We here at Philly 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.
Continental Drift, Mai-Linh Hong
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the 2025 Trio Award winning poetry collection Continental Drift, Mai-Linh Hong honors and explores the geography that made and continues to shape her ancestors’ story, her own story, and the future story of her descendants. From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world.
Mai-Linh Hong is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry has received support from Voices of Our Nation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Born in Vietnam and raised in Virginia, she teaches literature at the University of California, Merced.
Daughter of Salt, Leila Farjami
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The speaker in Iranian-American poet Leila Farjami’s debut collection, Daughter of Salt, fiercely engages with and questions her mother, her father, ancestors, and herself. Patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and displacement swirl together, colored by the frustration at being expected to hold it all together for everyone else: A daughter made of salt-a dead sea to keep bodies afloat. Throughout, the daughter vacillates between rebellion, acceptance, and empathy, searching for healing from a childhood marked by war and violence. This collection moves the reader into remembrance and healing; the preservation and renewal of the self that occurs when grace is given to others and ourselves, when we allow ourselves to keep close the memories we share with those we have lost, and use them to build a foundation for a better future.
Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator and psychotherapist. She has received The Iowa Review Award in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award, and a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and was runner-up for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Her work has also been recognized as a finalist for prizes from Pleiades, Noemi Press, Perugia Press, and Southern Indiana Review. A Pushcart nominee, her poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, Swamp Pink, AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, The Mississippi Review, Southeast Review, Southern Indiana Review, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
Dear Dear, Reuben Gelley Newman
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Winner of the 2025 Louise Bogan Award, Reuben Gelley Newman’s Dear Dear renders queer love through the lens of music, art, nature, and politics. Drawing on artists from Bach to Mitski, Gelley Newman flirts with nostalgia but refuses to dwell in the past, asking how remembering our ancestors can reinvigorate our present struggles. In these poems, sound becomes the language of desire and self-expression: “I want to do better / I want to be the husband of the song.” Combining playful sonnets and earnest narratives, Dear Dear searches for belonging in our grief-stricken world.
Reuben Gelley Newman is a writer, librarian, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the chapbook Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), and his poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, Ninth Letter, Only Poems, and Salamander. A former intern at Copper Canyon Press, he has edited for The Adroit Journal and Couplet Poetry. His reviews have appeared in Adroit, The Brooklyn Rail, and diode. He holds an MS in Library and Information Science from the University at Buffalo and a BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College.
My Wise Little Ghost, Emily Hyland
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In My Wise Little Ghost, Hyland’s latent grief over her abortion from many years ago is activated by her sister’s pregnancy. Week by week, as she learns all about how her niece develops in utero, Hyland uncovers the texture of buried, complicated feelings from the impossible timing and circumstance of the end of her marriage that led to the choice she made. As she tracks memory and experience on deep psychedelic therapy journeys, the unexpected arises: “who-would’ve-been-Daisy” finds voice and narrates the story from somewhere off in the cosmos, in conversation with Hyland, as each speaker works through what happened and touches into who they are-and aren’t-as a result of Hyland’s abortion.
Emily Hyland‘s second collection of poetry, My Wise Little Ghost, is forthcoming with Trio House Press in July 2026. Her next collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, will be published with Cornerstone Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, in March 2027. Emily Hyland’s debut collection, Divorced Business Partners, was published by Howling Bird Press in October 2024. Hyland’s poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College.
Deer Medicine, Clare McCotter
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In the darkling hinterland we call memory loss the past is a strange country, the present a place of endlessly shifting sand. Here the old maps make no sense: the signposts are mercurial, the constellations in disarray, and the seas have all changed their names. To navigate such terrain one must become a maker of new maps. Approaching her subject cautiously and with compassion Clare McCotter’s third book of poems is a sustained meditation on the masterful, and many, navigations that people diagnosed with dementia and memory loss make on a daily basis. Drawing on McCotter’s personal experience as a daughter, cousin, and friend of people for whom the past and present shape-shifted sadly into something other, and on her years of work as mental health nurse, Deer Medicine explores ways of seeing, of hearing, of speaking to, of being with when the old landmarks have gone, when rock and tree and star have vanished and nothing that is was. An attempt to touch this place, Deer Medicine urges its readers to reach into that world rather than trying to drag its inhabitants into theirs. With such distances progress will be limited. But what is the alternative? Trying to orientate people to a reality no longer their own comes at too high a price. This price, the price of medicine, is a central concern in the collection. As the title suggests, these poems explore the cost and nature of the cure. In the landscapes McCotter creates medicine takes many forms: prayer, incantation, cobweb, wild thyme, a swiftlet tattoo, the hollow bone of a crow, a deer’s scent on pearls spun from the areola of the moon.
Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in many parts of the world. She won The British Haiku Award 2017, The British Tanka Award 2013 and The HIS Dóchas Ireland Haiku Award 2011 and 2010. Her work has been included in the prestigious Norton anthology – Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. Her longer poems have appeared in over thirty journals including Abridged, Crannóg, Cyphers, Envoi, The Honest Ulsterman, Iota, The Interpreter’s House, and The Stinging Fly. Awarded a Ph.D from the University of Ulster, she has also published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Belfast-born Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Clare was one of three writers featured in Measuring New Writers 1 (Dedalus Press). Black Horse Running, her first collection of haiku, tanka and haibun, was published in 2012 (Alba Publishing). Revenant is her first collection of longer poems. She has worked as a lecturer, a teacher of English, a psychiatric nurse and a full-time carer. Home is Kilrea, County Derry.
It Is Still Beautiful to Hear the Heart Beat, Margo Berdeshevsky
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Margo Berdeshevsky’s It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat seems to leap up and declare a rhythmic homage to the world, and one is called to gaze into one’s own eyes and see patterns of the past and future — life and death. And when the speaker says, ‘It was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it’ a unique voice pierces us.”
Yusef Komunyakaa, Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York City, lives and writes in Paris. Her Before The Drought, from Glass Lyre Press was finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poem, “Somewhere Everywhere” was selected and recorded by the Academy of American Poets for the poem-a-day. She is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Recipient of the 2022 Grand Prize for the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award for the poem “Ripening,” other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, River Heron Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar — One, Manoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken’s “Over Tea and Tears” for Ukraine, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, and Under the Radar. Find her reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, literary festivals, or somewhere new in the world. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online.
The Language Game, Timothy Emlyn-Jones
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Timothy Emlyn Jones draws on his experience as an artist in treating language as a medium, like paint, through which it represents itself as much as what is portrayed. He paints in words, takes a line of words for a walk, collages images, and invites the reader to cut up the pages and throw the pieces in the air to complete the last poem in this book. The sounds of Charlie Parker, Keith Jarrett, the playground and the bike sheds, the conversations of County Clare, as well as Welsh cynghanedd and Dylan Thomas may be heard in the syntax. His themes range from passion to politics, death, and the limits of meaning. Ghosts of modernist literature and art may be seen lingering in the company of his words.
Timothy Emlyn Jones discovered his impulse for poetry at art school in London and Paris. The interplay and tensions between visuality and language which he discovered at that time—the modality of the eye versus the modality of the tongue—have remained with him, informing and unifying his practice as an artist, poet, and educationist.
This Welsh-Irish poet has published with a number of small presses, including Arrowspire and Beau Geste, and his collection Proposition: Nowhere as Here and Now was published by Embryo Books in Glasgow. He is represented in four anthologies: Grandchildren of Albion, ed. Michael Horovitz, New Departures; “the GCSE reader,””Poems in Your Pocket,” ed. Mike Ferguson, Pearson Education,Longman; “Seeing In The Dark,” ed. Ian Breakwell, Serpents Tail; “and,” “Brought To Book,” ed. Ian Breakwell, Penguin.
The Sleep Thief, Stephen Murray
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“What I love about this bold, incantatory voice is that the rhythm, emphasis and statement acts, ultimately, as a portal onto the wild surrender of genuine seeking. Murray’s fierce courage and earnest vulnerability are essential tools and consolations in this wild century.”
Tracy K. Smith
Stephen Murray is an award winning poet and the founder of Inspireland. He has published two collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry to widespread critical acclaim. He is regarded as Ireland’s leading poetry workshop provider for young people and has delivered workshops to over 50,000 young people in Ireland. His work has featured on Nationwide, RTE TwoTube, TV3, Arena, BBC 2, The Irish Times, the Independent and Hot Press.
Throat Full of Feathers, Lorna Shaughnessy
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“In Lorna Shaughnessy’s Throat Full of Feathers time refuses to move in straight lines. It dissolves, gathers, and returns in fragments—moments of real beauty refracted through memory. These poems are shards of light and shadow, of voices and their echoes that blur and merge, speaking of metamorphosis and the fragile architecture of remembrance. There is a rare brilliance in her fearless play with form—monologues, sonnets and free verse—vessels for many voices. This collection becomes an experiment in fracture and flow: a chorus of sisters, stories told and retold, weaving selves and family, and the vast sweep of history into song. Through the ache of change, language bends and reshapes itself; time advances with a quiet dignity, carrying the hum of what cannot be spoken.” -Elaine Feeney
Lorna Shaughnessy has published four poetry collections, Torching the Brown River, Witness Trees, Anchored and Lark Water (all with Salmon Poetry) and a chapbook, Song of the Forgotten Shulamite (Lapwing). In 2018, she was awarded an Artist’s Bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland. Her monologues based on the myth of Iphigenia, Sacrificial Wind, were staged in 2016 and 2017 and adapted for online showings in 2021. She lectures in Hispanic Studies in NUI Galway and translates Galician, Spanish and Latin American poetry, including two collections by Manuel Rivas, The Disappearance of Snow and The Mouth of the Earth (Shearsman Books). She is the Director of Crosswinds: Irish and Galician Poetry and Translation, a collaboration of poets and translators in Galicia and Ireland.
We Are An Archipelago, Erin Fornoff
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
We Are An Archipelago, an epic poem, tells the (somewhat true) story of ninety-nine year old Bill, who moves back to Ocracoke, the little island of his birth to live out the rest of his life. There, he meets Deena, a young pregnant woman fleeing a difficult past. Their gentle friendship sustains them through storm, birth, and trial as they remake a notion of family. Switching between perspectives, We Are An Archipelago is a moving story told in verse about the strangest of circumstances.
Erin Fornoff is an American-born, new Irish citizen from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Called a ‘story-telling poet’ and ‘as close to music as poetry gets,’ she has performed at hundreds of festivals and events across Ireland, the UK, and the USA, including twice at Glastonbury Festival and a national Irish and UK tour. She has featured on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, at Hozier and James Taylor concerts, and her poems have been included in Best New English and Irish Poets 2016. Her debut collection Hymn to the Reckless (Dedalus Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and named by The Millions as a ‘Must Read.’
What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems, Bertha Rogers
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Bertha Rogers’s captivating collection, What Want Brings: New and Selected Poems, is a celebration of love and nature and a testament to her extraordinary life. A meditation on loss, grief and tenderness, as well as a profound tribute to her late husband, it weaves memory and literature with dreams and her heartfelt love of animals in a rich tapestry spanning decades of poetry. At the heart of these deeply moving poems lies a quest to be fully alive, embedded in the alchemy of grace: ‘I wanted to be one, complete— / a manuscript illuminated.’” —Hélène Cardona, award-winning author of Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves
Bertha Rogers, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, is a poet, translator, visual artist, and master teaching artist. She is the founding director of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York’s Catskill Mountain Region.
to be and not to be, Philip Fried
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In to be and not to be, Philip Fried engages our chaotic times with compassion and humor, sharp wit and satiric flair. Untethered voices, espousing conspiracy theories and an array of other quack notions, swarm in cyberspace. Shakespeare’s Polonius writes his own soliloquy while characters from Macbeth escape from the play to roam our streets and prowl our social media. Lockdowns flatten our world, causing us to lose one or more dimensions. War, personified, claims to be misunderstood, and a ballad modeled on a famous François Villon poem laments the Sixth Extinction.
Philip Fried has published nine books of poetry, the most recent being to be and not to be (Salmon, 2026). He has published work in Poetry, Poet Lore, Plume, The Poetry Review, and The Warwick Review. In addition to writing poetry, he is the founding editor of The Manhattan Review (1980-present), an international poetry journal.
Sky Sailing, Tony Kitt
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
What a beautiful book this is! It’s just dizzying, amazing, and I love the style! The words literally jump off the page as I am reading. Never read anything like this before. Wonderful work! —Noelle Kocot, Author of Ascent of the Mothers
Tony Kitt is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. His family hails from County Mayo in the West of Ireland, as well as from Italy, Greece, and Ukraine. He has worked as a researcher, a music critic, a literary translator, a creative writing tutor, and a magazine editor. His poetry titles include Endurable Infinity (The University of Pittsburgh Press, USA, 2022). His chapbook called The Magic Phlute was published by SurVision Books, Ireland, in 2019. His poems appear in multiple magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Daily, The North, Cyphers, The Café Review, Plume, Matter, The Fortnightly Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The New Ulster, and Under the Radar. They have also been translated into Italian, Greek, Romanian, German, Ukrainian, Albanian, and Chinese. He edited the anthologies Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry (SurVision Books, 2023) and Invasion: Ukrainian Poems about the War (SurVision Books, 2022), and was the recipient of the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Prize and an Individual Artist Grant from Dun Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council.
Jewel Box, Toby Altman
Publisher: Essay Press
Publication Date: June 30, 2026
Format: Paperback
Jewel Box engages the buildings that the architect Louis Sullivan designed in the last years of his life. Though Sullivan is widely considered the father of modern architecture, he spent the last thirty years of his life struggling to find work: in part, because of his unwillingness to compromise with the Gilded Age capitalists who were his best clients and biggest supporters. In small towns across Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Sullivan tried to develop an architecture of democracy, an architectural practice that would restore American democracy to its utopian promise.
Jewel Box investigates both the accomplishment and the failures of Sullivan’s architecture. The book revives Sullivan’s design practice, recreating his ostentatious, ornate buildings as elaborate concrete poems that spill across the page. But, it also locates Sullivan’s architecture in a colonial landscape, documenting the way that Sullivan’s achievement relies on the genocidal erasure of native peoples—an erasure that Sullivan participated in, calling for an “indigenous” American architectural style, built by white architects.
Jewel Box is the second volume in a proposed trilogy about the midwest, its architecture, history, and infrastructure. The previous volume in the series, Discipline Park, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2023; the final volume, Prairie School, is currently in progress.
Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Michigan State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Residential College of the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/30 and 7/6 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.”
A Conversation with Abby Minor
“[A] long time ago I realized, and more or less accepted, that I would commune with most of my poet teachers and comrades via their work, not in person. And my work is how I talk to them.” Poet Abby Minor discusses her chapbook, Infinity Ballot, her Jewish-Appalachian heritage, and her convictions in this interview with new contributor, Julie Swarstad Johnson.