Porkbelly Press is an independent micro press specializing in handbound, small & open edition runs of chapbooks, micro chapbooks, zines, broadsides (letterpress & lithograph & screenprint), and Sugared Water.
by Susan Milchman
Milchman borrows 80s song lyrics to transform them (via the golden shovel form) into long-lined poems tied together with fearless wit, rhythm, and sharp-tongued agency: “the dreams a girl keeps like a bent knife in her boot / like a fistful of borrowed fire.” In these pages you’ll find poems “bruised and sugared,” a little wild, a little broken, and ever relentless. (Porkbelly Press 2024)
by Mari Ness
Ness’ chapbook of poems balances between the real and unreal, myth and place, in an ecological weaving of stories of caution and survival.
Love Me, Love My Belly is a half-size zine composed of art, creative nonfiction, & poetry—an annual print zine dedicated to the acceptance of self and imperfection as beauty. It’s about the space between us, our differences, our scars, our wobbly bits, and our power as it relates to the bodies we live in.
48 pages
open edition
by Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Ancestral-Wing is a chapbook of poems touching on ritual, the litany of memory, ancestry, and how the ways we mourn connect to everything, from landscape, places, to each other. (Porkbelly Press 2024)
40 pages
open edition
by B. Fulton Jennes
Jennes’ Flown is a chapbook of poems about sisterhood, grief, living through illness, and dying, too. It’s about what tethers, and how when some things are fraying, others hold us fast in the moment, and how that, too, is fleeting. There’s a power in these sharp poems, language precise and haunting. (Porkbelly Press 2024)
40 pages
open edition
Recently released titles:
by Adrie Rose
Rose’s poetry leads us on a journey through vulnerable, distilled moments spun with steel underpinnings. These poems persist through flashes of deep shadow and heartache, reaching for the possibility even in stark, painful experience, present and attentive, always willing to risk. (Porkbelly Press 2023)
20 pages
open edition
by Sayuri Ayers
Ayers’ chapbook is a lyric essay investigating relationships, mental illness, pregnancy, and family weaving through folktale and childhood memory. This chapbook is at once immediate and ephemeral, rooted in both the body and in dreaming.
(CWs: post-partum depression, thoughts of self-harm.)
36 pages
open edition
by Sam Herschel Wein
Wein’s Butt Stuff Flower Bush is a joyous, vulnerable, fantastically gay chapbook of poems that dance through sex, relationships, trauma, healing, and hunger. It has its share of tears, and there’s joy too. Eat, want, sing, survive, flirt. (Porkbelly Press 2023)
40 pages
open edition
by Danny McLaren
McLaren’s hybrid chapbook is a collection of poetry and micro CNF “full of trans/enby rage, love, desire, and dreams of the future.” It’s about body, mind, love, desire, shape, and hope”—a body and an identity “writing itself into existence.” This micro examines that which is given and that which is chosen, and, yes, it includes a manifesto. Sharp, witty, vulnerable in places, The Enby Manifesto claims space and makes room for others to come along and be themselves. (Porkbelly Press 2023)
open edition
20 pages
by Jane Ayres
Ayres’ micro chapbook of poems, written after total hysterectomy, touching on aging, identity, relationships, and body image through the lens of a neurodivergent, post-menopausal woman. Dedicated to all hollowed-out spider spaces in a constellation of distilled moments, “angular bone nudging thin flesh,” burrowing deep into the body. (Porkbelly Press 2023)
by Megan Cannella
Eldest Daughter is a deeply personal hybrid chapbook of poetry and creative nonfiction. Grief and love exist in a sometimes surreal space between mother and daughter, exploring the absence and mourning of those left behind, the space that can grow between them, and how letting go is sometimes not only okay—it’s necessary. (Porkbelly Press 2023)
haunted is a special edition outside of the regular submission period & subscription. We asked for work rooted in the imagery & language of haunting, incorporating all manner of them: ghosts, people, places—things persistently present, things that occupy the mind and refuse to let go, from language to memory to specter.
[CW: mentions of/reference to loss (adults & children), death, illness, trauma.]
68 pages
limited edition of 125
by Sarah A. Chavez
Chavez’s micro chapbook explores the body and grief in all is messiness. This epistolary collection is both haunting and haunted, the speaker’s voice well-crafted and sure, poems intimate and woven like a spell, a dream so vivid it pulls us in.
by grace (ge) gilbert
Gilbert’s essays explore identity, sexuality, personal history, religion, and relationships, weaving together what feels at once an intimate, sure, and exploratory confession. “Everywhere I look is a dagger, or a dagger returned,” they write. Sharp and decisive, sometimes a little lonely, yet inviting you along for the journey.
32 pages
open edition
by Michelle Seaman
Part love letter to the fauna & flora of Florida, childhood, family, this chapbook of poems examines the tooth in memory, the way sharp things and soft things leave their mark upon us. It’s fracture and recovery, medicine and magic, transmogrification and chant. (Porkbelly Press 2022)
36 pages
open edition
Love Me, Love My Belly is a half-size zine composed of art, creative nonfiction, & poetry—an annual print zine dedicated to the acceptance of self and imperfection as beauty. It’s about the space between us, our differences, our scars, our wobbly bits, and our power as it relates to the bodies we live in.
32 pages
open edition
by Suzanne Honda
Honda’s When We Were Birds is somewhere between a poem and a prayer-song, a vibrant, lyric, chapbook-length single piece of many parts. It begins “we wanted everything,” and continues in a swirl of wing, feather, moon, mother, daughter, sister, fire, and flight—”a blue dream in bare feet.” (Porkbelly Press, 2022)
For more offerings from our catalog, please see the OFFERINGS+ menu in the left hand bar. You can select by genre, or click forthcoming to see what’s coming soon!