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.
Primordial, Mai Der Vang
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.
With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.
Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.
Mai Der Vang is the author of two previous poetry books: Afterland, winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, and Yellow Rain, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva
Publisher: Blair
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
In The Opposite of Cruelty, Steven Leyva’s poems ask readers to see and remember beauty when the world seems to be in ruins, to notice and praise “the industrious cherry // trees budding despite a summer / full of bullets to come.” For Leyva, beauty can be found in lineage and memory, in the heroes of the comics and TV shows he watched as a boy, in taking his children to the movies to see an Afro-Latino Spider-man on the big screen, and in doing so passing down that beauty, those means of survival. In these sonnets and urban pastorals you’ll find Selena, UGK and Outkast, Storm, Static, and Batman, as well as Sisyphus, Medusa, Perseus, and Grendel. This weaving of modern culture and the ancient world calls attention to our need for stories, how heroes and villains take up residence inside us, how important it is to see one’s self represented in art and film.
This book does not look away from life’s hard and cruel moments, it simply dares to ask “What is the opposite of cruelty?” The answers: The beauty of a Black boy in his school picture, the beauty of one man’s hand touching another man’s face at the barber, the beauty of a family home or a memory of what it once was, “not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left / when the world’s terrors retreat.”
Steven Leyva was born in New Orleans and raised in Houston, Texas. He is a Cave Canem fellow and author of Low Parish (a chapbook) and the collection The Understudy’s Handbook, which won the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Steven holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore, where he is an associate professor in the Klein Family School of Communications Design.
Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, Alison Hawthorne Deming
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of six books of poetry and five books of nonfiction, editor of the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems in Celebration of Animals & The People Who Love Them. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship and the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her writing has been widely published, including in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson, Arizona and Grand Manan, NB, Canada.
COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Karen Finley
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
First performed at sold-out theaters in New York, where the Village Voice compared Karen Finley to Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, this vivid suite of poems invokes a maelstrom of feelings that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page. In COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, Finley processes the pandemic in all its complexity—from the collective coping strategies during isolation and loss to the absurd new habits we acquired, from handwashing to wiping down groceries to decorative double masks and zoom dance parties.
The New York City hotspot echoes an earlier AIDS era; that rage and sorrow remain part of the City’s DNA. During COVID, tragic historic events such as the police murder of George Floyd and the continued brutality on Black and brown bodies, challenged the nation. Revolution took to the streets. The reversal of Roe v Wade and the criminalizing of trans peoples’ bodies, mental health realities, houselessness, essential workers’ rights, and social isolation brought desperate conditions. Finley reflects on these traumas, asking how do we employ love despite the hate, to encourage humanity despite proliferating violence?
On the fifth anniversary of the pandemic lockdown, COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco looks back while also looking forward, offering art as salvation, and the deep belief in the power of words, compassion, and humor to transcend the harsh realities of today.
Karen Finley is an artist, performer, and poet. Born in Chicago, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Finley was the named plaintiff for the Supreme Court case Finley v. NEA that challenged the decency provision in government grants to artists through the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been presented internationally such as at the Barbican in London; Lincoln Center, New York City; Art Basel in Miami; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. She is the author of nine books, including Grabbing Pussy (OR Books, 2018), the 25th anniversary edition of Shock Treatment (City Lights, 2015), and The Reality Shows (Feminist Press, 2011). A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a professor in Art and Public Policy at New York University. She lives in Westchester County, New York.
Scorched Earth, Tiana Clark
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.
From a generational voice that “earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews” (Booklist, starred review), Scorched Earth is a transcendent anthology for our times.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.
Daffodil: And Other Poems, Vincent Katz
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
With his painterly eye and disarming concision on the page, Katz opens this book with a powerful image of “all time sequestered in the fold of a daffodil,” setting the stage for an encounter with the immediacy we must embrace to see the world around us with clarity. At the center of this collection are his captivating poems about animals—“The hope in fear / In thrill to run” of the rabbit, the snapping turtle “nestled // Next to brother rock”—as the poems continually engage with the heady passage of days and years, and the promise to honor a life in the here and now, to walk the street with the sense that, “It’s not about buying / But rather about feeling the air.”
“Whether in nature, or on a crowded or empty city street, was all a dream?” Katz writes, considering Daffodil. “Surely, there was and is still someone close, and that continues, as animals, despite war, despite incursions, continue. New York is a place of return, where we’re aware of faces and other things; there, or in a field of flowers, in places in the distant past and present, love has some inexorable way of continuing.”
These poems evoke the exact scenes that command our daily thoughts, that usher in grace and beauty, with their quietly urgent moral qualities, which, Katz suggests, can shape our days if we allow them to.
Vincent Katz is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), and Swimming Home (2015) and of the book of translations The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004), which won a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (2002), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia Chelsea, Katz also edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry for the Dia Art Foundation (2017). He lives in New York City.
The Khayyam Suite, Charles Martin
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In The Khayyam Suite, acclaimed poet Charles Martin explores both the profound and the personal in verse that celebrates the spectrum of human experience.
At the heart of this collection is a study of the Rubaiyat, the renowned poem cycle attributed to the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. Martin pays homage to Khayyam’s classical Persian poetic form—the ghazal—by infusing it with contemporary sensibilities, creating a rich tapestry of contemplation and artistry. By seamlessly blending Eastern and Western poetic traditions, Martin offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on timeless questions that have captivated philosophers and poets throughout the ages. Each long poem consists of forty quatrains mirroring those of Khayyam’s.
Martin’s verses reflect on modern existential dilemmas, environmental crises, and the intricacies of personal relationships. From the haunting feeling of “On the Coming Extinctions” to the stark socioeconomic commentary in “On Capital,” each poem invites the reader into a contemplative dialogue with the self. Martin’s poems are both a mirror and a window to the soul, reflecting personal histories and illuminating the universal human condition. This collection, imbued with the lyrical charm and intellectual depth of Martin’s writing, is a profound commentary on love, loss, and the fleeting nature of life.
Charles Martin (Syracuse, NY) is the Pushcart Prize–winning author of seven books of poetry, most recently Future Perfect. His verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Beyond the Watershed, Nadia Alexis
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
A hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed explores the various experiences of a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. Nadia Alexis crafts a moving portrayal of generational trauma, domestic violence, survival, and reclamation, using stunning imagery drawing from the body, spirit, nature, and cityscapes. Alexis traces journeys to break free–documenting pain, making space for light, becoming a reckoning, connecting with spirit, and writing oneself into new seasons of safe waters, healthy love, and transformation. This vital debut affirms that there’s “nothing like the thirst / of Black girls who believe in their own dreams,” even as they navigate nonlinear paths to healing. “Sometimes the clouds speak to me / & tell me to look beyond the burning,” the daughter declares, as she charts her own path forward.
Nadia Alexis is a poet, writer, photographer, and daughter of Haitian immigrants. Her writing is published in Poets & Writers, The Global South, Shenandoah, Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems, and others.
Far Country, Kyce Bello
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her new collection, Far Country, Kyce Bello documents an unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium for deepening connection and love. In poems firmly rooted in the Southwestern bioregion, landscape and language are layered into vivid sequences where the personal, collective, and ecological merge and illuminate one another. Ultimately, the collection forms a new map of the unknown, traveling to a realm in which worlds both seen and unseen are fused into a rich tapestry of lyric exploration and wonder. In the poem, “The Bend,” a woman asks, “How do we survive this?” Far Country is not an answer, but a witnessing and embrace that becomes its own act of resilience and transformation.
Kyce Bello was the inaugural winner of the Test Site Poetry Prize with her debut collection, Refugia, which also received the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. Bello edited the award-winning anthology The Return of the River, a work of literary activism.
This Sweet Rupture, Omar Ramadan
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This Sweet Rupture unflinchingly explores interwoven themes of family secrets, diaspora, food culture, and the impact of war on personal stories. Rooted in Omar Ramadan’s experiences as a son of Lebanese immigrants, and set in Canada, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, the collection brings together intergenerational exchanges and present-day realities, from sweetened tea preparations to conversations about conflict zones to investigations of Canadian blizzards. The book speaks to Arab father-son relationships and incorporates Arabic, reflecting the hybridity of its speakers and their shifting sense of place. Resonant and intricate, This Sweet Rupture thoughtfully navigates cultural identity, war, memory, and family.
Omar Ramadan is a Lebanese-Canadian writer, poet, aspiring novelist, and PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. His work and research revolve around Arab diaspora literature, particularly focused on systems of power, surveillance, and the lasting impact of 9/11 on Arab and Muslim communities in Canada. He is the author of the chapbook Sesame Love and his work has appeared in CV2 and The Polyglot. He lives in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton).
Requiem, Virginia Konchan
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Requiem is a collection anchored in personal and collective grief, remembrance, and commemoration, journeying through the loss of a mother in a series of elegies, fugues, and lamentations that draw from the Church’s canonical hours of prayer as collected in a breviary. Historical and religious mourning rites, and the grief work of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, and Mozart, among others, establish a lyric dialogue around aesthetic representations of grief, invoking a doubleness between the griever and the grieved; a mutuality and interconnectedness that illuminate the role of witness in poetry, mortality, and transcendence. Requiem enacts our deepest longing: to honor and immortalize the beloved.
Virginia Konchan is the author of five books of poetry, including Bel Canto, Hallelujah Time, Any God Will Do, and The End of Spectacle, as well as a short story collection, Anatomical Gift. She is coeditor of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, Atlantic, Believer, and Academy of American Poets.
The Old Current, Brad Leithauser
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
As snappy as a dinner jacket’s red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser’s robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It’s also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as with deft care Leithauser easily, often unexpectedly, juggles off-rhymes and old forms and new.
The book unfolds like a five-act play, moving from chattier poems to dramatic denouements. In the collection’s two “Darker” sections, we meet folks learning to say goodbye, from a three-year-old’s cry “I love you so loud” (“A Young Farewell”) to a reckoning with words formed “Forty-Five Years On.” Time presses in continually. In “Abroad” and “At Home,” the author shows us himself, in younger form: sixty-six, then twenty-seven, catapulted back in memory to Tokyo by a single bite of food (“The Old Current”). Then, eight, and awed to remember the beauty of a lone jet overhead. With Updikean wordplay he recalls: “Porch steps, sunset; a warm, gathering gloom. / Behind me, five lives: two parents plus the three / Brothers with whom I share my room” (“A Single Flight”).
Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen previous books, most recently Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Shapeshifter, L.E. Bowman
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Melodic and introspective, Bowman’s poems converse—struggling with grief and hopelessness while fighting for love and recovery. Shapeshifter grounds the reader in the body, ever transforming with age and experience. Reckoning with self-image, heartbreak, and motherhood, this collection emphasizes the beauty in mundanity—the journey that is life.
Bowman’s Shapeshifter embraces the fear of an ever-changing and vulnerable existence, encouraging the reader to live in spite and because of that fear. It’s a truly touching collection that can’t be missed!
Lauren E. Bowman is the author of The Evolution of a Girl (Black Castle Media Group), What I Learned From the Trees (Button Poetry), and Shapeshifter (Button Poetry). Lauren’s work often delves into the intricate relationship between humans and nature, and how these often overlooked, everyday interactions affect us as individuals, families and communities. Being a working mother and writer, Lauren pulls much of her inspiration from the capricious lives we tackle every day. She focuses on all facets of womanhood, including the shifting roles and definitions that we face as we change and age.
Doggerel, Reginald Dwayne Betts
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: March 4, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic—but equally rich—lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.
Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us “how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)—and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his dog.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/4 and 3/10 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.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”
Dancing With the Dead: On Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
“Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook, Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance.”
Read three poems by poet Wendell Hawken, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “First Hurt”.
Book Excerpt: Slow Chalk by Elaine Equi
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Slow Chalk” from Out of the Blank by Elaine Equi, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: Caro M. by Angela Siew
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Caro M.” from Coming Home by Angela Siew, along with a few words from the poet.
Read four poems by poet Natalie Marino, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue.
A Conversation with Kate Colby
Poet Kate Colby discusses her latest chapbook, ThingKing, her creative writing practices, and her penchant for poetry chapbooks with PCR Editor Aiden Hunt in this interview piece.
Read three poems by poet Adele Ross, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Heavy Water”.
Book Excerpt: The Self-Combed Woman by Laynie Browne
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2025, “The Self-Combed Woman” from Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: To Let Go by Deirdre Garr Johns
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2025, “To Let Go” from Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns, along with a few words from the poet.
Read four poems by poet Sarena Tien, our sixth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Mother Tongue”.