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.
We, Layli Long Soldier
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In We, Layli Long Soldier examines what it means to be in community, to be in relation with family, nation, history, and language. We is the first-person plural, the pronoun of inclusion in English. It is also Wé, the Lakota word meaning “blood”—what is shared and what is shed.
In this ingenious and insightful arrangement of poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color, Long Soldier creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge. The 184 X’s signed to a broken treaty, the fringes of a winged dress braided in honor of children lost to Indian boarding schools, and intricate Lakota star quilts become shapes and patterns that convey collective kinship, memory, and grievance. “From this day forward,” Long Soldier writes, “I declare a war of language.”
We is a visionary new collection by a writer and artist whose unfolding works are among the most groundbreaking of our time.
Layli Long Soldier is a poet, artist, and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She is the author of WHEREAS, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lion, Tina Chang
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover
In Lion, Tina Chang mines personal and collective memory to explore safety and danger, visibility and invisibility as an Asian American woman. Throughout the collection, Chang responds to multi-hyphenate women artists, including Haena Yoo, H?ng-Ân Truong, Astria Suparak, and a collective whose work paid tribute to the life of Christina Yuna Lee, a young woman who was killed during the height of anti-Asian hate crimes. Responding to art across various media—text, illustration, painting, video, and sculpture—Lion sparks cross-disciplinary dialogue on Asian American perspectives, surveillance, and the myth of the model minority.
As the aftermath of the pandemic is examined, so too are the structures of bias, racism, and violence that continue. The collection’s title explores the word’s cultural history, composite Chinese iconography, and lion-centered explorations of strength and mastery. Lion traverses the closeness and distance between the racialized self the world views and the perceived self who endures and survives.
Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, Half-Lit Houses, and coeditor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She was the first female poet laureate of Brooklyn and is the director of creative writing at Binghamton University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Return Signal, TR Brady
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Return Signal is transmission. Is diversion as determination. Is obsession as communication. Transness and desire are catalogued in daydreams and real dreams and distraction. Testosterone daydreams and phantoms reimagine queer obsession in elegies and lyric sequences. Desire for self-determination becomes data for self-surveillance. Months pass in the wrong order. Second selves are passed off as twins, dogs, Blake’s Urizen, wannabe bodybuilders, stars, mirrors, teenagers, and the biblical Adam. Grief and desire act as stand-ins for each other, measured through fantasy repetition. This time, this. And again.
TR Brady is a writer, fiber artist, and editor from Arkansas. He is the co-founder/co-editor of Afternoon Visitor, an online journal of poetry. TR’s writing has appeared in Poetry Daily, Tin House, Bennington Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. TR holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Maytag Fellowship, a Teaching/Writing Fellowship, and a third-year fellowship to teach undergraduate poetry writing. TR teaches at The University of Alabama.
Shoreline Devotional, Casey L. Ford
Publisher: Woodhall Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Shoreline Devotional contains motifs of sun, earth, and unbridled nature in poems about growing up and living in Southeast Texas; poems about vulnerable female bodies, decades of accumulated grief after deaths and hurricanes and pandemics, and the conflicts at the base of human existence and experience — the longing for religion and also its insufficiencies, the “seasoned hymn of the gulf” crashing upon its littered and polluted beaches, greed next to love, paradise next to hell, and the miracles of music alongside the enshrined skulls of ancestors.
Casey L. Ford walks around looking for ways to seem weightless in a body too big for the world. Born in a very good year at St. Mary’s Hospital in Port Arthur, she spends much of her free time on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast– a good place for making complicated art. Ford recently earned the MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University and her first Pushcart Prize nomination from Last Stanza Poetry Journal. Her poetry has appeared in Delta Poetry Review, Ocotillo Review, Concho River Review, Texas Poetry Assignment, and Amarillo Bay, among other places. She is Assistant Director for Faculty Success in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
Arguments, Benjamin Gucciardi
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
In “Anima Hominis,” Yeats writes, “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Arguments by Benjamin Gucciardi takes that inner quarrel as its starting point. Written in a time of environmental collapse and social unrest, these poems confront the contradictions that shape contemporary life: how to make a self, a family and an ethical life within exploitative systems that demand complicity. Moving through domestic spaces, a climate activist camp, and landscapes of the American West, the collection blends lyric and formal poems to ask urgent questions: What responsibilities to we bear to one another? How are we entangled in the systems we seek to dismantle? What place does violent resistance hold? How do we sustain an inner life in a material-driven world—and how, in the face of grief, do we balance private mourning with collective obligation? Arguments turns to language as a practice of care, tending the fragile links between self and community, human and non-human, the living and the dead.
Originally from San Francisco, California, Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of Arguments, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and West Portal, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage, chosen by Elena Passarello as the winner of the 2020 Quarterly West Chapbook contest, and I Ask My Sister’s Ghost. His poems appear in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY and elsewhere, and have been featured in On Being’s “Poetry Unbound,” Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has received the James Dickey Poetry Prize from Five Points, the Booth Prize for Unexpected Literature and the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, as well as awards from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Jentel Foundation, PLAYA and Artsmith. In addition to writing, he works with newcomer youth in Oakland through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.
feel recordings in the evershift, Edwin Torres
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Torres’s new collection, feel recordings in the evershift, investigates ecology and the body as fields of perception, seeking to record this felt world and allow the reader a chance to roam within their own recordings. A longtime teacher and performance artist, globally active in collaboration with many multidisciplinary communities, the poet explores placemaking as self-making, portraying for the reader the wide-ranging possibilities of poem making. This record of investigation and deep listening reveals poetry’s ability to connect the body to the earth’s continual shift. As we experience the ecopoetics formed through this process, we are asked to join Torres in challenging a poem’s function on the page, in the reader, and within the world.
Edwin Torres is a NYC native and the author of 14 books of poetry, including Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (Roof Books, awarded a 2022 American Book Award), Xoeteox: the infinite word object (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof), The PoPedology of an Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function of External Circumstances (Nightboat), and editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). Multi-disciplinary collaborations with a wide range of cultural nomads have contributed to the development of his bodylingo poetics. He has performed worldwide and received fellowships from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, The DIA Foundation, Arts MidHudson, among others. Anthologies include New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archives, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, Poets In The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Aloud: Voices from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He is an Adjunct Poetry Professor at Columbia University and a resident of Beacon, NY.
Kaddish, Radu Vancu, Sean Cotter (Tr)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Kaddish, Romanian poet Radu Vancu assumes the identity of the murdered Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, taking as his starting point the notebook that was found with Radnóti’s body when it was exhumed in 1946. Vancu imagines Radnoti addressing his wife in these poems — remembering their time together, but also conversing and joking with the dead around him (including his close friend, the violinist Miklosz Lorsi, who was executed just a few days before him), and invoking such historical figures as Dante, Shelley, Borges, Freud, Schumann, and Oppenheimer. Vancu’s imagined mass grave is a place of bones, torture, and blood, but it also becomes the ground from which poetry emerges in its most stunning and powerful capacity: to find beauty despite the horror and to be able to resurrect the dead. The book is bilingual (Romanian and English) on facing pages.
Radu Vancu is a poet, scholar, and translator who has written nine volumes of poetry, a novel, two children’s novellas, a collection of essays, and scholarly publications. He has received numerous awards for his literary works, and also edits Transilvania magazine and Poesis Internațional. He has translated works by Walt Whitman, John Berryman, and Ezra Pound into Romanian, and is the president of Sibiu’s international poetry festival. He also served as the president of PEN Romania.
Sean Cotter is the translator of many works of Romanian literature, and Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. His translation of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid (Deep Vellum, 2022) was awarded the Dublin Literary Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Romanian Cultural Institute prize for best translation of the year. Other books have won or been short-listed for numerous other awards. Zephyr Press published Cotter’s translations of two volumes by Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, Lightwall (2009) and Goldsmith Market (2003).
Skin, Tyler Pennock
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Skin is a haunting, genre-blurring collection rooted in Treaty 8 territory, where memory, place, and loss intertwine. When a Two-Spirit Indigenous person returns home, they begin to understand the world through their relationships to others. Meditating on the difficulty of belonging, especially when shaped by both colonial and communal wounds, Pennock lets spectral inheritances speak.
Through lyrical, found, and experimental forms, Pennock excavates what—and who—is remembered, grieved, and built upon in the violent memoryscapes of the prairies. Here, haunting is methodology: ghosts are kin, time loops, and memory scratches at the walls. For readers of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jeanette Armstrong, Skin conjures. It listens. It offers poetry as a kind of skin—porous, protective, remembering—for those still finding their way home.
Tyler Pennock is a two-spirit adoptee from a Cree and Métis family around the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta, and is a member of Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. Their first book, Bones (Brick Books), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry, was released in 2020, and their second book, Blood, was released in 2022. Tyler was the inaugural FASS (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) Indigenous Artist-in-Residence at Carleton University in 2023, and is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. They live in Toronto.
Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems, Erin Belieu
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
In celebration of a major voice in American letters, Erin Belieu’s Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of work alongside a generous selection of new poems. Wide ranging in style, subject and structure, this collection confronts with unsentimental clarity both tender intimacies and grief, as well as the absurdities of what it is to be a human. Belieu considers with fierce emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor the power dynamics and quiet brutality often embedded in our domestic lives and national narratives. Whether addressing sexuality, the sustainability of faith in one’s self or others, or American identity, the poems are penetrating and precise. Cocklebur is a portrait of a poet unafraid to look directly at our personal and collective histories—what they permit, what they erase, and what they ask us to carry.
Born in Nebraska, Erin Belieu earned an MA from Boston University and an MFA from Ohio State University. Belieu’s work focuses on gender, love, and history, filtering wide-ranging subject matter through a variety of theoretical frameworks. She often addresses feminist issues and uses poetic conventions and street talk. Belieu is the author of many books of poetry, including Come-Hither Honeycomb (2020); Slant Six (2014); Black Box (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; One Above & One Below (2000); and Infanta (1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series. Belieu coedited, with Susan Aizenberg, the anthology The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (2001). Belieu has received admiring reviews for her poetry throughout her writing career. Book critic Dwight Garner in The New York Times says “Belieu is a poet who can’t abide pretension,” and “She’s a comedian of the human spirit, in league with poets from Frank O’Hara, to Deborah Garrison, to Tony Hoagland.”
Rupture Anthem, Hera Naguib
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rupture Anthem is a journey of severance, faith, and womanhood across continents. It follows an intricate, dazzling record of a Muslim girl’s becoming bracketed by the oil boom in the Arabian Gulf, the migrant abuse under the region’s restrictive kafala system that built its shining new cities, and the flowering of erotic desire against the backdrop of strict religious mores. The speaker of this stunning book journeys across countries, cultures, and languages in search of belonging and freedom. Against America’s War on Terror, its ghostly afterlives in her country, she navigates urban militarism and patriarchy, exploring what it means to be lost among your own people before ending up in the United States, where she discovers freedom is often an unkept promise. Through lyric and documentary poems that braid memory with history and feminist dignity, Rupture Anthem architects transformative acts of witness, dissent, and bodily pleasure against the systemic forces that silence.
Hera Naguib was born in Saudi Arabia and has lived transnationally in Canada, Pakistan, and the United States. Winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the Quarterly West Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in The Believer, The Iowa Review, AGNI, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright scholar and the recipient of the VIDA Residency Fellowship, Naguib’s work has also received support from Art Omi, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. She divides her time between Boston and Lahore.
Of Blood and Rivers: A Book of Elegies, Michael Delp
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
One of the poems written out of Michael Delp’s experience with grief begins “At first a koan, “What to be done?” then a mantra, finally a prayer said into flowing water, because so many things bleed, each individual kind of pain like a fire coming in unseen from far off, then the searing begins”
As heard in the sample, the eighty-four elegiac poems in this book navigate through and beyond loss, grief, love, and the joy of being present in the moment. Inspired by the movement of river water, these poems metabolize loss in the ways our bodies come to know that some questions have no answers. Taken together as one, this prose poem emerges as a meditation, a prayer where grief balances love and body balances spirit. Loss comes to us all. This book bears forth the wisdom of looking to the stars for solace, the deep quiet of connecting to the natural world, remaining grounded in our own living bodies.
Michael Delp is the former director of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received multiple awards from the National Foundation for the Arts for teaching excellence. He is the award-winning author of several works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including The Mad Angler: Poems. He is coeditor emeritus of the Made in Michigan Writers Series.
Agate Head / Stone Soup, Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Many have called Patricia Lockwood a wordsmith, but in the latest iteration of her life, she has become, quite literally, a metalsmith too. Stones, gems, metals, fossils—she forges them into bodies, faces, and, with her typical irreverence, vaginas. In these poems, a robot dog discovers the Lascaux caves in France. Jane Austen shoots a perfect 147. A rock gets a girlfriend. The Pope blesses McLovin (kind of). Lockwood’s most successful work of metal- and wordsmithing yet is her blend of the Internet world with the natural one, as she slips meme references and algospeak into evocations of geological time, explorations of organic bodies, and observations of youth. Her most personal collection of poetry yet, you may find you understand yourself—and Patricia—more than you’d like to by the end.
Patricia Lockwood is the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize-winning novel No One Is Talking About This, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the past 100 years. Her other books include the memoir Priestdaddy, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, the novel Will There Ever be Another You, and two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.
The Rope in Bloom: A Bilingual Edition, Radu Vancu, Paula Console-Soican (Tr)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In 1997, when he was nineteen, Radu Vancu discovered the body of his father, who had hanged himself in the family home. In the dark years that followed, Vancu turned to literature and self-medication. By 2009, after a decade of “Schopenhauer and vodka” and the publication of seven influential volumes of poetry and essays, Vancu was married, newly sober, and expecting his first child. With these themes in mind—bereavement, love, fatherhood, and poetry—he began writing Frânghia înflorită, or The Rope in Bloom, a poem of Dantesque ambition and scope. Through twenty-four cantos interwoven with prose vignettes, Vancu revisits the scene of the suicide and speaks with the lost soul of his father, who guides and advises him. Each canto begins with the same lines:
What your dead one, what the best-
beloved of your dead loved ones says to you
when you have the heart to dream of him:
Vancu’s verse depicts a nightmare underworld, at once terrible and banal, containing both rivers of blood and family movie nights. Prose vignettes punctuating the book narrate tender years in the early life of a new family. Here, the poet appears in everyday moments, watching cartoons with his son and seeing his wife off to work. Together, the cantos and prose accumulate into a charged collection, where the loss of a father looms over the joy of becoming one.
This volume is the first full-length English translation of Vancu’s work, marking a long-overdue introduction of the poet to anglophone audiences.
Radu Vancu is university professor of arts and letters at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He is the author of eleven volumes of poetry and numerous books of prose. He has also contributed important translations into Romanian, including volumes by W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and John Berryman. Vancu is editor of Poesis International and Transilvania, founder and organizer of the annual international poetry festival “Poets in Transylvania,” and former president of PEN Romania. Paula Console-Șoican is a lecturer at the University of Kansas and translator, with Cyrus Console-Soican, of Mircea Ionescu-Quintus’s The Devil’s Grinder: Poems of Hope and Despair from the Forced Labor Camps of Post-WWII. Cyrus Console-Șoican teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is the author of the poetry collections Brief Under Water, The Odicy, and The Wayfarer.
Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025, Michael Waters
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In these richly textured poems—crafted with taut clarity and consummate skill—Waters confronts the immutable presence of death by reveling in sensual pleasure and spiritual daring. Each poem unfolds as a compelling narrative, sharpened by precise diction and lifted by lyrical grace and musical phrasing.
Waters’ range is expansive, moving across geographies from Brooklyn to Romania, from the Dominican Republic to Greece, all while engaging in urgent political realities such as AIDS, Black Lives Matter, and authoritarian rule. He also draws on a vibrant cultural lineage that includes Caravaggio, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cesare Pavese, and Balthus.
Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2000–2025 presents a body of work that affirms Michael Waters as a singular and enduring voice in American poetry and as an artist whose poems continue to deepen, resonate, and enrich his remarkable literary legacy.
Michael Waters has published fifteen books of poetry & editor/co-editor of six anthologies. His poems have appeared in five editions of The Pushcart Prize and in Best American Poetry. He has chaired the poetry panel of the National Book Awards and been Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at Al. I. Cuza University in Iasi, Romania. He lives in Ocean, NJ.
Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, T.S. Leonard
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A time traveler crashes into a gay bar, and from that electric collision unfolds Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival, T. S. Leonard’s dazzling debut poetry collection. Moving through glitter, ash, memory, and music, these poems follow a queer time traveler across decades and geographies, from turn-of-the twenty-first-century Missouri to 1970s San Francisco to imagined origins of music itself. Along the way, they come of age, try drag, lose friends, and fall in love, tracing a life shaped by history’s ruptures and its celebrations.
Leonard’s poems travel through temporal sites of plague and resilience, from the AIDS epidemic to COVID-19 lockdowns, while also lingering in spaces of dance, performance, and community such as discos, living rooms, archives, and bars. Themes of change course throughout the collection in climate and cities, in bodies and identities, and in the fragile yet enduring structures of queer belonging. Even as the poems confront grief and loss, they insist on joy as an equally vital inheritance.
Rich with cultural references, from The Wizard of Oz to Felix González-Torres, from Tim Dlugos to Destiny’s Child, Another Anthem of Fabulous Survival reads like a jukebox of queer history, each poem a track spinning across time. Leonard’s voice is playful, elegiac, and searching, asking how memory becomes record and how record becomes song. The result is a collection alive with humor, tenderness, and fierce imagination, a testament to survival and to the music that carries us through.
T.S. Leonard is a poet, performer, and educator whose work has been featured in Poetry, Foglifter, Fourteen Poems, and in collaborative projects at the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Design Center. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, he lives and teaches in San Francisco.
Cameo Appearance, Mary Jo Salter
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
With her signature dark humor—one eye on our possible redemption, the other on the human comedy—Salter here offers sparkling poems that consider youth and age, speaking and silence. As with her grandmother’s cameo ring, long stashed in a drawer for fear she’d lose it but now fitting her finger perfectly, the poems are often drawn from her intimate life and the collapsing span of years: “Where did they all go, / my go-go boots, bell-bottoms, / shoulder pads, opinions?” the speaker wonders. Elsewhere, in the “omniscient” full moon flickering between trees, the jab of the vaccine needle in a baby’s thigh, or the cutting beauty of a single tear frozen at high altitude, Salter engages with the disparate and dazzling range of our experiences, summoning the rewards of connection and awareness, as well as the sorrow at what we sometimes can’t express to one another.
Alternating short lyrics with richer long narratives, flowing down the page in witty, melodious stanzas, Salter’s poems expand our sense of gratitude for our brief “cameo appearance” in the one life we have.
Mary Jo Salter is Professor Emerita in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of nine previous poetry collections and a children’s book and is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore.
Little Sound, Katherine Gibbel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The title for Katherine Gibbel’s debut collection plays with the etymology of the sonnet, or sonnetto in Italian: a little song or little sound. Exploring the possibility of words and the limits inherent in both language and form, Little Sound asks its reader, “Did you hear that?” and tunes in to what echoes when we listen.
Divided into three long poems, Little Sound explores language, gossip, reading practices, love, and death, tracing webs of meaning across a range of seemingly disparate topics. Gibbel’s speaker interrogates partial histories and turns them into meditations on the literary, the natural, and the personal, including the subdivided memorial prairies of the Midwest, family history, pipe organs, and medieval theology. Associative, funny, curious, bell-like, and elaborately architectural, Gibbel’s poems offer a study in emotional nuance, knowing winks, and sonic attentiveness.
Katherine Gibbel edits and prints the monthly letterpress poetry series Send Me Press. She lives in Vermont. Little Sound is her first book.
Come Again?, Alyssa N. Moore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Alyssa N. Moore’s Come Again? conjures a series of otherworldly scenarios in which reinvention becomes a form of resistance and a method to escape the snares of a modern existence to which we contribute but cannot control. Throughout these surreal and absurdist poems, an untethered consciousness is continuously reincarnated and dragged through various personae—including the Volunteer, the Eternal Counselor, the Streetcleaner, and the Architect—to find “what exactly to do with a willing body.” For example, in “The Volunteer,” a visual sequence, the book’s shapeshifting narrator is dropped into a formless expanse and expected to perform. As we move through the collection, the speaker’s perception morphs rapidly. From wage worker to computer programmer to sexbot to God, they collide over and over with the boundaries of the world. With each shift, the speaker guides us through a series of darkly comic set pieces that are, in turns, cinematic and slapstick as they seek a solid home base from which to “reject the emptiness that’s inherited.”
Moore’s facility with poetic form, use of image and text, and play between irony and sincerity make Come Again? a bold collection that defies the customary and conventional, instead forging new worlds of continual remaking.
Alyssa N. Moore is the author of the chapbook WET MEDIA. She is an intermedia poet and an editor for Ghost Proposal, a journal for poetry and work outside traditional notions of genre. She was the inaugural winner of Poetry magazine’s Editors Prize for Visual Poetry.
A Theory of Knots, Pervin Saket
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
A Theory of Knots explores the loops of how identity and belonging are constructed, broken, resurrected, and dissolved. In sections, knots weave DNA and cords, memory and mythology, home and tongue; they draw on desire, Zoroastrian rituals, tradition and transgression, and the legacies of womanhood, asking what connects us, and at what cost.
As layers of identity are examined, Pervin Saket’s poems return to language: heirloom, hazard, half-truth. Soon enough, language is both subject and suspect; having exposed the artificial nature of our truths, the poems confront the artificial nature of language itself. At the end, poetry reaches the wilderness of earth, collapses upon itself, dissolving on the page—untangling the final knot.
Pervin Saket is a Mumbai-based novelist, poet, editor, and literature curator. As poetry editor at The Bombay Literary Magazine since 2021, she curates literature for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. She is the author of Urmila and A Tinge of Turmeric.
That’s Where You Come In, John Skoyles
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in That’s Where You ComeIn address the loss over time of friends and family. And yet several figures return, ghost-like, to make appearances in the speaker’s life: an uncle, a mother, a father, and close friends. Even a favorite dog returns to take the poet out to dinner in the afterlife. Despite the collection’s focus on these losses, the book has a central thread of new love; many of these love poems are set in the urban landscape of New York City, capturing its streets, characters, and institutions.
John Skoyles’ books of poetry and prose include Suddenly It’s Evening: Selected Poems, Yes & No, Driven, and All the Question Marks. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among others. He lives in New York City.
Year of the Labyrinth, Brian Sneeden
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Described by Kiki Petrosino as “a beautiful invasion,” Year of the Labyrinth draws upon Sneeden’s experiences as a translator and multilingual writer working in language preservation to explore boundaries between speech and ritual, myth and ecology. “In these fiercely imagined poems,” Petrosino writes, “our speaker passes between seemingly fixed physical and conceptual worlds—human/animal, past/present, forest/field. This voice finds lyric power in liminal spaces—in ‘the pollen line’ and ‘a change of wind.’ With the speaker, we travel through mirrors to places where you might grasp an animal if only ‘by the curve of its name,’ and where ‘a bird that ha[s]n’t yet been invented’ may sing. This poet’s imagination makes porous the landscapes we thought were familiar.” Kelly Link, in her judge’s citation for the Barthelme Prize, writes: “How wonderful it is, the marriage of economy and the arcane, as if a story could be a kind of lozenge that, slipped under the tongue, estranges us from our idea of how both life and language work. Every sentence has the effect of an acupuncturist’s needle, small pricks that let in strange energy.”
Brian Sneeden is a poet, translator, and editor based in southern Scotland. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Review, and other magazines. Translations of his poetry have been published internationally in Arabic, Italian, Modern Greek, and Serbian. Last City, his debut collection, appeared in the 2018 Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. His translations of poetry from the Modern Greek have received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and other recognitions. He is the translator of four collections of poetry, including Phoebe Giannisi’s Cicada, and most recently, GOATSONG. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing and publishing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Rock Arrangement, Yan An, Chen Du (Tr), Xisheng Chen (Tr)
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rock Arrangement by Yan An, a prominent contemporary Chinese poet, won the Sixth Lu Xun Literary Prize, China’s highest literary honor, in 2014. Representing China’s highest poetic achievements from 2010 to 2013, this poetry collection was translated into English for the first time and was a runner-up for Carnegie Mellon University Press’s 2025 Literary Translation Prize.
Akin to eco-poetry in their core themes, characterized by surrealism, mythical elements, and high abstraction, and even abstruseness, these poems integrate regional culture, surrealist poetics, and philosophical reflection. They skillfully employ a variety of vivid rhetorical devices and create contrasts through unconventional combinations of imagery, developing a distinctive poetic and spiritual language. Rock Arrangement is a landmark work in contemporary Chinese poetry that combines intellectual depth with artistic innovation.
Chen Du is a voting member of the American Translators Association and an expert member of the Translators Association of China. In the United States and a few other Western countries, she has published, either independently or in cooperation with Xisheng Chen, hundreds of pieces of English translations, poems, and essays in over fifty literary journals, such as The Southern Review and AGNI.
Xisheng Chen is a Chinese American ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator, and educator. His working history includes adjunct professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University) in Angola, Indiana. As a translator for four decades, he has published many translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad.
From the Diary of Madame Mao, María Teresa Ogliastri, Yvette Neisser (Tr), Patricia Bejarano Fisher (Tr)
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
From the Diary of Madame Mao is a poetry collection of fictionalized diary entries in the voice of Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong and a vilified leader of the “Gang of Four,” a Maoist political faction which wielded unchecked and violent suppression of dissent during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The haunting voice in this collection recounts the events of twentieth-century China through the imagined inner thoughts of Jiang, a liberated woman in a male-dominated society who struggled to fend for herself but then, upon gaining totalitarian power, became “mentally ill.” Maria Teresa Ogliastri—who has lived under authoritarian regimes in Venezuela for more than two decades— “opts for compassion” in her portrayal of this infamous public figure, conveying the full complexity of human emotion and experience in her singular lyric voice.
María Teresa Ogliastri was born in Los Teques, Venezuela and lives in Caracas. The author of five collections of poems, she has been featured at poetry festivals throughout Latin America, and her poems appear in several anthologies of contemporary Venezuelan poetry. She has taught philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, as well as worked as a researcher and editor at public institutions such as the Venezuelan National Library, the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art, and Fundación Cultural Fundarte.
Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. She has taught writing and translation at George Washington University, The Writer’s Center (Bethesda, MD), and other institutions. She lives just outside of Washington, DC.
Patricia Bejarano Fisher is a former Spanish instructor and learning materials developer at the University of Maryland. Her translations include poems in Laura Shovan’s The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary; Bridges, a trilingual collection of poems by Lidia Kosk in Polish, English, and Spanish (unpublished); and the co-translation of Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s South Pole/Polo Sur.
When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like, Benjamin S. Grossberg
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
Benjamin S. Grossberg’s When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like is about how we come to understand death—sometimes in terror, sometimes in loss, and perhaps, in the sober assessments of middle age, with calm acceptance, when what may have loomed as a nightmare can come to seem unremarkable, familiar, even a “private wonder.” The poems span the trauma of coming out as a gay man at the height of the US AIDS epidemic to the advent of PrEP—a class of HIV-prevention drugs—twenty-five years later. The poems wrestle with the growing awareness that, though one bugbear may press less close, death still waits, patient and inevitable. A series of elegies for the poet’s mother, who returns as a wry, irreverent ghost “swirling/ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka,” lies at the heart of this ranging, cinematic collection.
Benjamin S. Grossberg is the author of the poetry collections My Husband Would, winner of the Connecticut Book Award, and Sweet Core Orchard, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. His novel, The Spring before Obergefell was selected by Percival Everett for the Associated Writing Program’s James Alan McPherson Prize and received a Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared widely, including in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the director of creative writing at the University of Hartford.
Divers, Samuel Amadon
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker’s impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past—including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton—echo through Amadon’s poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon’s sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.
Samuel Amadon is the author of five books of poetry, including Listener and Often, Common, Some, And Free. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Nation, Lana Turner, Volt, Fence, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina, where, with Liz Countryman, he edits the journal Oversound.
SENTIENCE, Meredith Stricker
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
With this collection, poet and artist Meredith Stricker considers questions about personhood, belonging, property, and ownership within interdependent living cultural systems. Looking beyond humans alone, she considers whether animals dream, who our relations are, what interior lives are held within words, and whether the world is truly alive to us today or if it is simply something we experience through screens. The poems track bee swarms and hazardous waste, separation walls, and diatoms. They are intently visual, aural, and spatial, tracing the dendritic forms of trees and fractal coastlines and the symmetries of biomorphic animal patterns. They highlight non-artificial, non-extractive intelligences in sharp contrast to the rise of AI. Informed by biosemiotics, SENTIENCE arises from Stricker’s continuing multidisciplinary work and architectural habitat restoration in Big Sur and her performance collaborations with musicians, composers, artists, and beekeepers.
Meredith Stricker is the author of six poetry collections, including REWILD, winner of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize; Our Animal, winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Award; Tenderness Shore, winner of the National Poetry Series Award; and anemochore, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize and finalist for the Poetry Society of America Four Quartets Award. Her work involves performance, paint, drawing, graphic overlays and hybrid forms of documentary/lyric exploring a sentient world through media ranging from artist books to buildings. As an artist, designer and poet, she co-directs poetics + space, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur, along with projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms.
The Body and the End of Time: Poems Selected and New, 1985–2025, Rodney Jones
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Comprised of poems selected from eleven previous volumes and accompanied by work from the past half decade, The Body and the End of Time represents the distilled evolution of one of the most fluent, generous, and embracing voices to emerge in American poetry since the Vietnam War era. Prophetic in the tradition of William Blake and Walt Whitman and equally suspicious of received wisdom, Rodney Jones is a master of discernment and revelation, driven by an urgency to bring language and witness to the sudden erosion of the local, the obsolescence of the homegrown, the erstwhile mysticism of the makeshift. Redefining the boundaries between narrative and lyricism, “Classical revision and Romantic improvisation,” high and low culture, logic and dream, Jones creates an inimitable full-spectrum poetic vision in a world that has little use for poetry. By turns elegiac and celebratory, provocative and playful, these are love poems dedicated to places and bonds, to manners and accents, but most importantly to the people—the dreamers and farmers, road pavers, running backs, waitresses, and shade-tree existentialists—that form the distinctive music and texture of the American South.
Rodney Jones, the author of eleven books of poetry, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives in New Orleans.
SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR, Aileen Keown Vaux
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR is a four-part poetry collection rooted in the Pacific Northwest that resists regional mythmaking in favor of lived experience. With wry humor and earned wisdom, SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR aims to deconstruct queer alienation and our ever-changing relationship with the natural world. Determined to be more celebration than elegy, the book suggests “if you thought that life would end when the world did / then you don’t know anything about life.” Drawing on county fairs, 90’s true crime TV, and the COVID-19 pandemic, SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR locates meaning in memory in unexpected places, while situating itself in the tradition of Northwest writers who treat the land not as backdrop, but as an active force–and in doing so, offers a portrait of the Pacific Northwest as it is: fractured, funny, enduring, and alive.
Aileen Keown Vaux is a poet, essayist, and instructional designer who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Their chapbook Consolation Prize was published by Scablands Books and their full-length Sad Man Happy Hour debuts with Unsolicited Press. Passionate about supporting the literary ecosystem through in-depth interviews, you can find their conversations with poets and writers online at The Rumpus. They live and work in Portland, OR.
Crossing State Lines, Anne Babson
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Crossing State Lines, Anne Babson sends Walt Whitman, Liz Cheney, Phillis Wheatley, immigrants, commuters, and ordinary American workers into a surreal poetic reckoning with the nation’s past and present. Moving from Manhattan to Montana, from Ellis Island to the post-truth political landscape, the collection examines democracy, civic exhaustion, regional fracture, and the fragile possibility of common ground. Formally inventive and politically awake, Crossing State Lines asks what remains of American hope when the country can no longer agree on what is real.
Anne Babson received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and has a terminal degree in writing from The City College of New York, where she studied under the great poet Marilyn Hacker. She remains ABD in English at the University of Mississippi with a focus on Middle English and Middle French Literature. Anne Babson is the author of five full length collections of poetry, The White Trash Pantheon (Vox Press, 2014), which won the Colby H. Kullman Award at the Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference, Polite Occasions (Unsolicited Press, 2018), Messiah, (Saint Julian Press, 2019), and The Bunker Book (Unsolicited Press, 2022). She is the author of multiple poetry chapbooks as well. Her individual poems have appeared in literary journals on five continents. She served as President of the Women’s National Book Association of New Orleans from 2022 to 2025. She served on the editorial board of the literary journal Peauxdunque Review from 2022 to 2024. She has taught at Southeastern Louisiana University since 2016.
Deep Fakes: Selected Poems, Dan Sociu, Monica Cure (Tr)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: October 8, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems of celebrated Romanian poète maudit Dan Sociu inhabit the margins of modern life, where personal confession meets social critique and irony deepens emotional truth. Sociu captures the melancholy of post-transition Romania in poems that are both autobiographical—influenced by his own experiences with homelessness, illness, and poverty—and collective. A poet of emotional precision, Sociu chronicles disillusionment, love, death, and survival with minimalist clarity and subdued lyricism. Here, the body dwells in abjection and vulnerability, yet fleeting moments of transcendence emerge through insight, tenderness, and ironic reflection. Deep Fakes, the first representative volume of his poetry to be published in English, spans more than a decade of Sociu’s work, from his Naive and Sentimental Poems of 2012 to the 2025 volume Sweet and Cheap.
Dan Sociu was born in Botoşani, Romania in 1978. He is the author of over ten books of poetry and several novels, and has won numerous awards, as well as fellowships in the U.S. and Germany. Homeless for the first half of his twenties, he has worked as a minimum-wage intellectual in journalism, translation, and editing, and has translated more than 30 novels from English to Romanian, the poetry of more than 30 British and American poets, as well as articles and plays, and has been an artist-in-residence in the U.S. and Germany.
Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, literary translator, and dialogue specialist currently based in Bucharest. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and her poems and translations have appeared internationally in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Graywolf Lab, Kenyon Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, Dorsey Craft
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: October 8, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The speaker processes her son’s traumatic birth against the backdrop of American gun culture and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. These provocative poems use humor and voice to explore breastfeeding, postpartum depression, trauma, and family as the speaker considers what she will pass down to her child.
A Brief History of Accidental Inventions explores the emotionally fraught territory of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. By equal measures harrowing and humorous, the collection chronicles the speaker’s freefall into postpartum depression against the backdrop of American gun culture and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. The poems peer keenly into texts from Kristeva to Kim Kardashian’s Instagram account as the speaker searches for clarity in her new role as a mother. With a voice both lyrical and brash, Craft confronts challenges of embodiment and violence alongside the overwhelming experience of maternal love.
Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions, Plunder (Bauhan 2020), and two chapbooks. Plunder was the winner of the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Anderson Center at Tower View, and Yaddo. She holds both an MFA in Poetry from McNeese State University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from The Florida State University. Craft teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Agni.
What Flesh Inherits, J. Scott Brownlee
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: October 8, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Though a chorus of unexpected speakers that include grasshoppers, deer, coyotes, catfish, an itinerant “preacher poet” named Aron Anderson, Brownlee himself, and other Hill Country creatures and spirits, What Flesh Inherits teaches us what it means to belong even when we feel, at times, like exiles in familiar places.
What Flesh Inherits is a meditation on home, identity, belief, and the ways in which small-town Texas culture has shaped Brownlee’s own origin story, as well as the experiences and stories of the friends and family members in the town where he grew up (Llano, TX, population 3,033). Readers are introduced to not only Brownlee’s Hill Country roots and memories, but also a quasi-gospel exploring the life, death, and resurrection of Aron Anderson, a fictional character introduced midway through the book who is assembled from the people and landscape that defined the poet’s childhood. Brownlee and Anderson’s voices join a chorus of unexpected speakers in this collection that include grasshoppers, deer, coyotes, catfish, and other Hill Country creatures and spirits, teaching us what it means to belong even when we feel, at times, like exiles in familiar places.
J. Scott Brownlee is a poet from Llano, Texas. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, named a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and received the 2016 Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
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