innovative. daring. beautiful.
Rockwood Press makes right-sized poetry chapbooks for people who need poems.
We believe chapbooks are an art form as much as a literary form, perfectly suited for revolution, protest, political change, and social critique. They can be both haunting and hauntingly beautiful.
We believe in emerging and established poets and aim to make room for all kinds of mighty voices in teeny books that might not otherwise find their way into the world.
We believe that a work doesn’t have to be full-length to have a full life. That’s why almost all of our releases are open editions.
This chapbook is in conversation with Shivani Gupta's first collection: my mother is a mixed metaphor. You could start, end & re-enter the landscape of mothers, fathers, daughters between these poems as you’d like.
The politics of entitlement, gratitude, authority, obedience, and abandonment are raked over the coals of Gupta’s syntax as she remixes our expectations of language, fathers, and men more broadly. Together, these poems stitch a sensitive portrait of a particular kind of paternal psyche and the reluctant psyches of those of us who love them, miss them, and carry with us their love and their transgressions alike in assemblages of ourselves amidst our inherited and created cosmologies which, inevitably, contain all the fragrances and textures of their memory.
Ashna Ali, author of The Relativity of Living Well
The collection moves with rare intelligence and feeling, unearthing the speaker’s father’s presence and themes of home with both tenderness and precision. Gupta’s poems balance whimsy with (at times) mathematical rigor, allowing memory, grief, and curiosity to unfold in unexpected patterns. The result is a book that feels deeply personal yet formally daring, intimate in its subject matter and expansive in its imaginative reach. This is poetry that rewards attention: inventive, moving, and beautifully exacting.
Timothy David Rey, author of Zip!
Cumulus is filled with visceral imagery, honest takes, and tender gut punches. Shivani’s work reminds me what it means to hold on to the feeling of a person rather than the details. And yet, the details are so vivid throughout! It’s a body of work that is reminiscent and wholly reverent.
Talicha J., author of Falling in Love with Picking Myself Up
Shivani Gupta is a Chicago-based writer, curator & researcher. Her work has featured globally across BBC, Forbes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Baby Teeth Journal, Epiphany Magazine, Corpus Callosum, and more. She has served as an In-Surreal-Life fellow, the Development Committee Chair for the Chicago Poetry Center and has been supported by the Narrative Shifts residency. She loves sauces, baked goods, pen-pals, and all-around silliness.
Details
Title: Cumulus
Author: Shivani Gupta
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - August
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 44
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-244-6
Cumulus
Cumulus
Recent titles
Annunciations by Buffy Shutt, coming September 8!
nor are you free to abandon it by sarah klein, coming September 1!
Letters to the Dead by Toni Ortner, coming August 19!
Black by the Bedside by Khadija Ceesay, coming August 15!
Cumulus by Shivani Gupta
minutes between city and forest by Ceridwen Hall
AMERICANAPOCALYPSE by tommy wyatt blake
This Rough Magic by John A. deSouza
HEAVY: poems that count by Megan Hollingsworth
by-the-wind-saylor by Maya Cheav
Paradise by Stephan Antoine Viau
Masquerading as a Gastropoda by Hachi Chuku
View all our available chapbooks
submissions
We select manuscripts through an open submissions process that occurs year-round.
Manuscripts should be tightly linked collections of ten to thirty poems or up to forty pages, submitted in .rtf, .doc, or .docx formats only. All submissions should be made via email. We do not accept unsolicited paper submissions.
Eligibility: Poets writing in English are eligible. Previous book publication is not a consideration. Simultaneous submissions are permissible, but entrants are asked to notify Rockwood Press immediately if a manuscript becomes committed elsewhere.
There is no open submission fee.
We do our best to reply to submissions within one month, but the time can vary depending on submission volume. If your work has not been accepted or declined, it’s still under consideration. Every submission is considered thoroughly before a response is made.
All submissions are eligible for publication by Rockwood Press with a standard royalty contract.
submissions at Rockwood Press dot com
If we seem familiar
That’s because, Rockwood Press, a not-for-profit literary imprint, is a project of Fernwood Press and its parent company, Barclay Press. For years, we’ve made our books and full-length poetry collections available through POD services, but we wanted to produce more books in-house where we have control over color, texture, paper quality, and the overall shape each project takes.
We’ve also seen a ten-fold increase in poetry submissions over the last year and sensed from our conversations with writers that it’s getting harder and harder to find homes for good work.
The project of Rockwood Press is to bring more great poetry into the world in smaller, focused collections that can be produced locally, quickly, and beautifully.
