New Micro-Chapbooks from The Braag

Toucan by Jessica Boatright & The Annual Convention of Most Gentle and Virtuous Saints by Heather Chapman

Author

Kym Deyn
January 30, 2026

Hi folks,

I’m announcing the release of two of our handmade limited-run micro-chapbooks (try saying that five times fast!) today. We have poetry by Jessica Boatright and speculative fiction from Heather Chapman. These books are printed on 100gsm ivory paper with colour endpapers and a cover hand-stamped with the braag logo. You can find them here.

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My knowledge of rainforests
becomes encyclopedic, obsessive.
Home is built from fortified wire
a crisscross of curated branches

silicone leaves for easy cleaning.
I cage her on an elevated shelf,
worried otherwise she might dream
of the savanna’s hollowed trees.

 

Toucan is a single poem over nine pages, focussing on the appearance of a toucan into the lives of the speaker and her family. Surreal, tropical and grief-stricken, it looks to our complex relationships with the nonhuman and what happens when we have to say goodbye.

Jessica Boatright writes from a colourful house in Lincolnshire. Her words have recently been spotted in Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, Anthropocene and Poetry Bus, among others. In 2025 she placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize. Jessica is founder of “Raising The Fifth,” a creative digital space for writers without children.

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You are smoothing our pillows and smiling, your lovely axe standing blue-white out from your neck, caught at its ancient angle. I am thinking of cigarettes, how if I were to smoke them you would forgive me for it, and thereby delete the action – and I would thank you, vivid in cleanness even as my tongue buzzed with ash. 

The Annual Convention of Most Gentle and Virtuous Saints by Heather Chapman is a tale of two saints who died many centuries apart, and what happens when they are brought together. Densely lyric and speculative, Chapman's short story dives deepy into belief, trauma, and queerness.

Heather Chapman is a Durham University student. She was a 2023 Foyle Young Poet, was shortlisted for the 2024-5 Poetry Wales Award, and won the 2025 Hive Young Writers Competition. Her work is published in The Garlic Press, Bloodletter and Carmen et Error. Heather likes vampires, sestinas, and Edward II. She is on Instagram @heatherchapman4523.

 Check them out before they’re gone!