Introducing . . .
Laura Candler, the 2026 Chapbook Competition winner—a collaboration between The Poets Corner, Toad Hall Editions, and the Camden Festival of Poetry.
Check out her reading and conversation on The Poets Corner with Chapbook Judge Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
And find out about pre-ordering her chapbook below . . .
“These poems keep turning toward the world—toward the child’s voice, the river’s body, the small, bright pop of a flower—and in that turning, they make a place where wonder and worry can stand side by side without shame. They remind us that close attention is its own kind of devotion, that to name what is fragile, fleeting, and alive means to love it more fully.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, poet, essayist and 2026 Chapbook contest judge
photo of Aimee © Dustin Parsons
Laura Candler is the 2026 Chapbook Competition winner—a collaboration between The Poets Corner, Toad Hall Editions, and the Camden Festival of Poetry.
Common Name, by Laura Candler, is a collection of lyric poems exploring motherhood, identity, and the greater than human world. Candler devotes poems to single species like the Tennessee Cave Salamander and American Persimmon, while also marveling at the humorous language of her children and their fleeting youth. She moves between handmade quilts to the backyard flower garden to the ecosystem of the South Cumberland Plateau, all with an ear toward what sparks wonder. With seriousness and play, tenderness and urgency, this collection interrogates what it means to both assert and accept a sense of self during a time of personal and ecological transformation.
“These poems keep turning toward the world—toward the child’s voice, the river’s body, the small, bright pop of a flower—and in that turning, they make a place where wonder and worry can stand side by side without shame. They remind us that close attention is its own kind of devotion, that to name what is fragile, fleeting, and alive means to love it more fully.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil,
poet, essayist and 2026 Chapbook contest judge
We are currently taking pre-orders, the book will be published in September 2026.
Laura Candler’s manuscript Common Name is the 2026 winner of The Poets Corner Chapbook Contest. Laura’s poetry appears in Gulf Coast, SWING, Variant Literature, and other publications.
Her book reviews and radio stories have been published by Good River Review, Civil Eats, Inside Appalachia, Marketplace, and other NPR affiliate stations.
She is completing an MFA from Spalding University and lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.
More Chapbooks
The poems in What Blooms in the Dark wander through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the grocery store with a mother grieving the death of her preterm twins.
Details:
5” x 7” saddle stitched chapbook
32 pages
Poetry
Ordering from outside the US? Contact us directly at hello@toadhalleditions.ink for shipping costs.
Nan Seymour’s debut collection of poetry, prayers not meant for heaven includes 24 poems which Nan writes “were never meant to ascend.” They read like tinctures, infused with hope, humility, and healing.
Spare in form but rich in tenderness, reverence, and connection, prayers not meant for heaven is a devotional for our times, a spiritual field guide for the heart.
Details:
5” x 7” softcover book
50 pages
Poetry
by Maya Stein
The first small collection of 10-line Tuesday poems—this pocket-sized book is 6” wide by 4.75” high, and contains 10 mother-related poems .
More small collections of Maya’s 10-line Tuesdays will be coming close behind this one!
Traveling between the woods and broken mills of Western Maine and astrological, astronomical, and future spaces, Orbit is a collection of poems angling toward themes of loss and arching back to resolution. Begun during the March 2020 Covid lockdown, Orbit is a search for meaning in stillness, and the growth that becomes possible when our usual movements are interrupted, disrupted, and changed.
Katherine Hagopian Berry (she/her) is the author of Mast Year (Littoral Books 2020), LandTrust (NatureCulture, 2022) and Orbit, launching from Toad Hall Editions in February 2023. Her poems have appeared in the Café Review, SWWIM, and Feral among other places. She is a poetry reader for the Maine Review.
Details:
6” x 8.5” softcover book
95 pages
Poetry
by Laura Bonazzoli
On the shores of Consecration Pond, a burn victim begs her husband’s ghost for forgiveness for failing to save him, a retired teacher counsels a reporter seeking easy answers to the cause of his neighbor’s death, and a boy’s self-imposed rite of passage nearly costs him his life.
The eleven linked short stories in Laura Bonazzoli’s collection take place in and around the same pond in rural Maine. Together, these stories offer a meditation on the nature of wisdom, the risks and gifts of allowing ourselves to be seen, and the challenge of creating meaning in the wake of loss.
Details:
5.5” x 8.5” Softcover book
175 pages
Short Fiction
Pub Date: July 2022
Cover art illustration by Elizabeth Ogle
by Elizabeth W. Garber
Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year, is the story of how a bookish teen and her younger brother are sent by their dominating father to “shape up” on a sail training school ship, where they discover the rigors, joys, and triumphs of being at sea. As they scour the decks, learn to splice ratlines, and climb the rigging, they also survive an act of piracy, a near-sinking, and being held hostage by armed gun boats. The book chronicles a transformative year in the throes of late adolescence that leads to courage, grace, and a reclamation of selfhood.
Details:
5.5” x 8.5” Softcover book
300+ pages
Memoir
Pub Date: September 2022
“This book is a beautiful, high-stakes coming of age tale about survival on an old square-sailed rigger. It’s also a vivid, stirring reminder that again and again the natural world will reduce us to our most elemental selves and allow us to finally see and know who we are.”
—Susan Conley, author of Landslide and memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune
Toad Hall Editions’ first book The Poser wins a 2023 IPPY Independent Spirit Award—recognizing excellence in independent publishing.
What’s this book about?
Part art book, part essay series, part something else entirely, The Poser is a collection of contemporary portrait reenactments completed in the spring of 2020. The book features interviews with a selection of artists whose work was the inspiration for the series. Designed by Liz Kalloch, with a foreword by Danielle Krysa of The Jealous Curator and an afterword by Amy Tingle (who served as my “reluctant art director” for the reenactments). The Poser is a celebration of creativity in a time of uncertainty and the power of art to both transcend reality and respond to it with hope, joy, and connection.
“This book entranced me, amazed me, made me laugh out loud with delight. A celebration of human resilience and the power of the imagination, Maya’s lockdown recreations of contemporary art portraits became a sustaining project for her during 2020, and this extraordinary book is the result.”
—Diana Whitney, editor of You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (Workman Publishing) and author of Girl Trouble
Details:
7” x9” softcover book
188 pages
Art, Photography & Essays
kerning | a space for words [a literary journal]
We are thrilled to present the fifth issue of kerning, a biannual compendium of writing that includes poetry, fiction, short stories, flash fiction, personal essays and creative nonfiction from women and gender diverse people.
For this issue, we invited writers to send us work based on the theme “The Company We Keep,” work that explores kinship and connection with another—whether longstanding or fleeting, platonic or romantic, familial or foreign, bewildering or obvious, carefree or complicated. What was the magnetic force that drew two people into orbit with each other (or flung them out of it?), and what world was born from their tether to each other?
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” – Anaïs Nin
We are thrilled to present the fourth issue of kerning, a biannual compendium of writing that includes poetry, fiction, short stories, flash fiction, personal essays and creative nonfiction from women and gender diverse people.
For this issue, we invited writers and artists to send us work based on the theme “The Body as Evidence,” writing that tackles visibility and the body, and the journeys of discovery, healing, and even destruction that are undertaken to lay the truth bare.
“In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches... that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.”
—Janet Fitch
We are thrilled to present the third issue of kerning, a biannual compendium of writing that includes poetry, fiction, short stories, flash fiction, personal essays and creative nonfiction from women and gender diverse people.
For this issue, we invited writers and artists to send us work based on the theme “Secret Identities,” writing that delves into what we conceal, obstruct, or obscure from view—whether it's by necessity, choice, or circumstance—and whether we're hiding from ourselves or the world.
“...I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
—Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
We are thrilled to present the second issue of kerning, a biannual compendium of writing that includes poetry, fiction, short stories, flash fiction, personal essays and creative nonfiction from women and gender diverse people.
For this issue, we invited writers and artists to send us work based on the theme “It’s All Relative,” to explore the places where contrast and connection meet with stories about actual families or relationships, pieces about situations or experiences that resist comparison or attachment, and stories in which one’s decisions, behavior, mindset, or action flouts another’s expectations or understanding.