With the start of Issue 13, Philly Chapbook Review will now publish information on new literary novels and short story collections the same way we have for full-length poetry books (prose chapbooks will be covered in a monthly post). Every Tuesday, we’ll publish an update about what titles we know are releasing in the following week.
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.
Awake Awake, Fiona Mozley
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they’d really happened to her. But she knows they’re too wild to be possible. Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.
Set against the disorienting and rapidly changing political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, Booker Prize finalist Mozley’s disarming coming-of-age tale is addictively readable, and poignantly captures the shakiness of identity – both personal and national – and the anchoring force of friendship.
Fiona Mozley was born in East London and raised in York, in the North of England. She studied history at Cambridge and then lived in Buenos Aires and London, working at a literary agency and at a travel center. Her first novel, Elmet, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner and their dog. Mozley’s second novel, Hot Stew, is available now.
All That Is Left of Life, Roberta Recchia, Antonella Lettieri (Tr)
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
It’s a sultry August night when sixteen-year-old Betta Ansaldo convinces her cousin Miriam to sneak out to the local beach for a party. Only Miriam returns. Traumatized by the violence she’s witnessed, she remains silent. The small community is riven with grief, none more so than the Ansaldos, who search for answers they cannot find. Who did Betta cross paths with on that fateful night? What was she doing there? And how could such a horrific crime happen in such a peaceful place?
As the years pass, and Betta’s murder goes unsolved, the Ansaldo family fractures under the weight of their loss. When Miriam meets Leo, a sweet-natured young man with a dark past, their romance seems to turn her life around. But when Leo starts to pull loose the threads of Betta’s story, determined to find out what really happened, his search for the truth risks unraveling everything.
With more than 200,000 copies already sold in Italy, All That Is Left of Life is a deeply atmospheric and unputdownable family saga that explores love, loss, and the secrets we carry, from a riveting new voice in international fiction.
Born in Rome in 1972, Roberta Rossella Recchia lived for a time in Lille, France, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations and cultures. She worked for ten years for a big company and then quit office work to devote herself to teaching. She currently teaches English in a high school in Rome. She is passionate about film and literature, especially Russian and French. She lives with her chihuahua, Claudio, in a small town on the coast of Lazio, Italy.
Antonella Lettieri is a London-based translator with over ten years of experience working in English and Italian. She was the 2023 NCW Emerging Translator Mentee for Italian and was awarded first prize in the 2023 John Dryden Translation.
Solstice, Carol Gilligan
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Boston, 1969. Eve, a dancer whose feelings are expressed through the body and movement, senses an inexplicable distance growing between herself and her husband, Gabe, a journalist and father of her two children. Feeling lost and alone, she begins an affair; Gabe detects it immediately and begins one himself. Yet somehow they find their way back to each other, and when Eve gives birth to a daughter, their marriage becomes vital again.
Years later, when Gabe returns from a reporting trip to the Middle East and Berlin, Eve again perceives something is wrong in her marriage. Gabe no longer seems like the man she once knew. He has always had a darkness she could not fathom—deep psychological scars from his childhood, when Gabe escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport.
Amsterdam, 1991. Newly separated from Gabe, Eve has accepted a fellowship to choreograph a dance inspired by the story of Adam and Eve. When a colleague introduces her to a new translation of the ancient text, Eve begins to redefine the way she thinks about women, men, and relationships—and, perhaps, to see another path back to her marriage.
In this emotionally riveting novel, Carol Gilligan draws on her unsurpassed psychological understanding of women’s lives to explore a new vision of love and intimacy. Sweeping across decades and continents, Solstice is a provocative and profound portrait of what it takes to truly love another.
Carol Gilligan, whose landmark classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of girls, women, and human psychology, is a University Professor at New York University. She is the author of the novel Kyra and a number of books on psychology, women’s and girls’ development, and listening to how people speak about their lives. She did her undergraduate work in English literature at Swarthmore and her graduate work in psychology at Harvard, where she was the first Graham professor of Gender Studies and taught for over 30 years. In 1996 Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential Americans and in 2025 she received the Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her husband and the very old dog of their youngest son.
The Hanged Man, Katherine Conner
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Against the surreal landscape of the deep south, three Lebanese-American sisters encounter their missing mother six years after she vanished from their lives. Georgia, now a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, spots her mother’s face in the crowd of tour-goers. Virginia, a receptionist at a mental health facility in Mississippi, is sure her mother walks in one day and asks to be committed. Louise, a relay operator in Birmingham, hears her mother’s voice late one night on the line. Each of these encounters is fleeting, almost ghostly, ambiguous. Is it really her, their mother, the woman who packed their grandmother’s trousseau and walked out of their lives without a word all those years ago? Or is she a vision, a ghost, no more than a memory?
Steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Jesmyn Ward, this atmospheric collection of linked stories explores our complex relationship with loss and our desperate search for meaning.
Katherine Conner is a Lebanese-American writer from Mississippi. Her collection of short stories, The Hanged Man, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award, the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and the Iron Horse Literary Review First Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines, including West Branch, Pembroke Magazine, Willow Springs, Shenandoah, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, Fugue, Surreal South, The Chattahoochee Review, The Portland Review, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere.
An Incomplete History of the American West: Stories, Gabriel Urza
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
An Incomplete History of the American West is a striking collection of twelve interconnected short stories that span 150 years across the stark, haunting landscape of the Great Basin. Moving chronologically through time, each story acts like a literary historical marker—pausing along the timeline to reveal a moment, a voice, a reckoning.
Rooted in the traditions of Western literature but unafraid to challenge them, author Gabriel Urza brings a fresh and unflinching perspective to stories that span race, class, and time. Unsentimental yet deeply humane, An Incomplete History of the American West asks readers to reconsider what the West truly means—and why the stories we tell about it still matter.
Gabriel Urza is a writer, attorney, and university professor from Reno, Nevada. He teaches fiction in the MFA program at Portland State University. He is the author of the novels The Silver State and All That Followed, as well as and The White Death: An Illusion and The Las Supper. He lives in Hood River, Oregon.
On the Greenwich Line, Shady Lewis, Katharine Halls (Tr)
Publisher: Peirene Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In an East London housing office, a frustrated local government employee spends his days trying to figure out what the latest policy announcement means for both himself and the migrants he works with every day. As a favour to a friend, he finds himself roped into organizing the funeral of Ghiyath, a young Syrian refugee. But it is not until his life collides with Ghiyath’s death that he realises just how much he has in common with those who’ve fallen through the cracks. Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.
Shady Lewis, born 1978, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing centres on cultural and political intersections within and beyond the Arab world. He lives in London, where he has spent many years employed by the National Health Service and local authority housing departments, working with homeless people and patients with complex needs. He has published three novels in Arabic to date – The Lord’s Ways (2018), On the Greenwich Line (2019), and A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (2021) – each of which engage with the social history of Coptic Christians and trajectories of migration from Egypt to the West, and a travel diary, Death Tourism, or a Comedy of Foreigners (2024). On the Greenwich Line has also been translated into German, French and Italian; the French translation was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix de la littérature arabe.
Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her critically acclaimed translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed and her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award. Her work has appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Asymptote, and others. She is one third of teneleven, an agency for contemporary Arabic literature.
The Depopulation, Marina Closs, Thomas Bunstead (Tr)
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
So begins this polyphonic wonder of a novel set in a 17th-century Jesuit mission founded within the wild South American subtropics by the mystical and intense Father Ruiz and his assistant Father Maceta. As the priests seek to convert the indigenous Guaraní and unravel the many religious mysteries that surround them, the harmony of their community is abruptly upended by the arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus. But an even larger threat presents itself when word arrives that European marauders and slave hunters will soon descend upon the peaceful mission, compelling Overá and the priests to launch a mass exodus into the heart of the jungle.
Full of humor, passion, and terror, The Depopulation brilliantly evokes the moment when modernity’s spark set fire to a still-magic world.
Marina Closs grew up in a small town in the Misiones province of Argentina, an area steeped in the history that informs The Depopulation, her first novel to be published in English. She is the recipient of Argentina’s Fondo Nacional de las Artes Prize and Angélica Gorodischer Prize, and has also been shortlisted for Spain’s Finestres Prize and Ribera del Duero Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Soft Spots, Leila Renee
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
After miraculously securing a teaching job at a dysfunctional high school, loner Robin moves to South Bend, Indiana, where she’s paired with an eerily perfect roommate: Naomi. Freshly estranged from her abusive parents, Robin obsesses over two absurd goals: to be the best teacher at the school, despite never having taught, and to become best friends with Naomi, who could not be more her opposite. Meanwhile back home, Robin’s brother must decide between being loyal to his sister or their parents.
Just as Robin grows closer to her students and Naomi, she receives earth-shattering news from her brother. Desperate to cope, Robin redoubles her efforts to befriend Naomi, spiraling even deeper into obsession and self-sabotage. Everything comes to a head when one of Robin’s many bad choices come back to bite her, and she must confront the limits of forgiveness, the weight of memory, and the true cost of estrangement.
Leila Renee is originally from Milwaukee. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University and her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, and more. She has received the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and a Fulbright Award. She teaches at the University of St. Thomas and lives in Minneapolis.
Moderation, Elaine Castillo
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Girlie Delmundo is the greatest content moderator in the world, and despite the setbacks of financial crises, climate catastrophe, and a global pandemic, she’s going places: She’s getting a promotion. Now thanks to her parent company Paragon’s purchase of Fairground—the world’s preeminent virtual reality content provider—she’s on the way to becoming an elite VR moderator, playing in the big leagues and, if her enthusiastic bosses are to be believed, moderating the next stage of human interaction.
Despite the isolation that virtual reality requires from colleagues, friends, and family, the unbelievable perks of her new job mean she can solve a lot of her family’s problems with money and mobility. She doesn’t have to think about the childhood home they lost back in the Bay Area, or history at all—she can just pay any debts that come due. But when she meets William Cheung, Playground’s wry, reticent co-founder (now chief product officer), slowly unearths some of his secrets, and finds herself somehow falling in love, she’ll learn that history might be impossible to moderate and the future utterly impossible to control.
Elaine Castillo, named one of 30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People by the Financial Times, was born and raised in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, was a finalist for numerous prizes including the Elle Big Book Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and the New York Public Library.
Kitten, Stacey Yu
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Katie is far from home and fresh out of college, desperate to skirt adulthood’s demands, and all too willing to let her wealthy boyfriend James make decisions for them both. It doesn’t help that she’s no longer speaking to her mother, who resents her for leaving Little Rock. Or that her roommate has abruptly moved out of their New York City apartment. But when James takes Katie on vacation to his family’s seaside house, he brings Silver, his childhood cat, and Katie discovers a sudden, strange, and giddy sense of connection.
Silver doesn’t mind that Katie can’t seem to get a job, hold her own at dinner parties, or make amends with her mother. Silver, who gets to lie around all day, misbehave spectacularly, be cute, gross, and still get fed, seems to have the life Katie increasingly longs for. Soon enough, they’re inseparable, and something inside Katie begins to crack open, or maybe just…crack.
Because if Katie has learned anything from her estranged mother, it’s that devotion comes at a price. As Katie’s affection for Silver deepens, all of her other relationships begin to falter. Soon, Katie must confront what it is she desires from her life, and what she might have to risk to get it.
Both darkly playful and unexpectedly heartfelt, this debut from a major new voice in fiction is a timeless reckoning with the uncertainty of becoming a person in a world that is as disorienting as it is full of hope and promise.
Stacey Yu is a Chinese American writer. She grew up between Texas, Arkansas, and California and currently lives in London. Kitten is her debut novel.
Etna, Paul Yoon
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.
Paul Yoon is the author of six works of fiction: Etna; Once the Shore, a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run Me to Earth, a Time Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and The Hive and the Honey, winner of the 20th Annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates prize.
Queen Mab, Emily McBride
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
There is a changeling in this story—but who is it?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own desire to bring new life into a world marked by loss.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh, despite a traumatic labor. But just a few nights into their life, something seems amiss. Maud is changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light, with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Tom goes about the day-to-day, working toward a promotion and urging Madeleine to connect with other moms. Her parents come to clean out her grandmother’s house, her father newly obsessed with genealogy and DNA tests. Madeleine, interrupted by violent visions, panicked at her lack of maternal love, shut out from her old life, frantically searches for answers. The old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed, and the fairies don’t just kidnap babies—they’re also partial to young women. Is Maud the changeling, or is Madeleine? And if she’s been swapped, how will she find her way back?
Emily McBride’s Queen Mab is a riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered.
Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut novel.
Whyteface, A. Igoni Barrett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Paperback
Four years ago, a young man named Furo Wariboko woke up one morning in Lagos to find that he had transformed into a white man. Except for his ass. Now well established with a good job, going by Frank Whyte and living in a nicely appointed house in the capital city of Abuja, he is ready to set off on a real vacation—his first trip outside Nigeria.
As Frank travels to Amsterdam, Oslo, and Milan, he finds himself, for the first time in years…blending in. His skin is not in the least remarkable. In Amsterdam he befriends his Airbnb host, a well-meaning but often misguided liberal Dutch woman. He also meets a Nigerian expat living in America whom he is both delighted to see but who vexes him. In Oslo, he intervenes when a charismatic Kenyan writer is the victim of a racist taxi driver. In Milan he comes upon a possibly distant relative, who has survived a treacherous migrant’s journey. He quickly realizes that he feels most Nigerian when he is outside of Nigeria, and he begins to wonder what it might take to be treated, simply, as human.
Hilarious, sharp-witted, and moving, each in turn and often all at once, A. Igoni Barrett’s Whyteface confronts the absurdities of the “first world’s” ideas about the developing world—both its xenophobic fear as well as its supposedly beneficent charity. It is a heady and absorbing new novel by the writer Teju Cole called “a major talent.
A. Igoni Barrett is the author of Blackass and Love Is Power, or Something Like That. He is the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. He lives in Nigeria.
Majestic Hills, Dawn Turner
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Tired of the daily drama in his emergency room, Dr. Langdon Blaque is in search of a place where he can leave the world behind. He loves his job and has no delusions about the suburbs being perfect, but he wants peace and quiet. His wife Josephine, a lawyer, grew up listening to her father’s stories about the Jim Crow South, and sundown towns. She prefers the city. Still, she agrees to move with the caveat that they stay for a year and reassess.
The tight-knit, predominantly white group of neighbors in Majestic Hills initially welcomes them with open arms. But beneath the veneer of privileged harmony, tensions simmer. When a horrifying crime rocks the community, the illusion of safety is shattered, and Josephine and Langdon find themselves at the heart of a brewing storm that pits neighbor against neighbor, exposes deeply ingrained prejudices, and threatens to implode into violence.
As their experiment in suburban living ticks toward the one-year mark, the Blaques are pushed to a breaking point. Can they find a way to make a home in Majestic Hills? Or has the move put their future, their marriage, and even their safety in jeopardy?
Dawn Turner is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics, and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election and inauguration. Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France, and Ghana. She spent the 2014–2015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of two novels, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven and An Eighth of August. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Bird Girl, Duston Spear
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Publication Date: August 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rebekah Hunnicutt, a reclusive painter now living in Western Massachusetts is unexpectedly thrust into the art-world spotlight when a popular podcast identifies her as the young woman behind a decades-old art-world incident. In the 1970s, at the height of the Soho art scene, she was entangled with an ambitious artist who used her four-foot-long braid as material for his work.
The podcast’s retelling of that episode turns her into a reluctant cause célébre, drawing curious visitors to the once-secret studio where she has quietly reworked the same seven canvases for forty years. Now she must decide whether to remain in the shadows or finally re-enter the New York art world, armed with the artwork that has consumed her life.
What unfolds lays bare the artistic power dynamics that shaped her youth and the ways a woman’s image can be celebrated as muse only to be erased as an artist. Rebekah’s journey between past and present illuminates the long personal consequences of that youthful artistic transaction and the cost of a single act of creation that wasn’t entirely her own.
Bird Girl is a clear-eyed exploration of female visibility and erasure and the reclamation of a silenced voice through art.
Duston Spear is a visual artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely, including a mid-career retrospective at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She has artwork in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and has been included in the collections of the High Museum of Art and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
Spear is a recipient of awards and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters, and Creative Time. Materials from her 3 Women in Black project, including costumes and artists’ books, are held in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She taught for over two decades in the College Program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and has contributed to Transforming Together: Higher Education and the Carceral State (Routledge, 2024). Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of text and image, authorship, and the politics of visibility.
Bird Girl is her debut novel.
Love Between the Lines, Mica De Leon
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: August 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Katharina Bautista is thirty-seven, newly unemployed, recently un-engaged, and one bad week away from becoming her brother’s permanent responsibility. No job. No savings. No plan. Just a talent for blowing up her own life and calling it “character development”.
She’s spent years being the good girlfriend, the dependable ate—the woman who makes herself smaller so everyone else can take up space. This time, she wants a life that’s hers.
Nick Malvar, front man of indie band Word Warlords, has been in love with his best friend’s older sister since high school. So when Katha shows up at his doorstep—disheveled and gloriously single—Nick sees his chance. Katha sees a mistake waiting to happen. She doesn’t need a romance. She needs stability. Reinvention. Possibly therapy. What she definitely does not need is a younger man with a guitar, a hero complex, and a long-standing crush he’s suddenly very interested in acting on. But Nick isn’t here to tame her. He just won’t let her disappear.
And as any good Shakespearean heroine knows: the battle of wills is only the beginning.
Mica De Leon is a Filipino author of swoony romance comedy novels and SFF novels. She has won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2019 and 2022 for her essays on romance, feminism, history, fantasy, and the Filipino identity in the aftermath of martial law and the 2022 presidential elections in the Philippines. She has published five books with Penguin Random House Southeast Asia, out of which Love on the Second Read (2023) was longlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023 and has been translated into Indonesian by Penerbit Baca and Korean by HansaeYes24 Foundation.
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Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”
Flash Fiction: Nova by Kimmy Chang
“‘Nova’ is a lyrical second-person story about the narrator’s first true encounter with death…the story presents loss not as beautiful in itself, but as the place where beauty begins.” Read the first original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Nova” by Kimmy Chang.