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.
Abdullah Bin Imran explores displacement, identity and belonging through poems that move between exile, memory, prejudice, and personal transformation. Drawing on images of borders, mirrors, cracks and changing skins, this collection explores what it means to live between cultures while confronting how other individuals perceive and define us and how we quite often become metaphorical borders ourselves.
Silver Busobozi
We Are the Borders is a poignant story of reckoning with the self through migration, misinterpretation, and even malice. This is a necessary collection that adds beautifully to the discourse of what it means to be human.
Rachel Turney, founder of Poetry (in Brief)
We are the Borders offers a glimpse of what it’s like to be part of the Pakistani diaspora. The poems shed and bleed, crack and transform. In four succinct parts, Imran explores the complexity of leaving the country you’re from and having to navigate a land where you feel you don’t belong.
Maya Cheav, author of by-the-wind-sailor
Abdullah Bin Imran’s work speaks to being an outsider—subtle yet surprisingly raw.
Ian Gouge, founder of Coverstory Books
Details
Title: We Are the Borders
Author: Abdullah Bin Imran
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - September
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 30
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-252-1
We Are the Borders
We Are the Borders
Recent titles
We Are All Naked in This Land by David J. Kann, coming September 29!
We Are the Borders by Abdullah Bin Imran
Forsythia Overnight by Dave Malone
Annunciations by Buffy Shutt
Apocalypse Rainbow by Louisa Schnaithmann
nor are you free to abandon it by sarah klein
Letters to the Dead by Toni Ortner
Black by the Bedside by Khadija Ceesay
Tiger Bite by Ursula McCabe
Cumulus by Shivani Gupta
minutes between city and forest by Ceridwen Hall
AMERICANAPOCALYPSE by tommy wyatt blake
This Rough Magic by John A. deSouza
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.
