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.
Winter of Worship, Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Told through an ever-queer lens, Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s fourth collection, Winter of Worship, is a patchwork of the pastoral and the “litter swirled around us”—a pandemic, global warming, a hometown hit by storms of fentanyl and Oxycontin scripts. A book of elegy told in ghazals, “Marble Runs,” and other forms, these poems reckon with loss: of climate, of fathers, of youth. Candrilli writes, “We are so young / to know so much about life without / our friends.” Steeped in the grief of these losses, Winter of Worship finds healing in the smallest memories: Nokia phone cases, jalapeño gardens, pop flys, 67 Dodge darts, YouTube mixes “all electronica and / glitch step.” We also find survival in our tender human connections: an iPod tucked into the jacket pocket of a drifter, a kiss pressed to a partner’s forehead, a mother calling her child by their chosen name. From the cornfields of Pennsylvania to the streets of downtown Brooklyn, these poems refuse to forget, refuse to lose “an ounce of gentleness.”
Kayleb Rae Candrilli (they/them) is the author of Winter of Worship (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021), All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia 2020), which won the Saturnalia Book Prize, and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017), which was a Lambda Literary finalist for Transgender Poetry. They are the recipient of a Whiting Award and of a PEW Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Candrilli has served as the nonfiction editor of the Black Warrior Review and as a feature editor for NANO Fiction. They served as Assistant Poetry Editor for Boaat Press from 2017 to 2018. They grew up in rural Pennsylvania and currently live in Philadelphia with their partner.
An Exodus of Sparksm, Allisa Cherry
Publisher: Wheelbarrow Books
Publication Date: January 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
An Exodus of Sparks explores how violence reshapes family, geography, and faith. Predominantly set in the high desert, these poems explore the micro-losses of a father and brother (to downwinder-related cancer and substance abuse) against the macro-losses of a geography to nuclear testing and a tradition of faith to the ravages of grief. Liberally appropriating Judaic symbolism and wedding it to an inherited Mormon vocabulary and iconography, the poet/speaker wrests her power from her culture’s sacred texts to revise her position in sight of patriarchal systems.
This collection is for anyone exploring how loss reshapes identity. The book is structured around a crown of sonnets in which the speaker assumes the story of Moses and resituates it in the American Southwest. The book itself is an elegy composed of several smaller elegies; a fallible history; and most of all, a love letter to the family, culture, and geography that shaped the poet and her work.
Allisa Cherry’s poetry has appeared in over forty journals including TriQuarterly, The Penn Review, The Journal, the Baltimore Review, High Desert Journal, EcoTheo, and Rust + Moth. She has received several Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for both Sewanee Review’s annual poetry contest and Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.
Wave of Blood, Ariana Reines
Publisher: Divided Publishing
Publication Date: January 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
Wrestling with the mind of war, at times shocking in its self-analysis, Wave of Blood is a furious, strange and sincere essay, an eclipse notebook, a family chronicle, all told in the poetry of witness.
Ariana Reines is a poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts and based in New York. Her books include A Sand Book (2019)—winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award—Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006. Her poetry and prose have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, and many others.
before & after my body, Phil SaintDenisSanchez
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Phil SaintDenisSanchez’s debut collection before & after my body tackles complex familial history and struggles, emerging in the rich backdrop of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Through multilayered language and immersive imagery, SaintDenisSanchez interweaves political and social issues–from the lasting impacts of colonialism to environmental disaster–with intensely personal narratives of love, learning, and loss. The long, lyrical form and enrapturing poetic voice draw you in and refuse to let you go.
before & after my body maps a stunningly poignant family tree and gets at the root of the social forces that shaped its growth.
Phil SaintDenisSanchez is a poet from New Orleans. His work has appeared in Poetry International, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. His poem “monarchs are the communication medium for when i die” was a finalist for Poetry International’s C.P. Cavafy Prize and his chapbook “watch out for falling bullets” was a finalist for The Atlas Review’s and Button Poetry’s chapbook contests, and a notable manuscript for BOAAT’s chapbook contest. A semifinalist for the 2020 Discovery Prize, he has received scholarships to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
Notes Scattered and Lost, Appunti Sparsi e Persi, Amelia Rosselli, Roberta Antognini (tr.), Deborah Woodard (tr.)
Publisher: Entre Ríos Books
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Primarily consisting of “discards” from her third major collection Document (I976), the fragments of Notes Scattered and Lost provide insight into Amelia Rosselli’s creative process and her remarkable linguistic originality as a self-described “refugee.” While Rosselli’s published poems and collections are known for their structure— what she called “almost architectural work”— these bursts of inspiration that she enjoyed writing out by hand on tracing paper, along with passages cut from longer work she found unsatisfactory, reveal her humor and wit combined with a sharp sense of injustice and deep political engagement. Notes is also among her most accessible work. “…since the author runs after the impossible and the public doesn’t always keep up, I thought that being a little obvious or accessible wouldn’t hurt…”
Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is now recognized as one of the most striking and experimental poets of twentieth-century Italy. This edition marks the first complete English translation of Notes Scattered and Lost, one of her final works, concluding a trilogy of her shorter writings published by Entre Ríos Books.
A Catalogue of Risk, Alisha Mascarenhas
Publisher: Wendy’s Subway
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Alisha Mascarenhas’s A Catalogue of Risk is a volte-face of the neoliberal market economy’s construction of isolated, individual safety. In her debut book of poems, Mascarenhas lingers in the question of risk as it arises in daily life and intimacy. Through a close study and partial translation of philosopher-psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle’s Éloge du risque (2011), her poems posit risk as a fissure, through which we might imagine yet-unknown futures.
Alisha Mascarenhas (b. 1989) is a poet and translator and the author, most recently, of the chaplet Contagion Fields (Belladonna* 2021). She has contributed writing to Pamenar Press, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Recluse, Peripheral Review, and The Felt, among others. Alisha was a 2023 resident at La Baldi Artist’s Residency in Montegiovi, Italy. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she now lives.
The Star-Spangled Brand, Marcelo Morales, Kristin Dykstra (tr.)
Publisher: Veliz Books
Publication Date: January 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, translated by Kristin Dykstra, is a collection of prose poetry which tracks a city that changes–unless it does not. He began the book’s composition during the 2010s with a long poem, “The Swan II,” reflecting on everyday life and history in Havana. At the time, the world viewed Cuba as undergoing profound transformation. The end of this decade involved more large-scale shifts and conflicts, many driven by north/south relations. How would new events sculpt spaces around the love, fear, and needs of one single citizen?
Marcelo Morales (b. Cuba) began to write at the end of the “Special Period,” a euphemistic phrase referring to a time of economic, political, and social crisis in Cuba resulting from the collapse of the socialist field. In his poetry, Morales sifts through historical, political, economic, and material conditions that shape human experience. El mecanismo mudo, his extended collection of new prose poetry of which The Star-Spangled Brand is one segment, is forthcoming from Varasek Ediciones in Madrid. Morales is also the author of The World as Presence / El mundo como ser, a bilingual poetry edition from the U. of Alabama Press (2016, longlisted for the National Translation Award). His previous books of prose poetry include El círculo mágico, El mundo como objeto, Cinema, and Materia, among others; his novel, La espiral, appeared in 2006. He lives in Havana.
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of the prose poetry collection, Dissonance, winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). Veliz Books published her translation of Amanda Berenguer’s collection, The Lady of Elche, in 2023. Dykstra is principal translator of The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez, winner of the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and finalist for the National Translation Award. Her translation of 13 lunas 13, by Tina Escaja, won a Gold Medal from the International Latino Book Awards program (2023). She held a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation for her translation of Rodríguez’s Catch and Release included within the bilingual edition, Jigs and Lures, from Alliteration Publishing.
Haunch High Snow, Anastasia Stelse
Publisher: Pierian Springs Press
Publication Date: January 1, 2025
Format: Hardcover
With precise and haunting language, Anastasia Stelse’s debut poetry collection, Haunch High Snow, excavates personal and familial history. Her speakers collect and catalogue memories, people, and bones, in an attempt to understand how they fit together. While the poems span time and location, the landscape of rural Wisconsin and the house there returns again and again as a central force. There, a subtle violence thrums within the silence, an undertow of mortality highlighted by interactions with nature. A hunter feels his shot reverberate as “air and crystals of ice crack from the tree.” The children thrust “miniature fists in murky water, pulling up palms / full of mud full of critters.” The personal in these moments dances alongside the historical with a series of persona poems voiced by a resurrectionist and his network, by gods, by the sacrificed. These poems dig into the present, the past, the intricate threads that hold everything together.
Anastasia Stelse returned to Wisconsin after nearly a decade living in the South, a landscape which continues to paint her writing. She holds a BA in Archaeology and Writing from the University of Evansville; an MFA from American University; and a PhD in English, Creative Writing Emphasis from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers. Primarily a poet, she began as a fiction writer and believes in the importance of multi-genre study and practice as vital components of a writer’s education. Her poetry, fiction, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Poet Lore, Sou’wester, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative, and the Memorious Blog, among others. She currently teaches in the Business Communication Program at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/1 and 1/13 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.”