woman is a new kind of creature where danger is the thread that connects one life to the next. Where refusal, acceptance, and hunger are bound together in a natural, insatiable order. The book demands to know this of womanhood, of personhood: how much can one body hold? And what, if anything, are we willing to let go of?
Black Lawrence Press
Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture, Noelle Catharine Allen
It’s a beautiful September day in Seattle, but Tiny isn’t happy. Lung damage recently ended her dream career as a wildlands firefighter, and she’s grieving the person she loved most, her grandmother. Add to that Tiny’s festering anger over climate change, and the pushy neighbor who’s filed a complaint about the wind turbine on Tiny’s roof, and it’s no wonder she sometimes wants to punch something.
Things take a turn when a city employee arrives at Tiny’s doorstep with an unexpected proposal: become a beta-tester for a program designed to pull carbon from the atmosphere, counteracting global warming. Despite her skepticism, Tiny agrees. What ensues is stranger and more wondrous than she could have imagined—but when the city decides to abruptly end the program, Tiny must decide if she will follow orders, or if she will resist and follow her heart. Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture is an exuberant, funny, and smart tale about human shortcomings and hopes around climate change.
Bull City Press
You’re a Girl, Leslie Pietrzyk
In You’re a Girl, Leslie Pietrzyk delivers a portrait of young women balanced on the precarious ledge where childhood edges into adulthood. From chlorine-scented, 1970s summers to present, these flash fictions navigate the unspoken rules, harsh mothers, neglectful fathers, and casual cruelties that shape female youth. Piercing and deeply empathetic, You’re a Girl exposes the secret, sometimes uncomfortable truths tucked inside young hearts.
above/ground press
MUTTER, Peter Carl Anderson
Peter Carl Anderson is an actor and writer, author of the chapbook Indistinct Chatter & Character Breakdown (our teeth imprint) and a finalist in the 2023 Raven Chapbook contest. He has written more than twenty plays, available on the Canadian Play Outlet, and is the recipient of multiple awards for his acting and playwriting. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, artist and playwright Melody Anderson.
Bottlecap Press
Domestic Disturbances, Kelsey J Austin
Domestic Disturbances includes snapshot and traditional narratives where the characters are raw, the world is off-kilter, and the most intimate of relationships are fraught. In noticing and paying attention to the ordinary, the reader sees that life is anything but. Having a first-row seat to the inner worlds of these characters can be a gritty, pessimistic, sometimes humorous ride until the beauty of the human experience is found within the dark.
The pull to shy away from the brooding, conflicted psyche can be strong. In Domestic Disturbances, emotions are everything and the seemingly miniscule details from daily life are extraordinary and worthy of a second look.
Class, Bruce D Rowe
Troy is both an ancient city (site of the Trojan War, of course) and an old, now post-industrial city in upstate New York. Dave is a young teacher spending his first summer vacation working as a construction laborer for a college friend, Ron, who is managing a refurb project on Congress Street, a crossroads of culture and class in a seedy part of Troy between the prestige and privilege of a major engineering school and the wealthier parts of town and the down-at-the-heels scrubbiness of urban decline and decay.
The four young men working in this hot summer are all slumming it: two are college graduates and the other two are finishing up. None really understands his privilege, but they know not to flaunt it in this working-class neighborhood. While they watch one evening, a fight between a neighborhood tavern owner and his girlfriend erupts on the street before them, and it is this moment that fixes in Dave’s mind the distinctions between himself and the others on this street and the differences between himself and his co-workers as well. The girlfriend, a woman whose name he never knows, becomes for him an emblem of all he desires but is not sure he will ever have: a human connection with another.
A Semi-Dutchie, Vani Chokra
A Semi-Dutchie is a collection of poems and essays about building a life in a place you know you will eventually leave. During two years in the Netherlands, the author learns Dutch, figures out the recycling schedule, rides a bicycle, participates in holiday traditions, and slowly begins to feel at home.
Through neighborhood barbecues, Saturday markets, shared whisky, Dutch gingerbread, and the occasional longing for American toilet paper, the Netherlands starts to grow familiar. Strangers become friends, neighbors become familiar faces, and a little boy next door opens a door to a part of her she had not expected to find. A friendship built over twenty-three cappuccinos becomes an anchor. With humor and warmth, A Semi-Dutchie explores what happens when a temporary life starts to feel real and what you take with you when you leave.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 9/1 and 9/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
October ’26: Best of the Net, New Staff & New Schedule
Managing Editor Aiden Hunt shares about Philly Chapbook Review’s staff changes, Best of the Net nominations, submission stats, and new publication format in this editor’s note to Issue 14.
“I always feel like I have so much to say to my mother and in this poem, I selected a few memories to share. In a way, this creative choice is symbolic of waving my white flag…” Read three poems by Natalie Zhang, along with a few words about “Flagship.”
The Vocabulary of Disability: On Atropa Belladonna Coursing Through My Veins by Sudikshaa Amar
“Amar’s varied descriptions of embodied experience…let readers see into the work of forging a personal nomenclature for identity and action.” Read the full chapbook review by Contributing Editor, D.W. Baker.