2026 Chapbook Series!
cover art: As Auntie Says… by Alexis Rogers
Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones
by Yasmine Bolden
selected by Mya Matteo Alexice
[limited edition print copy--presales begun!]
[digital free PDF (coming 2027)]
[accompanying playlist]
[goodreads page (coming soon)]
Yasmine Bolden (they/them) is a descendant of Black/Nahiłií women who heard the earth speaking to them through their gardens and lovingly spoke back. They’ve been named a 2026 West Trade Review Prize for Poetry finalist, and an inaugural I, Too, Am the Dream Grand Prize Winner in Poetry by Angie Thomas. Their poems and research have been planted in or performed for the National Library of Medicine, Baltimore Beat, ONLY POEMS’ Best New Poems, Alocasia: 99 Queer Writers on Plants & Nature, Rootwork Journal, and other literary garden plots. They were a Writers in Baltimore Schools Teaching Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where they co-founded the school’s only poetry club and performed in the inaugural Rituals of Remembrance honoring the memory and legacies of those enslaved on the lands that now make up the university’s undergraduate campus.
Praise for Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones
I've been calling Yasmine Bolden my lil sis, ever since I learned that at the time of Beyonce's drop of Single Ladies, they were in kindergarten and I was in the 10th grade--both of us, dancing. WHO I LOVE MARKS TIME IN MY BONES is a beautiful gift, highlighting the best from our newest generation of poets where secrets, salts, queerness, seas and questionings aren't reprimanded by the firm hand of our elders. Elders, who sought to keep their children safe by stripping them of all things strange, othered or too transformative to be given a digestible title. Instead, secrets, salts, queerness, seas and questionings are shared within this collection as cubes of sugar. These poems are our teas, coffees, waters, and tequilas. WHO I LOVE MARKS TIME IN MY BONES, our table. Bolden is our magnificent hostess, daring us to speak and share of our lives like the darlings we deserve to be. It is such a wonder to welcome this debut chapbook. This taste of talents to make way for plenty more tea parties, sugar cubes and speakeasies to come. This big sis? Is exceptionally proud, and clapping the loudest in the crowd.
-Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, author of WHEN IT GETS COLD IN THE SOUTH, debuting with Screen Door Press x The University of Kentucky January 2027.
Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones is for those who know and are also constantly relearning how to carry the joygrief of worldendings and rebeginnings. This book embodies the pearlesque, not as dainty pearlescence, but as rogue, trickster, and subversive sinew of the oceans. The pearls in these poems invite you to string them worldbuildingly. This collection asks: How much longer can this world live on, feeding us amidst the lovelessness of domination and exploitation? It offers, to those willing to love and grieve and dream deeper, for the sake of us all, a field for brown soil bodies to root and grow, to weave and web, worlds upon worlds of liberatedness and grandmothers’ healing. It knows the queerness required to love the world is boundless. The poems in this book dig into the most beautifulest abundance of language amalgamation and the synthesis of remembrance and imagination, jolting the reader into an emotive state of being in direct opposition to the forces that would rather us numb and unfeeling. Thank goodness for unflinching poetics such as the ones in this collection, that confront worldendings heart-on, rather than shy away from them.
-Ayling Zulema Dominguez, award-winning poet
Yasmine Bolden's Who I Love Marks Time in My Bones is, above all, a song for the affectionately monstrous cast of its pages. A call-and-response love letter to queerness in its most expansive sense, this chapbook is deft and precise in its tenderness. Bolden writes to the "soul-bludgeoning silence of an x on a census", to "the eldest daughters of eldest daughters' eldest daughters", to the daughters of Lot's wife turned pillar. This chapbook is an invitation to participate in a glorious, joyful song deeply rooted in queer, Black, anti-colonial legacies. It's really a gift to the reader to be invited into Bolden's conversation with such a firm and welcoming hand.
-Mya Matteo Alexice, GPC 2026 Judge
Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’
by Allison Thung
selected by arushi (aera) rege
[limited edition print copy--presales begun!]
[digital free PDF (coming 2027)]
[accompanying playlist]
[goodreads page (coming soon)]
cover art: I’m afraid it’s just the rain by Christina Ortiz
Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet. She is the author of two other poetry chapbooks: Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and Molar (kith books, 2024). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions; and she is an Assistant Poetry Editor at ANMLY. Find her at @poetrybyallison or www.allisonthung.com.
Praise for Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified ‘you’
"I’ll be honest—I just want an excuse" Thung says in 'Soul Sister', deftly glossing over the one that's been found—this scrapbook of stories, these closed open doors. This look back at lovers; it's own hallowed grounds. Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified 'you' never drifts out of first person, it's not interested in guessing or rehashing fights. These poems center the 'you' but they live for the writer. Often tender, sometimes saddened or pleading, there's a reckoning in progress within; with choices and people, and the imprint they've made.
Thung's speakers seek complicit reflection. They are mining the foregone and, while they remember, they're looking to learn. "[T]o say you make me stupid unfairly absolves me of all responsibility" ('Fool'), "to say you make me stupid" unpicks the importance; Thung invites evolution—she's keeping the scars. These are postcards, are moments; are curtains pulled up to reveal how the world shapes a want shapes a love shapes a girl.
- wim blair, kith books EIC
If you are not already in love when you begin reading Allison Thung’s latest poetry collection, Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified 'you,' you will be by the time you reach the last page. Thung’s poems are swooningly lovely, paired with photographs that both complement and enhance. Moving seamlessly between free verse, prose, and experimental forms, each poem captures how everyday items—the rain, buttered bread, a neighborhood cat—can conjure memories of love.
Thung’s writing embodies the tentativeness of new love when the speaker is, “asking an eight ball where we stand and crossing my fingers,” as well as the disappointment of love’s ending when “everything is soft, soft, soft, and our song plays in the wrong key.” Readers at all stages of love will find something in this collection, which invests deeply in holding the seemingly ordinary details of life up to the light to let them shine.
-Frances Klein author of Another Life and editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler
Allison Thung’s Things I can only say in poems
about/to an unspecified ‘you’ is a quiet song of love, domesticity, and untold yearning. Each piece belies a personal, yet highly relatable notion of letting yourself love and be loved. This chapbook is quiet morning walks, tender conversations over dinner, and a raw willingness to know and to be known. It’s a book that’s steady, that shines brightly, yet inspires the sweetest of aches.
-arushi (aera) rege, GPC 2026 Judge
All We've Got
by Isaiah Newman
selected by Annie Marhefka
[limited edition print copy--presales begun!]
[digital free PDF (coming 2027)]
[accompanying playlist]
[goodreads page (coming soon)]
Isaiah Newman is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Voicemail Poems, Diode Poetry Journal, ANMLY, and elsewhere. You can find their work (and contact them) at isaiahnewman.com or on Instagram @thegreatskittishbakeoff.
cover art: Home by David Newman (2024)
Praise for All We've Got
Isaiah tells such a good story. Their style is so needed in the current poetic landscape—they are unafraid to dive into rabbit holes, to talk about the lineage of the thing, to dissect root causes, to follow an aside, to make their feelings apparent, and always to plainly name underlying political oppression. When Isaiah started coming to Boston Poetry Slam, they said they were mainly a fiction writer, and I said, too bad, you're a poet now. Because the best poets bring that dexterity of language and style. These poems are bursting with heart, hope, and anger, stitched with a sense of humor and unabashed obsession with pop culture. This chapbook is like listening to them tell a long, winding story that will give you new ways to view the world, and I will never tire of hearing it.
-Myles Taylor, Masculinity Parable (2023)
“If our grief knows only our own / can we survive?” Isaiah Newman asks, radiating the ideas of love and loss in this collection through overlapping lenses of Palestinian liberation, Jewish identity, therapy practice, the TV show Fleabag, and family history. It is not only one another's grief we find in All We've Got, but where that grief lives: in making art, sharing soup, singing the names of our beloveds. Reckoning with the concrete tragedies and despairs of this world—a “house of bones, pipes of rotten blood,”—Newman implores us to move from “the breath held / before a punchline” to instead imagine "prayers sung by one many-throated voice," because we can—and must—turn to one another to chart our collective survival.
-Aparna Paul, Home // Free (Game Over Books)
In All We’ve Got, Isaiah Newman excavates bones and ghosts and trauma and the cost of surviving it all. These sensory poems examine the vast range of human connection with stunning and tactile language that is mesmerizing in its rhythm. Readers will be drawn to Isaiah’s deep empathy, their reflections on “deaths of honeybees and humans” and the ways “there is always a new form of grief waiting / to sink its teeth into our heels.” But this collection is not simply a reflection on grief and prayers for change in a conflicted world, but a testament to the power of community and connection to propel us towards survival.
-Annie Marhefka, GPC 2026 Judge
out of this soil, a knife
by miguel santiago flores
selected by Alessandra Nysether-Santos
[limited edition print copy--presales begun!][digital free PDF (coming 2027)]
[accompanying playlist]
[goodreads page (coming soon)]
filipino-american miguel santiago flores was the winner of the Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry's contest with their novel, The Hungry Ghosts. they were also a semi-finalist in Button Poetry's 2023 Chapbook Contest, featured in Midnight Garden Publishing, and a contributing author to Lost to the Canon.
cover art: on of the land by Esraa Elbanna
Praise for out of this soil, a knife
“O, son of man. O, son of man. Who is the angel in revelations with a foot on water and a foot on land?” – Chance The Rapper, “How Great”
Miguel Flores’ out of this soil, a knife is the book that I have been ravenous for. Desperate and starving for more than I could provide for myself, I have opened many a collection, splayed many a spine to discover “an idea becoming a people becoming a person again.” Miguel is a spelunker of his own liberated soul – a soul who is and is walking the journey home. Crafted by a meticulous care and mastery that emanates from the page while exploring different forms and cultural influences, Miguel depicts the journey of the exile moved by the urge and impetus for liberation. I hear Maya Angelou whispering somewhere in the rafters “Belonging now/here, I belong everywhere.” Though Miguel asserts in “whatumeantheybuiltaparkinglotoverthebodies? pt. 1” that “I can not always paint hope over a sunset.” That is in fact what I am currently feeling after having been protected, held, covered, agitated, enlightened, and met in Miguel’s work. The spirit woven in this work is that of a tender, diligent gardener, indeed. A righteously angry and knowingly faithful one, at that! Alhamdullilah!
This collection is nothing short of a spiritual guide for the modern day revolutionary. Because “how can you spit fire if you do not first fill your stomach with kindling?” This book is kindling, indeed. Catalyst, certainly. Sustainer, thankfully. In the dark, enlightened times we find ourselves in (think: blacklight, if you will), the potency of Miguel’s work grants the reader permission to shed every layer of caked-mud-turned-to-skin that has been slung upon them as a fake identity by a fake, idolatrous, and empty society – and sit in the rawness of their dry season, the season of their unbecoming and unfurling, and rename for THEMSELVES all that emerges in the field, in the garden, of the essence of their existence.
“ – and you/ tell me I shouldn’t celebrate something so/ gotdamn beautiful”? A celebration is definitely called for in honor of this new, earthy, and ancient breath that I am now breathing thanks to Miguel Flores’ out of this soil, a knife.
Thank you, Miguel, for the full belly.
In love and solidarity,
–Melissa Ferrer Civil, First Poet Laureate of Kansas City, MO
A New American voice in poetry is emerging. In Miguel Santiago Flores’s out of this soil, a knife, the point of incision is where the healing will eventually begin, but first we must address the wounds sustained collectively as moral injury. These poems warn us that “Even our self-therapy/ is proxy.” —that “Perhaps some things are not meant/ to be metamorphed/ into obscurity.”
Miguel’s use of form and language cuts through our united state of apathy with the autopsical precision of an examiner after a crime. On one hand, there is a vigil; on the other, a call for judgment and justice. In these poems, the body is a revolution unto itself: “Turning towards itself to be free.” Reclaiming the immigrant body as more than a creative body of work but an agent of change. Informing us: “When I tell you that liberation begins in the body what I mean is,…”
–Huascar Medina, 2019-2022 Poet Laureate Emeritus of Kansas, author of “Protest as Love Poem” and “Un Mango Grows in Kansas”
Examining the entangled roots of revolution and the body, out of this soil, a knife is an origin story, a sermon for abolition, a block party. miguel santiago flores weaves musical apocaloptimism that does not just imagine liberation, but gets in the dirt and returns to the soil something beautiful and life-giving.
-Alessandra Nysether-Santos, GPC 2026 Judge
GPC's 2026 Finalists <3
