Since we’ve capped out on fee-free submissions this month over at Submittable, we’re going to extend our chapbook reading period into February.
We’re still able to take chapbooks with a purchase or chapbooks with a tip jar donation.
Please check back February 1, 2015 – Feb 14, 2015 to submit your manuscript.
Melanie Faith’s Tiny House is a micro chap of linked poems following the fictional narrative of a woman exploring tiny house ownership. Faith draws from her ancestral architectural experience (her family is full of builders and stone masons), to explore the idea of downsizing, stepping off the grid, and embracing the miniscule. We are charmed by this micro chap of sweet little poems. | open edition cover, $6
What makes a house a house
is light
altering inhabitant and interior
What makes a house a house
is a bed
built-in or pedestal or fold-down.
What makes a house a house
is the eye
recognizing a pitched roof as home.
The cover image (“Little Orange House & a Red Door” by Nicci Mechler) is printed on Epson premium matte professional paper. The micro chapbooks is handbound & each is trimmed by hand. As they are handmade, no two are exactly alike.
Melanie Faith holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, NC. Her writing has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. She is, among many things, an auntie, a tutor at a college prep school in Pennsylvania, and a freelance creative writing instructor. Her flash fiction, “The Slades,” placed honorable mention in the 2014 Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Short Story and was published in Shenandoah (Washington and Lee University). Her WWII-era poetry collection, Catching the Send-off Train, was published as the summer 2013 selection at Wordrunner eChapbooks. Her poetry chapbook, To Waken is to Begin, was published by Aldrich Press in September 2012. In addition to numerous photography publications, her instructional articles about creative writing techniques have appeared in The Writer and Writers’ Journal, among others. Her poems are forthcoming in The Hartskill Review.
Available via Wicked Little Heart at Etsy.
Here capitulation and recapitulation of love and nothing breaks my goddamn heart. What are we here for, what are we supposed to do with the mounting selves of our reflection, the mounting selves of our sorrow, the mounting selves of our nothing loves and our lovely nothings. What are we supposed to do with the mothers we were and the children we never had and the small wonder of elsewhere: “I fried them barefoot like a mother / Even though I am no mother / I was one once for eight weeks / Then we were in Belize.”
Throughout this tiny book is a power and beauty rare in its form. | full review
By complicating the subject of the female experience the reader is able to see it more clearly. Female death is a tool used for understanding some of the darker parts of life and its place in our psyche. In just a few words, Wiseman perfectly encapsulates some of the most complicated emotions, ranging from the realization of unfair social expectations to reactions to gender violence.
The pieces are arduous and emotional. In just a few words, Wiseman captures the often conflicted emotions of human experience with knife-edged honesty. | full review
Midnight Blue is a series of poems that exist in a place that feels very much in transit, as if the speaker in each poem is moving, always reaching for something under a shade of blue. Sometimes it’s the wash of a tropical sky, sometimes the black-blue of the night from an airplane window. Always the girl (or the I) is in the landscape, sometimes eating pancakes, sometimes washed with rain, leaving behind little sips of blood in the bellies of mosquitos in Belize. There’s always a little sense of the body, a hint of satiation followed almost immediately by hunger, maybe with the lingering sense of jet lag, and it leaves you with the urge to just go somewhere, taste something exotic&sweet, look at the sky and come home again. | open edition | $6
1.
to be wet and spa colored
2.
not spa colored
in the bougey sence
by this i mean the rains
will turn us to mud
and we will sinkhole
in cayo with everywhere flora
molten intruding
3.
we ate conch
every time we were hungry
we ate until we dreamt
the meat and kept
and turned conch
shell and spire
our selves hot
as ceviche
The cover image (“after midnight” by Nicci Mechler) is printed on Epson premium matte professional paper. The micro chapbook is handbound & each is trimmed by hand. As they are handmade, no two are exactly alike.
Vanessa is the author of Weekend Poems (dancing girl press, 2014) and the co-founder of Five Quarterly.
Bring on the chapbooks! https://belly.submittable.com/submit
12-28 pages, all genres considered. Simultaneous submissions accepted. Please see our full guidelines!
Each book will be produced in open edition with artwork solicited or designed in-house. All chaps are bound by hand.
Porkbelly Press is a feminist press open to work by all. We’re queer-friendly, and encourage works from authors&poets all along the identity spectrum.
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