We here at Philly Poetry 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.
Helen of Troy, 1993, Maria Zoccola
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn’t the same thing as staying gone…
Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: “if you never owned a bone-sharp biography… / i don’t want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me.”
Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she’s never been seen before.
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.
At the End of the World There Is a Pond, Steven Duong
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
At the End of the World There Is a Pond is a book about aftermaths. Each poem comes in the wake of a deep rupture—the ruptures of mental illness and addiction, of migration and displacement, of violence, familial conflict, and ecological catastrophe—and yet the speakers engage with despair and playfulness in equal measure, always allowing humor, irony, and the exuberance of contemporary life to bend darkness toward something like hope.
Again and again, Steven Duong’s writing excavates the unnatural conditions of a seemingly natural world, asking us to pay studied attention to its inhabitants. His poems force us to keep looking: at the betta fish trapped in its mason jar, the forest choked by invasive kudzu, the elephant wounded in a landmine blast. Through its relentless scrutiny and exacting care, this magisterial debut collection poses an impossible question: How can we reconcile a deep love for the world, in all its buzzing, wriggling aliveness, with an equally deep, self-destructive desire to leave it behind?
Steven Duong is the 2023–2025 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University. His poems and short stories have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Drift, Guernica, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria, Kim Dower
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Following the commercial and literary success of her bestselling poetry collection, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom: Poems on Motherhood, Kim Dower delivers What She Wants: Poems on Obsession, Desire, Despair, Euphoria—turning her keen eye, vibrant imagination, trademark insight, and humor to the intensity of obsessive love. These steamy and provocative poems, combining humor and heartache, run through the four phases of Limerence, the state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person: Infatuation, Crystallization, Deterioration, and Ecstatic Release. From the opening poem, “She’ll do anything for food,” to the sexy title poem, “What She Wants,” the painfully funny, “His Other Girlfriend,” to the longing in “Visiting Baudelaire,” and the sad, sweet final poem, “Fish’s Lament,” Kim Dower captures the essence of what it means to be stuck on someone—even on a squirrel! Her eclectic, growing readership will savor these poems that can be read in one sitting, like a story with an arc, or separately, each one recalling the moment of falling in or out of love, the moment our hearts skipped a beat.
Kim Dower, born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is the former City Poet Laureate for West Hollywood, California. She is the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including the Los Angeles Times bestseller and 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom; the 2020 Gold IPPY Awards winner, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave; Air Kissing on Mars; and Slice of Moon. Dower’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, as well as in many anthologies and journals, including Ploughshares, James Dickey Review, Plume, and Barrow Street. She teaches poetry workshops for Antioch University, UCLA Extension, and the West Hollywood Library. Kim lives with her family in West Hollywood, California.
the space between men, Mia S. Willis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: January 14, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
These piercing, surprising poems look to familial history, rituals of faith, and the natural world to explore how the intersecting cultures of Blackness and queerness relate to each other. As the collection evolves, the reader is challenged and empowered to seek expansiveness in spaces that have not previously been excavated, reckon with the complexities of interpersonal relationships, and explore memory as a catalyst for self-determination. Mia S. Willis weaves together intergenerational knowledge and personal discovery—not only to define themselves but to articulate a communal identity that transcends language.
Mia S. Willis (they/them) is a poet, popular educator, and cultural historian from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has been featured by The Slowdown, The Shade Journal, Palette Poetry, The Offing, the minnesota review, homology lit., NarrativeNortheast, and others. Willis has earned fellowships from Cave Canem, La Maison Baldwin, The Watering Hole, Lambda Literary, and Chashama’s ChaNorth. A two-time Best of the Net nominee, they are the author of monster house (Jai-Alai Books, 2019), the 2018 winner of Cave Canem’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.
pleasureis amiracle, Bianca Rae Messinger
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
A book of poems written out of a depressive episode, in which a devotional approach to music and desire reestablishes communication between the poet’s body and the world.
In pleasureis amiracle, the poems invoke the lyric and refuse it, moving between time and sound—words re-connect and re-cohere, resisting separation and challenging readers to feel their way to meaning. Perception becomes a many-limbed entanglement from which the reader is never let go. Music is both divine and accessible, a sublimation of everyday movements into an erotics of sensation.
An experiment in form as much as content, it asks what can be cured by music, what is trans about desire, and how can one allow the body to feel what the mind sees, or vice versa.
Bianca Rae Messinger is a poet and translator living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks The Love of God (2016) and parallel bars (2021) and translator of In the Jungle There is Much to Do (2020) among others.
The Shores of Vaikus, Philip Gross
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father’s birth, T S Eliot Prizewinner Philip Gross continues to develop the subtle conversation between words and silence that is at the core of his poetry.
At this collection’s heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of this book’s central sequence, Evi And The Devil, weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.
Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 28th book of poetry, The Shores of Vaikus, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. His previous collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2023), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. That followed eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. His collaboration with photographer Simon Denison, I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010.
If Nothing, Matthew Nienow
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
When mid-life collides with the precariousness of alcoholism, the vulnerability of opening oneself to a second coming-of-age becomes an ecstatic cry in poems that confront pain and the need for forgiveness. An unvarnished and direct accounting of the journey to sobriety, of struggles with mental health, and with the challenges of longing and loss, If Nothing traverses the sting of shame, the earnestness of joy, and the desire for absolution. Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, says: “Matthew Nienow shows us in If Nothing that he is a poet of birth, of making and making anew… This is powerful medicine, salve for earnest souls in an era of ethical infantilization. There is grace here, real grace made wise by having known real grief; If Nothing is a lasting book.”
Matthew Nienow lives in Port Townsend, Washington with his wife and two sons. Professionally trained as a wooden boatbuilder, he spent over a decade building small boats and custom wooden paddle boards. He is the author of House of Water (Alice James, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, New England Review, and Poetry, which awarded him a 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. He has also received fellowships, grants, and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Artist Trust of Washington State, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and 4Culture of Seattle. He holds a BA in English from St. Olaf College, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington, and an Associate degree in Traditional Small Craft from the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. He is pursuing a Masters in Mental Health Counseling, working on several new manuscripts, and serving on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books.
Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story, Danielle Legros Georges
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Between 1960 and 1975, thousands of Haitian professionals emigrated to Congo, a fellow Black francophone nation that emerged under the revolutionary new leadership of Patrice Lumumba. As Danielle Legros Georges writes in the introduction to this collection, these émigrés sought to “escape repression in Haiti, start new lives in Africa, and participate in a decolonizing Congo.” Among them were her parents.
Grounded in these personal and social histories, Three Leaves, Three Roots is a collection of Legros Georges’s creative reconstructions of the Haiti-Congo experience. She interweaves her verses with excerpts from primary sources such as the interviews she conducted with the Congo émigrés and letters written by people both famous and obscure, including Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and members of Legros Georges’s family.
The result is a richly layered portrayal of an era of decolonization and rebuilding, a time that sparked with both promise and vulnerability for the Pan-Africanist and Black Power movements. This collection is an important work of Haitian American poetry and of Black history: it reminds us, artfully, that movements of solidarity among people of color have always existed and always will exist.
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born professor emerita of creative writing at Lesley University. She served as poetry laureate of Boston from 2014 to 2019 and is the author and translator of several books of poetry. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Boston Foundation, and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Death of Persephone: A Murder, Yvonne Blomer
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: January 17, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?
Yvonne Blomer is the author of poetry collections The Last Show on Earth and As if a Raven, as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur. She works as an editor, teacher and mentor in poetry and memoir and served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015– 2018. She is the editor of Refugium, Sweet Water, Poems for Planet Earth, and Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page. She won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan.
The Ocean in the Next Room, Sarah V. Schweig
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning collection, “The question is what doesn’t / die with us?” Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath our frenzied consumer culture. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past branding, content-creation, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention.
In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. Profound and clear-sighted, this collection urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we “try again to write / the true things,” we might spy something real on the horizon.
Sarah V. Schweig’s poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Tin House, and the Yale Review, and her critical essays have appeared in Public Seminar, and Tourniquet Review. Her first book, Take Nothing with You, was published by the University of Iowa Press. She works as an editor, studies philosophy, and lives in Portland, Maine with her husband and son.
Pink Lady, Denise Duhamel
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
When her mother agrees to enter a Rhode Island nursing home in December of 2019, Denise Duhamel promises she’ll visit at least once a month. By March of 2020, everyone is in lockdown. The elegies in Pink Lady explore the resiliency of her elderly mother and nurses on the frontline, as well as the personal and universally experienced anxieties faced during pandemic policies. With focus, obsession, and even humor, Duhamel chronicles the separation of a mother and daughter, documenting the power of imagination, the aging body, and the limits of caregiving.
Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her previous books include Second Story, Scald, Blowout, Ka-Ching!, and Two and Two, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
(jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk, makalani bandele
Publisher: Futurepoem
Publication Date: January 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
(jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a frenetic multimedia jam session of discursive lyric arranged and produced by poems written in bandele’s invented prose poetic form the unit. The form gets its inspiration from virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album Unit Structures, insofar as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as poetics. Through the application of Free Jazz aesthetics, the language is pushed toward a heightened ambiguity, as wildly different subjects and source materials are played right after, alongside, and over against one another generating new valences and surprising, even playful suggestions that are at odds with common interpretations of phrases. Enter here to experience Free Jazz as a groove theory, a language model, and an underlying approach to artistic expression.
An Affrilachian Poet, with fellowships from the likes of National Endowment for the Arts and Cave Canem Foundation, makalani bandele has multiple books of poetry and his work has been anthologized frequently and published widely in literary journals and magazines. (jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk, recipient of the 2022 Other Futures Award, is his third collection of poetry.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/14 and 1/20 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.