QUEER. CURIOUS. UNRULY: June at Unsolicited Press
June is here, which means Portland is pretending it has always loved the sun, every patio chair in the city is suddenly sacred, and readers are building their summer stacks like their emotional stability depends on it.
At Unsolicited Press, June also means Pride Month.
We are not here to slap a rainbow on capitalism and call it a day, though we really fucking love rainbows. We are a womxn-run, feminist, fiercely independent press publishing books that have never behaved nicely for the market. Our catalog is full of strange women, queer love, unruly families, ghosts, grief, sex, devotion, failures, tenderness, rage, longing, and people who refuse to make themselves smaller for someone else’s comfort.
So this month, our campaign is simple:
QUEER. CURIOUS. UNRULY.
Not as a seasonal costume, but as a reading practice, a publishing ethic, and a reminder that books can still be weird, intimate, politically alive, formally restless, funny, devastating, and a little feral around the edges.
And because we are a small press and not a glitter-funded empire, June is also a serious sales month for us. Direct orders keep our books in print. They help us pay authors. They help us move inventory. They help us keep publishing literary work that does not fit neatly into the machine.
Here is what we have planned.
72-Hour Backlist Push: Move the Damn Books
We’re not gonna lie: we need a serious infusion of capital. For the next three days, we are running a backlist sale because the shelves are full, the catalog is good, and these books deserve to be in the hands of readers.
Buy any two Unsolicited Press backlist titles and get a third book free.
Use code: DAMNBOOKS at checkout.
This is your moment to stock up, gift books, fill your nightstand, or finally grab the title you have been meaning to read for months. Direct orders are the backbone of a small press. When you order from us, you are not feeding the algorithm. You are helping keep independent literature alive in a real, material way.
Buy 2, get 1 free.
72 hours only.
Code: DAMNBOOKS
Portland Book Week: June 5-14
We are celebrating Portland Book Week with a poetry special and a small act of literary mischief. From June 5 through June 14, buy one poetry book and get another poetry book free.
Use code: PDXBOOKS
Because poetry is not dead. Poetry is where some of the sharpest, strangest, most necessary work is happening.
We will also be hiding 10 books across Portland. Think of it as a small press scavenger hunt. A love letter to Portland. A reason to look up from your phone and notice what is tucked on a bench, near a coffee shop, beside a tree, or waiting for the right reader to find it. Keep an eye on our social media for clues.
READ OUTSIDE: June 8-14
From June 8 through June 14, we want to see where you are reading. Take your book outside. Sit in the grass. Read on the porch. Bring a novel to the river. Take poetry to the park. Let your short story collection get a little sun. Post a photo of yourself reading outside and tag us: @unsolicitedp
One reader will win a free month of Small Press Big Mouth Book Club. Books belong in bedrooms, buses, backpacks, coffee shops, campsites, public parks, and anywhere else a person can steal twenty minutes back from the grind.
Summer Reading Starter Pack: June 15-21
From June 15 through June 21, we are helping you build your summer stack. Buy any stack of books over $50 and get 15% off.
Use code: SUMMER15
This is a good week to grab something haunted, something queer, something sharp, something tender, something strange, and something you can press into a friend’s hands later with the words: “No, seriously, you need to read this.”
June New Releases
June brings two new books to the Unsolicited Press catalog: one hybrid poetry collection built from memory, obsession, correspondence, and emotional residue, and one literary novel that moves through grief, secrecy, haunting, and the impossible persistence of love after loss.
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE by Mark Fleckenstein
Publication Date: June 16, 2026
Genre: Poetry / Hybrid
ISBN: 978-1-963115-83-3
Price: $19.95
WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: Letters Rescued from a Fire by Mark Fleckenstein is a fractured, obsessive, deeply intimate collection that moves through longing, memory, art, emotional collapse, and the impossible desire to reconstruct what has already vanished.
Part poetry collection, part epistolary artifact, part meditation on obsession and survival, the book assembles “left-handed correspondence” from a brief but life-altering exchange between two artists whose connection burns long after contact ends.
Across letters, commentary, prose fragments, and poems threaded through recurring symbols of red shoes, birds, mirrors, windows, photographs, and unfinished conversations, Fleckenstein interrogates what happens when memory becomes both sanctuary and wound.
This is a book about the conversations that continue long after silence takes over. It is about the limits of language, the instability of memory, and the strange, stubborn ways art tries to rescue meaning from what could not be saved.
ESTUARY by Josh Rank
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-963115-84-0
ESTUARY opens in the disorienting aftermath of loss: Megan Mostly nearly collapses when she finds her son, Lincoln, awake and watching television in the middle of the night, despite the fact that his funeral was only a week ago.
As if grief were not enough, Stephen Tremble appears at her door asking an impossible question: was Lincoln his son?
Pulled together by secrets, loss, and a child who refuses to stay gone, Megan and Stephen must confront their pasts where memory and longing converge: at the estuary between what was, what is, and what still refuses to let go.
June Book Club Pick: KISS & RELEASE by Anthony DiPietro
June’s Small Press Big Mouth Book Club pick is KISS & RELEASE by Anthony DiPietro, a queer poetry collection with speed, bite, and a pulse you can hear through the wall.
These poems move through nightlife, hookups, romance, grief, masculinity, and the emotional loop of ending up in the same place again. The book is formally playful and deeply voiced. It brags, confesses, panics, jokes, seduces, and then turns around and asks what intimacy costs when desire keeps wearing the same mask.
Small Press Big Mouth Book Club is for readers who want more than a book in the mail. Members get the monthly book, live author conversations, and the pleasure of reading outside the same exhausted bestseller machine.
If you have been waiting to join, June is a very good month to come in loud.
June Events
Mari Matthias at Annie Bloom’s Books
Thursday, June 18, 2026
7:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Annie Bloom’s Books
7834 SW Capitol Hwy
Portland, OR 97219
Annie Bloom’s Books welcomes Pacific Northwest author Mari Matthias for a reading from her new novel, Cleah’s Bequest. Cleah Lucky was a handful in life. In death, she is even worse. When her three estranged children gather for the reading of her will, they expect complications. They do not expect a master list of demands. Holiday gatherings. Approved menus. Required outfits. Designated games. A theme song. And a rotating custody schedule for her urn.
Thanks to a legally airtight trust, they cannot collect a cent unless they cooperate. As the siblings attempt to honor their mother’s absurd instructions, resentment builds, alliances shift, and their grip on patience stretches paper thin. Cleah’s Bequest is a sharp and heartfelt story about what we owe the people who raised us and the price of getting what we think we deserve.
ESTUARY Launch with Josh Rank
Saturday, June 27
1:00 PM
The Tardigrade’s Bookshelf
501 N. Richmond Street
Appleton, Wisconsin
Join Josh Rank for the official launch celebration of ESTUARY, a haunting literary novel about grief, memory, secrecy, and the impossible persistence of love after loss. When Megan Mostly discovers her son awake in the living room only one week after his funeral, the fragile architecture of her life begins to collapse. At the same time, Stephen Tremble returns to Atlanta carrying the wreckage of his own isolation, along with a diary that seems to know more about his past than he does. As strange encounters mount and buried truths surface, both are drawn toward a child who refuses to disappear quietly. ESTUARY is eerie, tender, and emotionally raw, a novel that lingers in the space between haunting and heartbreak. Come celebrate the launch, meet the author, and pick up a copy.
Announcing Our 2028 Authors
We are thrilled, terrified, delighted, caffeinated, and possibly overcommitted to announce the authors joining the Unsolicited Press list in 2028.
The curation is a combination of friends and family, authors we have worked with for years, and authors we are just now falling in love with. We have room for two more, and our publisher is hunting down the last two so we can have 28 for 2028.
Please welcome:
Eleanor Levine
Sandee Woodside
Joseph Allen Costa
T.K. Lee
Edee Lemonier
Amy Baskin
Elizabeth Jaeger
Alia Luria
Summer Stewart
Heather Sommerlad
Jennifer Nguyen
Anne Leigh Parrish
Scott L. Ferry
Elisa Carlsen
Khanh Ha
Monica Cardenas
Jackson Bliss
Anthony DiPietro
Alex Miller
Cameron Miller
Terry Tierney
Maryann McGuigan
Mari Matthias
Laura Read
Elizabeth Fyne
A Gee
This list is full of poets, fiction writers, essayists, risk-takers, formal weirdos, sentence obsessives, truth-tellers, and people who know literature is not supposed to behave like a product category. We cannot wait to bring these books into the world.
Read Unruly This June
June is full. Good.
We have new books, book club, author events, hidden books, outdoor reading, Pride Month, backlist deals, poetry discounts, and a 2028 list that already has us reaching for more coffee.
Read queer. Read curious. Read unruly.
Buy the books that keep independent literature alive.
And for the next 72 hours, go move the damn books.
Buy 2 backlist titles, get 1 free.
Code: DAMNBOOKS
Thank you for reading, ordering, showing up, tagging us, joining book club, attending events, and making room for books that were never designed to behave.
