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.
Rachel R. Baum’s chapbook, Secrets she has saved, unwraps her maternal and filial relationships—as granddaughter, daughter, and mother—in poems evoking quotidian images and sounds that otherwise would mask these etched and slipping-away yearnings. With the poet, I found myself reaching to forgive.
—Rhonda Rosenheck, editor of Thriving: An Anthology, Sin No More, and Looking
In this quietly devastating short collection, Rachel Baum manages to convey an entire family in all its anguished ambivalence. Tolstoy may be right about happy families, but I recognize this unhappy family as if it were my own. Wry and occasionally funny, the poems skewer not only the speaker’s parents but herself and gesture toward the generations before and after, delineating how family dysfunction replicates itself. Baum covers an impressive amount of ground in these fourteen short, readable poems, as if she’d compressed an entire novel into a slim chapbook. The imagery is sharp and surprising; the voice both jaded and sensitive, belying the speaker’s tough stance. There is hard-gained wisdom by the end, and a kind of heartbreaking sadness throughout that reveals itself, finally, as love.
—Barbara Ungar, author of Naming the Animals and Immortal Medusa
Rachel Baum’s Secrets she has saved depicts a Jewish family over time and especially the connections and failed connections between mother and daughter. In these poignant poems, which take a variety of forms and are linked by repeated words and haunted by silences, Baum is intent on a rare kind of truth-telling about family life. Nor does she spare herself from judgment as she shows us the pain of a family with inherited trauma that is not spoken and therefore cannot be healed.
—Susan Kress, author of Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position
Title: Secrets she has saved
Author: Rachel R. Baum
Publisher: Rockwood Press
Released: 2026 - March
Format: chapbook, acid-free paper, silk cover
Pages: 28
Price: $10
ISBN: 978-1-59498-214-9
Secrets she has saved
Secrets she has saved
Recent titles
by-the-wind-saylor by Maya Cheav, coming March 31!
Off to War, Daughter by Trapper Markelz, coming March 26!
Secrets she has saved by Rachel R. Baum
Different With Him by mk zariel
my mother is a mixed metaphor by Shivani Gupta
The Biology of Leaving by Candice M. Kelsey
Sky Over by Lana Hechtman Ayers
Lavender Stones by Kenneth Pobo
From the Bowels of Molluscs by Carlie Daley
Banana Pancakes by Annalisa Hansford
A Razor’s Edge by Matthew J. Andrews
In the Way of Things by Nicholas Skaldetvind
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.
