Chapbook Prize Winners Bundle

A very special bundle featuring the five most recent winners of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize.

With this purchase you'll receive:

+ Sixteen Rabbits by Maryan Nagy Captan
+ Little Girl Blue: Poems by Sequoia Maner
+ mistaken for loud comets by lily someson
+ What Remains by Claudia Delfina Cardona
+ Threshold by Julie Howd
+ from The Water [Inaudible] by Stephanie Goehring

About Sixteen Rabbits by Maryan Nagy Captan (Spring 2022 Winner)

Sixteen Rabbits transports us through dream, memory, place and time, by opening portals that exist in the liminal space between two worlds. These meditative journeys spring from a deep nostalgia, and one of the most urgent expressions of longing in Captan’s work is that of the displaced, yearning for home. Through displacement, religious persecution, and trauma, these poems come shimmering forth ‘in full-bodied reverie’ seeking divine wisdom which echoes throughout Sixteen Rabbits like a summons–to see this moment, this place, this life–in all of its enchantment. As Captan writes: ‘reverence, / I am writing with reverence.’

About Little Girl Blue: Poems by Sequoia Maner (Fall 2021 Winner)

Little Girl Blue: Poems is a collection of elegiac poems that conjures a tapestry of Black voices from history, the victims and the heroes who have helped us see ourselves and the world more truthfully. In these poems, we are not only called to witness injustice, but to hold space for what blooms from it: a confrontation full of exile and longing, an unshakable sense of joy that defies even death. 

This work is a powerful and unique blending of history, memory, and music—as Amanda Johnston says in her introduction to this collection, “As painful as it is to revisit the trauma of such grotesque human realities, Sequoia guides us through our bodies and reminds us we are here to do much more than die. We are here to discover our unique sensual selves through self-discovery and creation.” 

About mistaken for loud comets by lily someson (Spring 2021 Winner)

mistaken for loud comets is a collection of poems that intertwines experiences around incarceration, queerness, and the Black body in America. In this chapbook, lily someson leads us through the Indiana dunes, into dusk air as incarcerated men are beamed into the heavens, and into the rooms of a house she built around herself, creating “a world without confinement.” someson’s poetic genius can be felt in her fortitude—she embraces the storm with startling empathy, and within these poems, offers up her most vulnerable moments alongside her most resolute proclamations of selfhood, claiming space on the page as if fighting for her birthright. Exploring the outermost limits of identity with a gentle, inquiring mind, someson lets the poems in mistaken for loud comets be “everything/ all at once.”

About What Remains by Claudia Delfina Cardona (Fall 2020 Winner)

What Remains is a collection of poems propelled by impulse, desire and an ancestral sense of longing. These poems are experiential; they exist within the dark and splendid catacombs of the body, in dusty moonlit Texas nights, and invite us into their own glittery mythos of what it means to be a young woman falling in and out of love in San Antonio.

What Remains begins with a portrait of a Brown girl growing up in San Antonio: a girl whose "tongue [is] burnt from gas station coffee," and who wears "a name dipped in gold." She invites us to "lay [our] head / on [her] chest and listen," to stir "your margarita / with a chamoy-coated straw", and to play "a guessing game of gunshot / or firework." We settle into the rich and storied landscape of San Antonio just in time to be lunged into a dimension of lust, loving, and longing, "toward someplace too dark for us to see—", only to return to what remains.

About Threshold by Julie Howd (Spring 2020 Winner)

Julie Howd's poems reach backward and forward in time simultaneously, breathing life into the language of antiquity, while fearlessly exploring of the issues that flood our present-day consciousness. This is deeply empathetic work; poetry in tune with the threats facing our natural world, our sanity, our joy and our sacred communal birthright to create art. As Taisaia Kitaiskaia says in the introduction: "Because of Threshold, poetry is evergreening right now, heady with hope, creeping with delight."

About from The Water [Inaudible] by Stephanie Goehring (Fall 2019 Winner)

In this excerpt from her book-length poem, The Water [Inaudible], Goehring gives voice to the voiceless. These poetic sequences exist within an eerie fog-filled forest, a crime scene in the mind of a young girl. They speak from the fluid nature of the girl's traumatic experience and society's forced repression of that experience, as she moves in and out of visibility from the thick haze. The Water [Inaudible] resists the structures of power that extinguish the stories of victims with an incantation, blending the languages of the unconscious mind, of the legal system, and the watery realm of memory. 

Author Bios:

Maryan Nagy Captan is a poet, screenwriter, gardener, and birder living in Austin, TX. She is an alumnus of The Michener Center for Writers and the Disquiet International Literary Program.

Sequoia Maner is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature at Spelman College. She is a co-editor of the critical-creative book Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020) and at work on a forthcoming book regarding Kendrick Lamar's album To Pimp a Butterfly for the 33 1/3 series (Bloomsbury). Her writing has been published in Auburn Avenue, The Feminist Wire, Meridians, Obsidian, The Langston Hughes Review, and other venues."

lily someson (she/they) is a poet and essayist from Chicago. She has obtained a B.A. in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and is a winner of the 2020 Eileen Lannan poetry prize with the Academy of American Poets. She has read at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series and has also been published/is forthcoming in Court Green, Queeriosity (Young Chicago Authors), and Columbia Poetry Review among others. She is currently a first-year Poetry MFA student at Vanderbilt University and an assistant poetry editor of the Nashville Review.

Claudia Delfina Cardona is a poet born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. She received her B.A. from St. Mary’s University and her MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University. In 2013, she co-founded Chifladazine alongside Laura Valdez, a zine that highlights creative work by Latinas and Latinxs. In 2019, she co-founded Infrarrealista Review, a literary journal for all types of Texan writers, with Linda Rivas Vázquez. Cardona loves music and films as much as she loves poetry. She is an aspiring DJ and cultural critic. Read her poems at claudiadelfinacardona.com.

Julie Howd is a poet from Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, Talking from the Knees Up, was published by dancing girl press in 2018. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received the 2015 Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative Arts. Her work can be found in Deluge, The Spectacle, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She lives in Amherst, MA.

Stephanie Goehring earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is the author of several poetry chapbooks. She works as a freelance copy editor and as a bookseller at Malvern Books in Austin, TX.