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 July 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.
Gasher Press
Time-Scolded: Essay, Katie Culligan
Across countries and languages, between loved ones and lost ones, through dreams and indecisions, Katie Culligan gifts the reader with Time-Scolded: a prose chapbook at once thrilling in its lyricism and mournful under the threat of military violence and dissolution. The twelve interconnected essay segments peel back, layer by layer, the concepts of time, place, and belonging, and ask what it means to be domestic or foreign, citizen or guest. Set against the backdrop of Russia’s impending occupation of Ukraine, the narrator and her companions—her students, fiancé, and the ghost of her sister—navigate “the physical rules of the world” with the knowledge that “perspective is fighting against itself.” Meditations on “farness” and “far-away-ness” are punctured by moments of dreamlike humor and imagistic imaginings. Time-Scolded is, at its core, an apocalypse in the truest sense of the word: a revelation.
YesYes Books
The Only Way Out Is Through: Essays, Katie Jean Shinkle
Katie Jean Shinkle’s The Only Way Out Is Through is a contemplation on ‘ghost-time,’ the pasts we erase, but which remain nonetheless, which persist. It tells a story of a breakup, or rather a story of multiple breakages, severances between / within self and other, intimacy, love, care—a story that repeatedly opens and closes on the possibility of change, of renewal, much like the process of living itself.” —thirii myo kyaw myint, Names for Light: A Family History
IKE: A Publishing Project
Crossroads of America: Stories, Dana Fitz Gale
A young girl and her mother pinball across the country in a green Plymouth station wagon, never staying anywhere long enough to be found or to put down roots.
What begins as a road story becomes a portrait of survival, mythmaking, and the fierce love between a mother and child living just outside the frame of an ordinary life. With each new state line crossed, the daughter grows more aware of the past they’re outrunning—and the future she’s quietly assembling from maps, mottos, and the stories she tells herself to stay whole.
The Mannequin: Stories, Carla Crujido
In 1934, inside Spokane’s glittering Crescent Department Store, a mannequin awakens to find herself suddenly—impossibly—alive. What begins with a sneeze becomes a darkly enchanting journey through a world that sees her only as an object of beauty. As she learns to move, to speak, to feel, she must also navigate the rigid expectations of womanhood in an era obsessed with perfection and display.
Blending historical detail with a touch of the surreal, Carla Crujido transforms a department store icon into a haunting figure of longing and self discovery. A story of awakening—both tender and unsettling—The Mannequin invites readers to consider what it means to be made, remade, and finally recognized.
Bottlecap Press
Ghost in the Rain: Stories, Matthew Jakubowski
In these 12 microfictions and flash stories, Matthew Jakubowski traces a terrain of otherworldly-ness populated by lost ghosts, haunted lovers, immortal siblings, amorous trees, and undead pandemic parents, each reflecting a facet of our changing world’s natural beauty.
Rich with gothic humor, surreal flourishes, and poetic fracturing, these stories address mortality and vulnerability with a steady belief in the mess of human intimacy, the risks and value in the eternally creative act of loving wildly and unconditionally.
With Ghost in the Rain, we see the elusive moments in life refusing to vanish, enduring the elements of our world and our hearts, gaining greater meaning to move us closer to the core of who we each are and who we are meant to be.
The Little Mermaid Turned Forty: Stories, Alice Kinerk
Cinderella, after the marriage, becomes a revolutionary. Some kids uncover a giant pacifier buried in the woods. Unicorns are born accidentally out of farts and prance around the cul-de-sac, wreaking havoc. The five itty-bitty stories in this eensy–weensy collection infuse magic into the mundane, silliness into the sober. They ask the question What if, and they answer it with a smirk.
The Little Mermaid Turned Forty is for people who think real life has grown kinda dull. It is for dreamers who look around and see a washed-out, watered-down world. It is for anyone who finds themselves grin-and-bearing-it through these dark days. Anyone who could use a respite from reality. In short, The Little Mermaid Turned Forty is for all of us.
All the World’s a Stage, Jeremy Stelzner
The day started with such potential. Theodore Vandershlump would be performing Hamlet. As a self-proclaimed thespian, it doesn’t get much better than that. But after Teddy drops dead mid-soliloquy, the day takes a turn for the surreal.
Upon arriving at the pearly gates, the afterlife appears to be an actor’s wonderland. But just as in the realm of the living, not everything is as it seems.
Jeremy Stelzner’s careful comedic touch is on full display in All the World’s a Stage. It’s a riotous ride for all fans of stage, screen, and Shakespeare.
above/ground press
from the green notebook: a writing vigil, rob mclennan
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 7/1 and 7/31 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.
“To fit the nuanced, dimensional experience of dysphoria and transition into narrative…often feels flattening, falsely assured. I wanted to look at this discomfort I felt, to see what was necessary in it.” Read three poems by Joshua Zeitler, our fourth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Cobbling.”