We here at Philly Poetry Chapbook Review love poetry, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. We have a hunch that our readers do, too. Every Tuesday, we publish an update about what full-length poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Bramble, Susan Stewart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle that comes with living in time and searching beyond appearances. The rough thicket presents impediments, yet it also bears fruit and delicate flowers.
With Bramble, Susan Stewart has composed a book of many forms, including satires, elegies, meditations, and songs. Bramble is also an exploration of the act of making such forms. The book’s three sections—“Mirror,” “Briar,” and “Channel”—link lyric time to our lives as they are situated in history and nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.
Susan Stewart is a poet, critic, and translator. Her previous books of poetry include Columbarium, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cinder: New and Selected Poems. A MacArthur Fellow and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she is also a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent prose books are Poetry’s Nature and The Ruins Lesson. She lives in Philadelphia.
Full-Time Mammal, Rennie Ament
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Full-Time Mammal, perception becomes both subject and site of excavation. Rennie Ament wrestles with what it means to be awake and aware in a disorienting world. How are you supposed to know what you don’t know? As ancient defense mechanisms fail, the brain must be retrained, and poetry becomes a divination tool, a game, a portal, a potential weapon, a way through fog. This collection feels its way through the failure of imagination at the heart of preordained systems, turning to the natural world not for refuge, but reinvention.
In Full-Time Mammal, perception becomes both subject and site of excavation. Rennie Ament wrestles with what it means to be awake and aware in a disorienting world. How are you supposed to know what you don’t know? As ancient defense mechanisms fail, the brain must be retrained, and poetry becomes a divination tool, a game, a portal, a potential weapon, a way through fog.
Survival requires becoming a poet-cum-scientist. Drool becomes data. Ants carry thoughts to rot beneath earth. Animals, plants, and objects are not symbols but companionate presences. This collection feels its way through the failure of imagination at the heart of preordained systems, turning to the natural world not for refuge, but reinvention.
Rennie Ament is author of Mechanical Bull. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Cleveland Review of Books, and Washington Square Review. She lives in Owls Head, Maine.
The Committee of Men, James Ciano
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
James Ciano’s debut collection, The Committee of Men, explores the cycles of violence men inflict on one another and themselves, examining how silence, shame, and inherited expectations shape masculine identity. Rooted in the speaker’s experience as a college athlete from a family of athletes—including a father who is a high school football coach—these poems confront the emotional weight of tradition and the often-unspoken struggles of male intimacy, mental illness, and familial pressure.
Through sharp lyricism and emotional honesty, Ciano delves into themes of belonging and exile, accountability and forgiveness, and the quiet damage done by historically unexamined masculinity, asking what it means to break these generational cycles without severing connection, and how healing might emerge in places where vulnerability is discouraged or denied. The result is a collection that is both unflinching and deeply humane—an urgent, resonant debut that refuses to look away.
James Ciano holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. He has received scholarships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers, and his recent poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review. His reviews and writings on poetry have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Under Editor David St. John, he is an Associate Editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf, 2026). He is the 2025-2027 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
To Compare, Xuela Zhang
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A bracing and variegated debut, Xuela Zhang’s To Compare inhabits the fraught condition of living in and through translation in the age of globalization, social media, and the Chinese-American neo-Cold War. In To Compare, Zhang navigates the quagmire of transnational life, where one is always both here and away. “Has language/passed you by/like a curvy city/or shielded/and isolated you,/an illuminated vehicle/against the flooding/tenors of light?” Zhang writes in To Compare, reflecting on the nature of translation—both linguistic and otherwise— as a way of life. Disjunctive, alluring, To Compare poetically represents our contemporary age.
Born and raised in China, Xuela Zhang writes in English and Chinese. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Gulf Coast, Bennington Review, PROTOTYPE, and 诗刊Shikan, among others. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.
SUBTEXT, Nicole Raziya Fong
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
SUBTEXT refracts the language of identity formation. It collages the echoes of diasporic and colonial histories through poetry, drama, autobiography, and archival uncovering. Divided into four parts, SUBTEXT peers into the imperceptible psychic strata created by intergenerational trauma, confronting the challenge of finding one’s place in a sensorium of concealed realities and obscured memories. Dwelling in the bubbling froth of dreamwork, these poems take a multifaceted approach to questions of diaspora and selfhood, incorporating visual and textual elements that dialogue with one another and ask readers to negotiate the unsteady shoals of identity and history.
Nicole Raziya Fong (they/them) is the author of Я (forthcoming, Hiding Press), ORACULE (2021, Talonbooks), PERFACT (2019, Talonbooks), and other works. Their work seeks to delimit and reconstruct immaterial ampoules of psychic experience, coaxing the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique. Writing appears in literary journals including The Capilano Review, carte blanche, Social Text, and The Volta. Their work has been translated, featured on the CBC, and long-listed for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. They live in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, Québec, Canada.
The Divination of Salmon, Vivian Faith Prescott
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
As these poems shimmer, weave, and flow on the page, they capture the rhythms of rural island life and the changes wrought by climate crisis. Salmon are not just sustenance but identity, and as the environment shifts, so does the lifeweb that binds communities to the fish they depend on. Both warning and wonder, the collection honors ancestral knowledge while imagining a future where resilience and connection endure.
Vivian Faith Prescott (she/her) is a bi writer, born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska. Her children and grandchildren are Ravens and belong to the T’akdeintaan clan from GlacierBay. She was adopted into that clan and is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi. Prescott is the author of thirteen books and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a MA in Cross Cultural Studies: Indigenous Knowledge Systems from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She lives and writes as a climate witness in Lingit Aaní at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’héenKwáan.
Tread Upon, Christopher Kondrich
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
Bold, incisive, and wholly original, Christopher Kondrich’s Tread Upon explores the social, political, religious, and economic drivers behind the chronic devaluation of the living world. In this book-length sequence, in which each section unravels a word or phrase of the prefatory poem, Tread Upon sprawls from suburbia to the Southern Ocean, from the Cape Fear River to the phones in our hands. Kondrich juxtaposes the intimate with the epic, integrating climate research and reporting to dismantle narratives of anthropocentrism and our individual responsibility amid corporate misinformation. What is the price of our (in)actions and who must pay the cost? In this world where “even one blade is a place,” the sequence reveals that the violence done to the living world is violence done to ourselves.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of three books of poetry, including Tread Upon (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press) and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His poems have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, and have been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. He is currently Visiting Poet in Residence in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Maryland. Coeditor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives in University Park, Maryland, with his family.
Save Your Prayers – Send Money, Jónína Kirton
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
Save Your Prayers – Send Money boldly takes on the wellness industry. Kirton delves into disability politics through the lived experience of a seventy-year-old Métis woman and recovering New Ager. A hybrid collection that moves fluidly between prose and poetry, Save Your Prayers – Send Money weaves intergenerational trauma and its impact on health through the daily realities of chronic pain and illness. These poems explore where healing might lie and how a peace might be found whether we heal or not. The weft supporting them all is the importance of belonging, of blood memory and cellular memory reaching back to our earliest Ancestors.
Jónína Kirton, an Icelandic and Red River Métis poet, was born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Treaty 1, the Traditional Lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis. One of the co-founders of Indigenous Brilliance, she currently lives in New Westminster BC, the stolen land of the Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. Jónína graduated from the SFU Writer’s Studio in 2007 and since that time has published three books with Talonbooks. She was sixty-one when she received the 2016 Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for an Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category. Her second collection of poetry, An Honest Woman, was a finalist in the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
Les Portes, Meredith Nnoka
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Unfolding in three movements—Le Début, Le Passé, and Le Présent—all of which rupture conventional domestic abuse narratives, and drawing heavily from zuihitsu, ekphrasis, erasure, and found forms to mirror the fractured experience of living through and after harm, these poems serve as radical meditations on the power to reflect as resistance. A queer woman caught in an abusive marriage begins to reimagine justice not as punishment but as something restorative, collective, and deeply non-carceral.
In her debut book, Nnoka poses the question that propels the collection: “Where is the path forward / that ensures no recurrence?” Rather than gesture toward resolution, Les Portes dwells inside this question, and what emerges is not consolation but an immense reckoning.
Meredith Nnoka is a Chicago-based poet, teacher, and prison abolitionist. She is the author of the chapbooks I Could Never Be Your Woman (O, Miami, 2023) and A Hunger Called Music: A Verse History of Black Music (C&R Press, 2016). Nnoka holds a BA from Smith College and an MA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, both in Africana studies. She teaches poetry in carceral facilities and has received fellowships from Illinois Humanities, Lambda Literary, and the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, her poems have appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
The Synesthete’s Rainbow: Poetry in the Colors of Love, Nisha Srinivasa
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Synesthete’s Rainbow is a captivating poetry novella that paints the story of a toxic situationship through the vibrant lens of synesthesia. It intertwines sensory crossover and emotional depth as the protagonist, the Synesthete, names the colors of her love—all of which fall within a symbolic rainbow that defies nature. As the Synesthete journeys across this messy, fragmented, chaotic, and heart-wrenching rainbow, she confronts both the antagonist and herself in her plight of unrequited longing, and ultimately arrives at a burgeoning sense of self.
Perfect for readers drawn to short, metaphor-rich poetry and evocative tales of transformation, The Synesthete’s Rainbow illuminates the intricacies of human connection and the beauty of finding oneself on the other side of emotional storms.
Nisha Srinivasa is a writer, educator, and lover of the arts. Writing has always been her medium of self-expression, a way to explore and articulate the complexities of love, identity, and transformation. Beyond her own creative work, she is passionate about helping others—especially her students—find and share their voices through writing. She earned her bachelor’s degree in French and linguistics from UC Berkeley before pursuing her master’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she specialized in human development. Nisha currently resides in Oakland, California.
Down Along Highway 90, Benjamin B. White
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
These three separate collections of poems – Conley Bottom: A Poemoir, Mill Springs, and Monticello – form a triadic reflection of events that highlight a relationship with South Central Kentucky. Down Along Highway 90 goes back to Wayne County to gather the meaning of growing up in a transformative time when no one expected anyone to transform. In Conley Bottom: A Poemoir, the reader is taken back on excursions to Lake Cumberland where locals gathered with styrofoam coolers and blow-up floatables to escape the summer heat, (but couldn’ t escape Ohio vacationers!). Mill Springs examines the historical events of a place and links the residual impacts of the past to a present family’ s lives – as the future waits. And Monticello captures the progression of a town that never expected to grow, change, or lose its identity even though every town knows better. These three collected collections take the reader on a trip through history, meaning, and insights into what it meant to grow up Down Along Highway 90.
When Ben White was serving his 22-year military career in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Coast Guard, and then again when he was earning his MFA from the University of Tampa, he thought he was a poet. Silly Ben – despite his books earning some recognition, he is not a poet. He is a witness. What he writes is testimony.
Extinction Song, John James
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Extinction Song begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive to the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, Extinction Song unwinds the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two previous chapbooks, Winter, Glossolalia and Chthonic, winner of the CutBank Chapbook Prize. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Best American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Load Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
UnRavel, Marjorie Stein
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In an age when we get lost in the particulars, UnRavel boldly embraces a cosmic perspective. It spans vast stretches of time and space with precise, elegant language and quick, playful intelligence, reveling in the uncertainty of knowing where we are and where we’ re headed. Finally, it conjures in us a sense of adventure and awe in our lostness.
Many decades ago, Marjorie Stein’s first published poem was printed on a placard and displayed on a Kalamazoo Metro Transit bus in Kalamazoo, Michigan— an auspicious beginning. Marjorie’ s first book, An Atlas of Lost Causes, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 2011. Another poetry project, In the Hinges of the World, was shortlisted for the Lost Horse Press 2020 Idaho Prize for Poetry. Marjorie lives in Northern California, where she is privileged to spend time playing with words.
Staff Picks for Invertebrates, Zoe Dickinson
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Welcome to Russell Books: an indie bookstore on an island in the Pacific Ocean, where anemones dispense life advice and staff recommend books to mollusks. Staff Picks for Invertebrates, inspired by the poet’s experiences over the last decade working in a large bookstore, is a love letter to books, and to people who love books. In these poems, divisions between human and non-human fall away. Staff and customers, swallows and starfish, the store itself and the books that live inside: all are part of the same family and dwell in the same fragile, radiant world.
Zoe Dickinson lives on the unceded lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on Vancouver Island, where she is a manager at Russell Books and Artistic Director emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.
A Nectary of Questions, Steven Nightingale
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
This book is an exploration in revelry, with hope, on the good ground of our shared innocence: pages of questions—offbeat, puzzled, affectionate, necessary—all composed in the knowledge that only one person in all the world can answer them: you
Steven Nightingale is the author of twelve books: two novels, six books of sonnets, a long essay about Granada, Spain, a book of short fiction, a series of essays about the Sierra Nevada, and most recently, a book of haiku. He is a graduate of Stanford University and divides his time between his beloved home state of Nevada, Morocco, and Europe.
Lustrous Promises: 24 Odes, Steven Nightingale
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
The ode has no dictated rhyme or meter. It comes as pure life, ready to be given a form, a name, an art, velocity and vision, wings. Odes come ready for creation, like all of us. The maker of verse can count on this visitation of life. We listen and give thanks. From the commonwealth of experience we choose a subject that, with mischief, would join us irresistibly for a venture deep into the original dream of language: a dream that language is a source of light. Here you have in your hands a most promiscuous range of odes: about storms, cities, keys, Bactrian camels, laughter, rivers, children, jasmine … Reader, they are for you. They are what we know and share. We know we can learn and love because we walk together upon an earth that is a homeland of lustrous promises.
Steven Nightingale is the author of twelve books: two novels, six books of sonnets, a long essay about Granada, Spain, a book of short fiction, a series of essays about the Sierra Nevada, and most recently, a book of haiku. He is a graduate of Stanford University and divides his time between his beloved home state of Nevada, Morocco, and Europe.
Auditioning the Routine, Daniel Morris
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Auditioning the Routine is well-titled: canny, meta, ludic, with Morris both performer (of many routines) and watcher in the wings. The reader settles in to be critic— until you begin to see yourself onscreen too, chest-deep in poetry, politics, and pop culture, clicking through the remote.” —Mairead Byrne
Daniel Morris is a Professor of English at Purdue University, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, an M.A. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, and a B.A. in English from Northwestern University. His academic appointments include Professor of English at Purdue University from 2006 to the present, and he has also served as Professor of English and Associate Head at Purdue University from 2005 to 2006.
The Unraveling, Wyn Cooper
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
Sometimes whimsical, sometimes bereft, but always honest, these poems are compressed, language-centered testaments to the difficulties of life in our time, not just here in the U.S. but wherever “the weathervane spins in uneasy wind.” These poems traverse the world, from Boston to Mississippi, from Scotland to France to Tuscany and beyond, to “distant places no planes fly to.”
There’s an urgency to these poems, not only in how they depict both inner and outer worlds, but in how they’re constructed—not a word is wasted, and the most urgent of these lyrics appear to rush across and down the page, their lines enjambed, their interior rhymes almost riddles, as if by rhyming they might find answers in repetition. Many of the poems are centered on human relationships both distant and close, on romantic love and how it can unexpectedly unravel, “the smell of your perfume still in the air.”
In the end, the real center of these poems is emotional truth, as it applies to individuals and to the population at large, and how that truth can make or break us. There’s darkness here—how could there not be on a planet dissolving before our eyes—but there’s also hope that humans can come together again to piece together the broken world.
Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry prior to The Unraveling, as well as a novel, Way Out West. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Many of his poems have been turned into songs, including by Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Vermont.
The Book of Visits, Dinko Telecan
Publisher: Sandorf Passage
Publication Date: April 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
Hard to categorize, impossible to forget, Dinko Telecan’s The Book of Visits engages with the world apace with the comings and goings of nature, those we love, and those we will never know. In the smallest of details—from the blooming of flowers to the angles of buildings and fleeting glances between two people—Telecan’s work illuminates the universal elements of existence in fresh and unforgettable ways.
Dinko Telecan was born in 1974 in Zagreb, Croatia. Since 1999, he has been writing poetry, prose, and essays, as well as translating from English, Spanish, Chinese, and Slovenian. He has published seven books of poems, including Knjiga posjeta (The Book of Visits, 2023); the metaphysical study Freedom and Time (2003); the travelogues Lotus, Dust and Poppy (2008), Asian Suite (2015), and Three Distances (2025); the book of essays The Desert (2009) and the novel Deserter (2013).
Don’t see a poetry title published between 4/28 and 5/4 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”