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.
Broken Houses, Chelsea Rathburn
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 29, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father’s placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.
At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three previous books of poetry, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in Poetry. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Macon, Georgia, and teaches at Mercer University. Since 2019, she has served as the poet laureate of Georgia.
The Boxer, Gabriele Tinti, David Graham (Tr), Nicholas Benson (Tr)
Publisher: Eris
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Format: Paperback
In The Boxer, Gabriele Tinti returns to the ancient bronze known as the Boxer at Rest, a figure seated, battered, unvanquished, and draws from it a sequence of poems as spare and unrelenting as the object itself. These are not elegies for victory, but meditations on endurance, on the dignity of damage, on the silence after violence and the long life of the defeated body.
Tinti’s lines are cut to the bone. Refusing ornament and consolation alike, they inhabit a world in which strength is indistinguishable from suffering, and survival itself becomes a form of defiance. Across these pages, antiquity is not revived but confronted, its beauty inseparable from brutality, its heroes stripped of myth and left with only their wounds.
This edition presents the poems in Italian and English, allowing the full weight and cadence of Tinti’s language to resonate across both. What emerges is a work of rare severity and clarity, a book that does not describe the boxer, but becomes him.
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian Poet whose work engages directly with classical antiquity, often composed for performance in museums and archaeological sites. His texts have been read by actors including Kevin Spacey, Willem Dafoe, and Abel Ferrara at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. His poetry is marked by its austerity, physicality, and sustained dialogue with ancient art.
David Graham is a translator working from Italian into English. He translates catalogues for art exhibitions and museums, including the Venice Biennale and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, and also works with poetry. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Europe in 1982. He lives in Venice.
Nicholas Benson is a translator working from Italian into English. His translations include Attilio Bertolucci’s Winter Journey; Aldo Palazzeschi’s The Arsonist, for which he received an NEA Translation Fellowship; and, with Elena Coda, Scipio Slataper’s My Karst and My City, which received the 2022 John Florio Prize from the Society of Authors (UK).
For You Who Are Being Obliterated: New & Selected Poems, Donna de la Perriere
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: July 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Haunted by history, a ghost dance…enacted with beauty and precision” (Maxine Chernoff) and characterized by “sound orchestration like Lorine Niedecker at her best” (Kevin Killian), For You Who Are Being Obliterated: New & Selected Poems draws from Donna de la Perriè re’s five previous collections of poetry and includes more than a dozen new poems that reveal “poetry’s essential miracle… vision awash in vision itself” (Donald Revell). In what has been called “the most necessary poetry we’ve had in a long, long time” (Gillian Conoley), de la Perriè re’s work navigates the landscape of gender and violence, familial and regional history, grief and mortality, and the intersection of the material world with the Eternal. “One urgent line at a time is drawn like a blood sample: here is a poet of enormous and visionary talent” (Jane Miller).
Donna de la Perrière is the author of five collections of poetry: three books — Works of Love & Terror (2019), Saint Erasure (2010), and True Crime (2009), all from Talisman House — as well as two chapbooks, Night Calendar (Omerta, 2018) and First Love (The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange Collection, 2013). She co-founded San Francisco’s Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series (2004-2019) and taught creative writing at San Francisco State University for twenty years.
fleurs, Friederike Mayröcker, Donna Stonecipher
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: July 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
Fleurs—flowers, flower petals—a title that might suggest a gentle world of blooming fields and soft breezes. But in the hands of Friederike Mayröcker, one of the greatest German-language poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this is a book of a very different kind. It is a wild, vivid journey into a rich, elemental landscape.
If you follow Mayröcker’s path, you find not a comfortable meadow but steep, stony ground—a place where her inimitable voice rings out in all its power and purity. Unsentimental and crystal clear, Mayröcker’s writing is driven by a single purpose: to create images of remarkable vividness in a language as free, bold, and fresh as if it were newly invented.
The final installment of Mayröcker’s trilogy, following études and cahier, fleurs is a book of memory and renewal, protest and revelation—a testimony to the enduring magic of writing itself.
Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) was among the most influential and decorated German-language poets of the postwar period. The recipient of numerous awards, including the renowned Georg Büchner Prize, during her lifetime, she published over eighty works, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books.
Donna Stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry and one of prose. She translated Ludwig Hohl’s Ascent and cotranslated Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat.
Be Water, Grace
Publisher: Anvil Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Be Water is a meditation on change — on what happens when life pulls you from the city’s constant current into quieter, slower waters. In these poems, water becomes both vessel and mirror, reflecting how we adapt, how we hold grief and joy at once, and how we learn, finally, to flow.
Grace is a Hong Kong-born settler, recovering marketer, and poet based in Ontario on the traditional and Treaty territory of the Anishinabek people. Her debut collection, The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak, was a Lambda Award finalist.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/28 and 8/4 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.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”