“Press Play” recounts one person’s story of fighting depression and anxiety in simple, elegant prose and black and white images, which began as a webcomic about Edward’s struggle with depression. The two brothers, Edward and Elbert have made Press Play into something more. A hub. A resource page for mental health issues and those in search of help.

Sweet Publications, 2021
Handmade Chapbook. $15.00 donation. Price includes shipping.
Paperback also available on Amazon *not handmade*.

This comic details a father’s struggle with the demands of raising his little girl. In a heartwarming sketched style, Roselló candidly retells his own experiences and lessons learned on the importance of patience, love, and family.

Sweet Publications, 2019
$15.00 donation Chapbook. Price includes shipping.

This broadside is created in conjunction with Print St Pete (http://www.printstpete.org/), a community letterpress located in St Pete, Florida. In McKayla Conahan’s poem “1943,” winner of the inaugural Sweet Poetry Contest, we see how the ghosts of history never leave us.

—Katherine Riegel

This pamphlet-style prose piece is an excellent teaching tool for explaining hermit crab essays. Using the guise of a medical pamphlet, Jepsen details her own experience with jaw wiring as a treatment for a broken jaw. Each section title and formatting detail alludes to a brochure one might find in a waiting room—but the content takes readers down a different path. Please contact admin@sweetlit.com for classroom discount orders.

Sweet Publications, 2019
Free, including shipping, with any donation of $5 or greater.

Sweet is pleased to announce that remaining copies of our inaugural 2017 Flash Nonfiction Contest winning chapbook are now available for purchase. from the Foreword: Laughlin’s work in these essays covers ground related to loss, to the beauty and bare truth of it, and to how our sense of place accommodates that beauty and bare truth. All three of these selections reflect on the dryland wheat farm of Laughlin’s youth, its austerity and dangers, and her own desire to hold it, to keep this home close, while acknowledging that impossibility. With language as stark as the land itself, and in the presence of a writer who meditates and reflects and discovers, we get an opening—a consciousness—that invites us to meditate and reflect and discover alongside, that sketches this place in the small, meaningful strokes of the short form.

—K.C. Wolfe

In Rules for Loving Right, Brian Baumgart practices misdirection in that understated way unique to the upper Midwest. Winter, Minnesota isn’t the name of an actual small town but it could be, and the speaker of these poems could be from there, where cold makes everything clearer than we really want it to be. But as blunt as these poems are about death and love and the body, they’re also blunt about the self—messy and afraid and snotty and made up of laughable parts. There’s mockery here, of others and of the self, but it’s not aggressive, just honest. And just when we think we know something, we learn, along with the speaker, how little we know. “If there’s one thing I’ve found, it’s that/it’s not cool for a man to love/cats.” Yeah, right. Or is the fear here really that “it’s not cool for a man to love”? In these poems, we get a mother’s love in the stitches she makes to reconnect her child’s skin after childhood accidents and a father’s love in the way he fears while his boy is ice-skating. Love is freezing and burning, it’s aging and animal. Though these poems sometimes offer snarky one-liners, a hand to pull you up off the ice, in the end they want you to feel it all, the sharp edges of living, the ones that hurt you enough to make sure you’re awake.

—Katherine Riegel

Jill McCabe Johnson’s lyric essay, “Borderlines” dives into memory and water. In poetic prose, Johnson fragments a moment in her life, seeking to understand and uncover the innocence of childhood and the dark shadows that ever follow.

Sweet Publications, 2016
$8.00 donation Handmade chapbook. Price includes shipping.

Lady in Ink is a mystery, the kind that everyone is trying to solve every minute of their lives: “Why did I do that? Why in God’s name did I do that?” When she turned 18, even before she lost her virginity, Stephens got a tattoo. A big one. Now, a decade later, she wonders why. And while she never pins down the culprit exactly, in this comics essay Lady in Ink Stephens goes on a joyous romp through her own brain, finding nineteenth century British prostitutes, Joan of Arc, and Kiera Knightly along the way.

Sweet Publications, 2015
eBook available from Amazon

Hold all the poems Sweet published in its first five years of existence in your hands at once! Nearly 100 poets here, including Nin Andrews, Sarah Browning, Oliver de la Paz, Megan Gannon, Kelle Groom, Michael Hettich, Luisa A. Igloria, W. Todd Kaneko, Stephen Kuusisto, Laura McCullough, Liz Robbins, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Tim Seibles, Maggie Smith, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Jeffrey Thomson, Terri Witek, and more. “We hope you feel about this anthology the way I felt when, at a fancy buffet, I stumbled into the dessert room.”

– from the introduction by Katherine Riegel

“Donna Steiner’s ink on paper is exquisite. Whether she is writing about wind, sleepless nights, or an unknown caller, she notes nuances and connections most of us miss. Her essay, ‘Sleeping with Alcohol’ is unforgettable for its honesty and emotional risks. Like all of the essays in this collection, it surprises us, makes us look look look again, makes the world new.”

– Beth Alvarado, author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir

“Amy Monticello’s short vignettes about her family and her father’s bar are wonderful…Her characters are so human, her clear-eyed romanticism and lovely prose so compelling that Close Quarters is hard to put down.”

– Rebecca Barry, author of Later, at the Bar

“In The Witch’s Index Megan Gannon reminds us how a poem, whatever its subject, is ultimately a kind of incantation. Original in intent, often startling in execution, through all their inventive twists and turns of thought and feeling, her poems never forget their loyalty to language itself, its magic-anchored possibilities. At once considered and spontaneous, able to fill restricted forms with unexpected feelings and achieve effects at once literary and personal, her imagination remains alive to those edges of being where reason and non-reason play together. As a poet who ‘swallows the world’ while acknowledging the vulnerable nature of flesh and blood, she achieves—in a manner both lyrical and tough-minded—her own ‘kind of grace.'”
– Eamon Grennan, author of Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems

“Spells and incantations were never so personal and so deftly woven from voices and images as in the poems of Megan Gannon. They bring out the secrets hidden in ordinary speech, which cease to be ordinary when the poet opens the door for us to hear them.”

- Nancy Willard, author of The Sea at Truro