The prose chapbook is a strange thing. Something broader in scope than a story in a magazine and less encompassing than a collection of stories, it engagingly pressurizes the thoughtful writer and the publishing press.

Will the fiction chapbook be a focused inquiry into a writer’s project and make the writer more circumspect about things like argument, or will it encourage prose the writer to self-consciously select works that make explicit a connection too diffuse to see when spread over  a longer manuscript?

The relative scarcity of prose chapbooks, and the boutique quality of those small presses that make them, means they are de facto artifacts. Attention to design and shape and all the rest play a part strange for a book of fiction. Or at least there is that potential.

The simple declarative sentences in Justin Maurer Don’t Take Your Life don’t announce his writing as much as they capture his experience: the writing ably carries the factual and emotional load of two kinds of stories here, travel memoirs and stories about his family. In both modes, his documentary style serves him well. Documentary reality seems distant from Magdalen Powers’ project in The Heart is Also a Furnace. I read the first seven or so fragments in this chap as dream-records, and they are up to the task of recreating the peculiar anxieties dreams can engender. I was more interested, though, in the chap’s later stories: still short and fragmentary, the greater formal awareness and shapeliness of the narratives make possible surprising ironies and effects. Both chaps are standard zine size, stapled and folded over sheets of eight-and-a- half-by-eleven paper and hark back to publisher Future Tense’s roots in the Portland music scene; not art objects per se, they are well-constructed, with colored endpapers.

Noemi Press’ chapbooks show a more self-conscious attention to idiosyncratic design. Diane George’s Disciplines, though roughly the same dimensions as the Future Tense chaps, has a full-bleed color cover like a 4AD album, with fold-over flaps containing bookish backmatter. The three stories collected here are preoccupied with the struggle to make meaning: in each, someone reconstructs a narrative from scraps and records, but there are always pieces missing and feared unrecoverable. The stories are written with care and precise language, but three stories might be as many as one need read at a time; as a chap, it’s a sustained interrogation into storytelling, but as a book length manuscript, it might be too much. Joanna Howard’s In the Colorless Round is off-sized, maybe nine inches square, and features illustrations by Rikki Ducornet. It might be ten brief chapters in the story of a man released from prison and the woman he left behind, or ten unrelated sequences, or a series of small clusters of narrative: it’s hard to tell. But each short chapter (the longest is a page) is written in an appealing pulpy language at once visceral and elusive. Ducornet’s ink and pastel portraits of the characters accentuate the stories: rumpled people recline in unwashed sheets, an older man’s features almost disappear into his face’s wrinkles and folds.

Publication and order info, etc at www.futuretensebooks.com and www.noemipress.org