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.
If You Love That Lady, Maya C. Popa
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover
The stunning third collection from award-winning poet Maya C. Popa dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: the private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the charged silences that follow. Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the collection lingers in the rush of love and its fallout: “Happiness was no small thing, / but neither was its cost.” Delivered with piercing elegance and signature wit—“What a formidable excuse he was. / What a pair of borrowed eyes / with a side of Keats”—these poems remind us that our appetites, like poetry, depend on revelation and restraint alike.
Set in America, England, and Romania, these poems are part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica of remaking. If You Love That Lady explores the inventive, relentless drive of longing, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves.
Maya C. Popa is most recently the author of Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. She is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, an online community for writers. The poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she lives in New York City.
Lift Every Voice, Phillip B. Williams
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Captivating for both its grandeur and intimacy, Lift Every Voice explores the capacity for the past to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an indelible testament to the endurance of love. In virtuosic poems that are wise, musical, richly layered, and saturated with vivid imagery, Williams honors a mother “who knew seven ways to say bitch under her breath,” a grandma whose smile “reflects the world,” and wonders at “the impossible lift” of forgiveness. Lift Every Voice is a staggering tribute to personal and collective evolutions, a vital chorus that answers only to God, community, and the empowered self.
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the novel Ours and two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. Raised in Chicago, he currently teaches in the MFA in creative writing program at New York University and is founding faculty of the Randolph College Low-res MFA.
Going to the Moon, Sally Ashton
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
In 2022, poet Sally Ashton learned that one of her poems would be included in a time capsule to be sent to the Moon via Astrobotic’s 2024 Griffin/VIPER as part of the Lunar Codex project. For her, this event seemed like the high point in a life spent chasing the Moon, from a childhood inspired by the space race of the 1960s to an adulthood spent in contemplation and conversation with the sky. In Going to the Moon, Ashton marvels at the Moon’s powerful influence since the dawn of humanity—how we have, in our own ways, gone to the Moon, and what we have found. Contemplating lunar settlement in the light of history, culture, the rise of the space industry, and geopolitical conflict, Ashton shares her sense of wonder at the simple beauty of our unchanged Moon and reveals what is at stake in our contemporary attempts to colonize it.
Sally Ashton is Lecturer Emerita of English at San José State University. She is the author of several poetry books, including Listening to Mars and The Behaviour of Clocks.
Coffin Flowers, Bianca Casady
Publisher: La Barba Metafísica
Publication Date: July 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Coffin Flowers is a beautiful collection of darkly luminous incantations—mysterious, dreamlike, and uniquely musical. Bianca Casady is a real poet.” —Jim Jarmusch
A new book of poems by artist Bianca Casady.
If Only I’d Turn into Someone Else, Sanni Purhonen, Steve Kuusisto(Tr), Mika Suonpera (Tr)
Publisher: Nine Mile
Publication Date: July 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Sanni Purhonen’s poems deal with embodiment, feminism, disability rights, and taking on the social constructions of normalcy. If Only I’d Turn into Someone Else doesn’t offer stylized and easy outlets for the effects of ableism. There’s no post-humanist fix coming. Science has no idea how to save us. Purhonen gives us dark pictures on the water. They are true as Odysseus’s arrows.
Sanni Purhonen has published three poetry collections, as well as two poetic radio plays and a poetry video. Purhonen works as a literary critic, creative writing teacher, journalist, translator, and communications officer for the human rights organization, The Threshold Association. She lives in Finland.
Returns: Poems Selected and New, Kenny Fries
Publisher: Nine Mile
Publication Date: July 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
With his poems, essays, memoirs, journalism, and advocacy, Kenny Fries has been in the vanguard of disability literature for over forty years. From considerations of Darwin and social Darwinism to the flinty and dismissive corridors of American medicine, Fries shows us how disability, embodiment, queerness, curiosity, and contrarianism can push us toward hope. With Returns: Poems Selected and New, the power of his lyricism reminds us why poetry truly matters. This is an important book by a poet at the height of his craft.
Kenny Fries is the author of several books, including In the Province of the Gods, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He curated Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer, the first international exhibit on queer/disability history, activism, and culture at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. He is a Disability Futures Fellow of the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists.
Color of a Cougar, Jan Minich
Publisher: Broadstone Books
Publication Date: July 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poetry of Jan Minich in The Color of a Cougar takes us from Ohio (“the change of a season, / autumn in Ohio I haven’t seen / in twenty years, I had forgotten / how fragrant the trees are”) to the Utah canyonlands (“In here Sweetie and I are alone. / A jay is calling from the junipers / and the chipmunks / have been teasing her all evening”). These poems show us the loneliness, yet satisfaction, of solitude as an antidote for grief: “but I have these mountains, / this solitude that never waivers / and comforts me on cold nights.” That a life well lived may, in the end, be lived alone, and that self-reliance, especially in grief, can save the human spirit.
Jan Minich grew up near fields, ponds, and lakes in Ohio. He has an MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in American Literature and Poetry Writing from the University of Utah. He taught literature at College of Eastern Utah/Utah State University for many years and directed their Wilderness Studies Program. Always drawn to water and the outdoors, Jan summers in Bayfield, Wisconsin, where he cruises Lake Superior in a small boat, and in winter, hikes Utah’s canyons. He lives in Wellington, Utah, with his wife poet Nancy Takacs and their two dogs.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/14 and 7/20 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”