Fork Apple Press is honored to publish Rivka Clifton’s A Feast of Small Proportions as the winner of The Slice Poetry Chapbook Contest (2026). A Feast of Small Proportions is a chapbook that interrogates how the body and mind are navigated and reclaimed, embodying themes of capitalist critique, death, consumption, and queerness. Clifton writes, ‘I had two shadows: one with and one without fangs. / Both wiggled their dark tongues inside my skull.’ With visceral use of the lyric, Clifton brings out these different permutations of shadow; what it means to occlude, be occluded, and to move within these modes. These poems are ones that find us in the dark parts of the ordinary, whether in a junk drawer, a yard, a dog leash, a faucet. These poems call us to redefine how we create.
