We here at Philly Chapbook Review love poetry, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. 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.
Shit Hike, Callie Garnett
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
A walking poet, Callie Garnett often composes poems while out on a tramp, but this newlywed’s current hike brings about a dramatic change of scenery—from a media-centric city life to an unkempt plot of countryside that must, like her life itself, be husbanded. After the honeymoon that opens this book, the unspoken “what next?” begins to blare loudly. This turn of the plow could unearth motherhood but, in Garnett’s case, it turns up something else. Channeling this poet’s keen mind, churning with midlife’s thorniest dilemmas, Shit Hike traipses through wildly incongruous modes, turning on a dime between the pastoral and the peeving, acceptance and resistance, through both comedy and loss. The result is a thrilling journey into the thoughts and feelings of Garnett’s exploration through these new unpaved fields.
Callie Garnett (born 1983) is the author of the poetry collection Wings in Time (The Song Cave, 2021), a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and the chapbooks On Knowingness (The Song Cave, 2017) and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Ugly Duckling, 2015). She works as Editorial Director of Fiction and Memoir at Bloomsbury Publishing (US), and lives in Esopus, NY.
Decoding the Hill of Dead Kings, Alex Vartan Gubbins
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Alex Vartan Gubbins paints a stunning portrait of a life lived between his two homelands: Michigan and Armenia. Written primarily in English with some poems in Armenian, this collection combines elegy and lyric across prose and open forms to shed light on the conundrum of diaspora—feeling rooted here, there, and in neither place entirely. Crossing the boundaries of space and time, Gubbins probes and unsettles notions of legacy, family, diaspora, geopolitical borders, and narratives of power. The ebb and flow of sadness and longing, paralleled by unshakeable spirit, ultimately settles within these poems as hope and wonder at existing in the everyday.
Alex Vartan Gubbins teaches at the American University of Armenia. A native Chicagoan, he now splits his time between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Yerevan, Armenia. His poems can be found in And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017 and North American Review.
Small Sargasso Mountains / Pequeñas cordilleras de sargazo, Antonio Ochoa
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Starting with sargassum, a species of algae found on the ocean’s surface, and spiraling outwards Small Sargasso Mountains assembles language, memory, and matter in a current where the borders between poetry and prose, reading and writing, Spanish and English, experience and memory are eroded like a shoreline. Bringing together childhood memories, folklore, and contemporary world events, Antonio Ochoa seeks to erase boundaries between time and space as well as linguistic and cultural codes in an “oscillation between hemispheres.” The result is a piece of profound personal and aesthetic ambition, one whose modes—diaristic, poetic, philosophical—recall those of Frankétienne, W. G. Sebald, and Édouard Glissant.
Antonio Ochoa was born in Mexico City. He has published two books of poems, pulsos and El toro de Hiroshima. He is the editor of Selected Poems & Selected Essays of Eduardo Milán. He hosts the podcast Texts for Nothing: Conversations with Poets. He lives in Massachusetts.
Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Nebulas, Meghan Kemp-Gee positions these giant clouds of glowing space dust, often the ‘nursery’ where new stars and planets are born, in an interconnected web of lyric form. As dazzling masses of matter and energy, fleeting, exploding and collapsing, creating connection across incomprehensible distances, these poems use constellations and light-years to reconfigure how art, mortality, loss, death, and afterlives are miraculous echoes and patterns in a gorgeous, chaotic universe.
Included in this dazzling collection are an extraterrestrial fox who works at a gas station, meditations about living across from a hospital during the Omicron surge, weathering climate disasters in North Vancouver, strange deep-sea ecosystems, conversations with a space-god who may be Walt Whitman, and multiple retellings of a Zen koan about tigers and strawberries. Here, respiration and repetition – literally, verse – acts as an outstanding formal feature, a way of creating connections and shared breath across spacetime.
Meghan Kemp-Gee is an award-winning poet, teacher, and scriptwriter. She is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as four poetry chapbooks. She co-created the graphic novel One More Year, and co-edited the sports-comics anthology Come Out and Play. She holds degrees from Amherst College and Chapman University, and is now a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick, where her dissertation focuses on sports literature. She currently lives in North Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
I Was Bonnie and Clyde, Laura Kasischke
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Kasischke’s newest collection, every moment contains an infinity: the mundane in the monumental, and the monumental in the mundane. I Was Bonnie and Clyde illuminates small collisions between life and death, from “that last suitcase circling / its last loop / for all of eternity” to “the mole / hauled out of the ground / by the dog / to die in the sun.” Ghosts haunt and heighten these poems as they draw upon the independent weariness of women throughout history: Bonnie Parker, Lady Godiva, Amy Winehouse, a handbook’s unnamed perfect hostess. Lovingly self-effacing, Kasischke evokes vulnerability, disbelief, and tragedy with a quiet, conversational reverence. With wordplay and exclamation, lament and ironic humor, these poems invite as they reflect, reaching out to a forbidding world.
Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and currently living in Chelsea with her husband, Laura Kasischke is the author of twelve collections of poetry and nine novels. Space, in Chains (2011) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Where Now: New and Selected (2017) was longlisted for the National Book Award. Kasischke is the Theodore Roethke Distinguished Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, and she has received many honors for her works, including the Juniper Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and the Rilke Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Kasischke’s novels The Life Before Her Eyes, Suspicious River, and Be Mine have been adapted for film. Kasischke’s books have been widely translated and are particularly well-received in France.
The Dinner Party, Cat Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Cat Fitzpatrick delights in this post-pandemic follow-up to her debut verse novel of present-day manners, The Call-Out—
a trans community celebration of mores, gender theory, and rhyme.
The Dinner Party returns to the chaotic and adorable world of trans femme. The title piece begins… “The ‘Rona being now at last abated,” and continues with cameo portraits of the seven guests she plans to invite.
Cat Fitzpatrick’s debut novel, The Call-Out (Seven Stories Press, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Lambda Award for Transgender Fiction. She is the author of the poetry collection Glamourpuss (Topside Press, 2016), and the co-editor of the anthology Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers, which won the ALA Stonewall Award for Literature. Fitzpatrick is the first trans woman Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers University–Newark, and she also serves as the Editrix at LittlePuss Press. The Dinner Party (Seven Stories Press, 2026) is her second novel in verse.
Namanlagh, Tom Paulin
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his first collection for more than a decade, Tom Paulin revisits themes of place, occupation, conflict and legacy, primarily in the context of his native Northern Ireland. Stories and memories, even histories, are shown to be both frail and persistent, troubling and vital. There is a powerful austerity in play as he sets aside the rhetorical force and linguistic dazzle for which he is renowned, to speak simply of later life and the losses it brings: “if only some idea / could find its way / through enemy territory / then I’d at last begin / to look up at the sky.” As outward-looking as ever, he also includes here intimate and resonant versions from Brecht and Ronsard, and from the contemporary Palestinian poet, Walid Khazendar.
Tom Paulin grew up in Belfast and now lives in Oxford, where he is Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, University of Oxford. He has published six books of critical prose on topics including Thomas Hardy and William Hazlitt, several plays, two anthologies and ten collections of poetry. His New Selected Poems appeared in 2014.
Verbal Violence, Danielle LaFrance
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Verbal Violence unravels, dissects, and shreds the language of the professional managerial class. Critically straining the email thread, the Freedom of Information Request, and the white paper through an aesthetics of anger that appropriates their last gasps at relevancy, LaFrance registers the absurdities of a purposeless people “just doing their job.” Hacking up neoliberal doublespeak, ideological reproduction, and progressive-except-Palestine rhetoric, Verbal Violence spits it out time and time again, scheduling a meeting to verbalize the what and the who liberal democratic institutions systematically shut down. Verbal Violence confronts capitalism’s managerial style guide for saying nothing at all with the fiery and empathetic conscience of the managed, their cri de cœur cracking the straight-faced bureaucracy of our most banal communications.
Danielle LaFrance is a poet and information malprofessional. Their commitments revolve around questions of liberation, resistance, and pleasure. LaFrance is the author of species branding (Capilano University Editions, 2010), Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks, 2016), JUST LIKE I LIKE IT (Talonbooks, 2019), and #postdildo (Talonbooks, 2022); chapbooks include Tentacle Rasa (Asterion Books, 2021) and pink slip (Standard Ink & Copy, 2013). Their poetry and critical work have appeared in magazines and journals, both online and in print. LaFrance also co-created the reading and journal series About a Bicycle and currently collaborates on the ad infinitum intertextual sound project Yes, Sydo. They reside on still occupied and still unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands.
Sweep, David Abel
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: May 20, 2026
Format: Paperback
Sweep is not a long poem or a series of short poems but a log of practice, determined / to find a structure to inhabit to bits. The form’ s generosity lets the bits live, passes them along, unforeseeable, irregular, and ordinary. It tells us what it is as it goes: The Encyclopedia of Unfinished Business. But also, A library is a cemetery in which every grave has a voice, and can speak. In this openwork, isolate moments float in silence, cottonwood-fluff light, carried together by a wandering ground bass. Did I say silence? Made of words: no single poems but a noncount poetry, including even a certain unmodified noun. This notation can be laugh-out-loud funny— Big 12 defense a sieve? That’ s grudge talk.— or gently devastating— Everyone leads three simultaneous lives: / their hidden work, their death, and their disguise.— or both at once.
David Abel is a poet, editor, and interdisciplinary artist, and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon. With a group of friends he founded the Spare Room reading series in 2002, still going strong in its twenty-fourth year. The author of more than two dozen books, chapbooks, artist’ s books, and text objects, his most recent publications are a chapbook of poems, Equifinality, from Crane’s Bill Books in Albuquerque, NM; two books based on performance scores — XIV Eclipses and Selected Durations. An expanded bilingual book of the Eclipses is coming from Escandalar (Mexico).
The Undertaker’s Invoice, Ifor Thomas
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: May 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
Ifor Thomas is back! This poet has published eight books of poetry and one of prose, his writing has won prizes – the John Tripp prize for spoken poetry, The Welsh Prize in the Cardiff International poetry competition, British Airways travel writer of the year.
Ifor Thomas has published eight books of poetry and one of short stories. Body Beautiful was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year. He won the British Airways travel writer of the year and his short stories have been broadcast on the BBC. He has performed his poetry throughout the UK. He won the John Tripp Award for spoken poetry and won the Welsh Writer category in the Cardiff International Poetry competition. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies.
A Hard Frost, Judith Kerman
Publisher: Broadstone Books
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Judith Kerman returns with her twelfth collection of poetry, A Hard Frost, in which she confronts aging and disability with honesty, wit, and an undiminished creative force. Written from the lived experience of becoming moderately disabled later in life, the poems examine the physical limitations of an aging body while refusing narratives of decline. What emerges is resilience, humor, and a fierce attentiveness to the world.
With an imagistic and naturalistic voice, Kerman explores her developing relationship with the natural world—its beauty, its menace, and its capacity to ground a life under strain. A quiet, unconventional mysticism runs through the collection, in poems where perception, science, music, and history interact.
A Hard Frost affirms the emotional and imaginative vitality of old age, offering poems shaped by perspective, irony, and hard-won insight—and demonstrates that older women shouldn’t be underestimated or overlooked.
Judith Kerman is a poet and multi-artist (singer, performer, and crafter). She has published eleven previous books and chapbooks of poetry along with three books of translations. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in 1971 and Mayapple Press in 1978, which she continues to run today. For more than 25 years, she has coordinated annual writers’ retreats and online workshops. Kerman earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Buffalo.
JAWS [tiburón], Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza, Dora Prieto (tr), Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier (tr)
Publisher: Cardboard House Press
Publication Date: May 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
This award-winning poetry collection collapses the distance between sea and office, aquarium and classroom, factory and vacation resort, resumé and body under attack. JAWS is a book about water, breath, and suffocation, about work that disciplines the body, about survival under glass. Through (mis)translation, documentary fragments, and cinematic archive, these poems reveal how capital renders certain lives expendable, human and non-human alike. Fierce, darkly funny, and formally restless, JAWS insists on the shark not as monster, but as mirror… swimming, working, alive and curious about where meaning breaks down across languages, worlds, and personas… and what lurks in the waters between.
Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 1982) is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, including Polvo lugar, Datsun, Poesía morosa: Prositas de amor contra el SAT, and JAWS [tiburón] (winner of the Ignacio Manuel Altamirano National Poetry Prize). She is also co-author, with Atahualpa Espinosa Magaña, of the essay collection Poesía y desempleo. She has translated several children’s and young adult books from French, most notably Tengo 14 años y no es una buena noticia by Jo Witek. She was a member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in the discipline of poetry from 2019 to 2021. She is currently pursuing an Interinstitutional Doctorate in Art and Culture at the University of Guadalajara.
Mexican-Canadian poet and translator Dora Prieto writes from Ohlone land (Oakland, CA), where she is a 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with House of Anansi (April 2027), and she is a member of El Mashup Collective, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary artistic experiments. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Best New Poets 2025, Catapult, Hazlitt, the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, and elsewhere. She won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. She is an auntie, a dreamer, a thinker, and a cold ocean swimmer—despite a close encounter with a shark as a kid.
Born in Cuernavaca, Mexico ✿ city of eternal Spring ✿ and raised in el Distrito Federal, Daniela Rodríguez Chevalier writes and translates from unceded Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, BC). Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Volume and carte blanche. She is part of eclectic artist collectives mim and El Mashup, a programmer at the Vancouver Latin American Film Fest, and co-host of Vivaporú on CiTR 101.9FM. Foodie who shelves books and binds them too. Ocean child. She has felt the presence of a shark stirring nearby waters. Dani has two feisty gorgeous dachshunds, Xoco and Rol.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 5/19 and 5/25 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.”
A Conversation with John deSouza
“Language is a powerful tool and can do great harm both to ourselves and to those most close to us when used cruelly or selfishly.” Poet John deSouza discusses his chapbook, This Rough Magic, his creative process, and the influence of John Ashbery in this interview with editor Danielle McMahon.
Chapbook Poem: from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys
“…what interested me was the idea of a character who didn’t do what he was capable of, not because of external circumstances, but because of either a lack of will or a seemingly perverse one.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for May 2026, from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Love does not exist by Maria Giesbrecht
“This poem was inspired by a dream… I had this strange feeling when I woke up that it meant something more and started writing a poem to see if anything would reveal itself to me.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for May 2026, “Love does not exist” from A Little Feral by Maria Giesbrecht, along with a few words from the poet.
“After a loss in my family, I discovered one grieves for both the living who hide their pain and for the dead who sleep in silence.” Read two poems by Patricia Wallace, our third biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fox.”
May ’26: New Staff, New Calls, New(ish) Name
Editor Aiden Hunt provides information about changes to PCR’s name, format, and staff in this editor’s note, which also contains links to our Spring calls for submissions.
“I kept thinking about how easily adults learn to stop seeing what’s right in front of them, especially when they’re somewhere between one country and another, neither arriving nor leaving.” Read four poems by Nivara Lune, our fourth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Notes Toward an Elsewhere.”
The Lines of Landscape: on The Catastrophes by Marie Scarles
“Scarles’ choice of title points away from place, and toward the book’s deeper and more powerful offering: a changed way of seeing, one of the hallmarks of any successful poetics.” Read the full chapbook review by contributing editor, D.W. Baker.
“Every time I plucked a few of the little orange sun sugars to take inside, their garden smell lingered on my fingers. It was almost enough to just sit with that scent…” Read three poems by Kait Quinn, our fifth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Tomato.”
Chapbook Poem: Superbloom by Joyce Schmid
“That June, flowers bloomed everywhere in Northern California—as if to honor her, to celebrate her life. This poem is an attempt to accept the fact that she is really gone.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for June 2026, from Superbloom by Joyce Schmid, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Well by Robin Becker
“Allowing flickering sentiments and images to play against one another, I replicated one form of consciousness. A surprising aspect of the poem: the sudden appearance of figures of government.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for June 2026, “The Well” from Midsummer Count by Robin Becker, along with a few words from the poet.
“Like a lot of my poems, this one reaches toward something impossibly out of grasp. But … maybe that’s the power of a poem, to momentarily touch something out of our reach.” Read three poems by Scott Weaver, our sixth and final biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Annotating The Inferno.”