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.
Close Escapes, Stephen Kuusisto
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“Never ‘in’ time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”
Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, Letters to Borges, Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? and, most recently, Someone Falls Overboard: Talking Through Poems with Ralph James Savarese. His memoir Planet of the Blind was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has since been followed by Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey. A Guggenheim fellow and Fulbright Scholar, Kuusisto has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Animal Planet. His daily blog, Planet of the Blind, is read globally by people interested in disability and contemporary culture. Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s interdisciplinary programs in disability at Syracuse University, where he holds a University Professorship.
Crane, Tessa Bolsover
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Interweaving distilled prose and shardlike verse, Crane reexamines two figures from Greco-Roman myth: Cardea, the little-known goddess of hinges, and Echo, the nymph whose body is transformed into reflective sound. Constellating personal narrative, etymological fragments, and meditations on language, the book’s first section unearths a poetics of the hinge. The second section, “Delay Figure,” investigates the relationality of sound, the affective capacities of the nonlinguistic voice, and the dissolution of the desiring body, taking as its guiding figure the aural phenomena of echoes as well as their mythological personification. “Inlet,” the book’s final section, is a sequence of lyric poems that revolve around questions of time, detritus, and transformation, tracing ellipses of intimacy and illness, duration, and ecological precarity. Crane is at once an elegy and a meditation on liminality, envisioning the threshold as a site saturated both with violence and dynamic mutability.
Tessa Bolsover is a poet based in Durham, NC. She holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Duke. She is also a founding editor of the publishing project auric press. Crane is her first book.
night myths; before the body, Abi Pollokoff
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
What are the stories we tell our bodies about our bodies? What are the myths we tell ourselves about ourselves? night myths • • before the body illuminated the dichotomies contemporary women grapple with every day: identity and expectation, self-preservation and doubt, freedom and entrapment, wildness and cultivation. By dissolving the boundaries between the body and the natural world, Abi Pollokoff’s evocative debut deconstructs the essence of womanhood, carrying the reader into a communing at once vulnerable and insistent. night myths • • before the body is a resounding interrogation of being human in a post-human world.
Abi Pollokoff is a poet, editor, and book artist. Her work has appeared in publications such as TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, and Guernica, and in such installations as the Summit Sound, the Seattle Convention Center sound installation. Abi was named a 2021 Jack Straw Writer and a 2019 Hugo Fellow. She has held residencies from the Seventh Wave, the Seattle Review of Books and the Alice Gallery. In 2012, Abi won the Anselle M. Larson/Academy of American poets Prize for Tulane University, judged by Caryl Pagel. She was a finalist for the 2022 Coniston Prize, judged by Dorianne Laux, and the 2022 Gatewood Prize, judged by Julie Carr, and a semifinalist for the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poem “aubade” was a finalist for the 2019 Omnidawn Broadside Contest, judged by Dan Beachy-Quick. In addition to her own writing, Abi is the managing editor of Poetry Northwest Editions and works in publishing. Abi received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, by way of Seattle, New Orleans and the Chicagoland area.
Alibi Lullaby, Norma Cole
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Alibi, in Latin, meant “elsewhere,” and “lullaby”—from lull, to soothe, and bye, near, close by—has elements linguistic elements that appear across cultures. Music, from ancient songs recorded on tables to contemporary compositions, share related framing elements that have persisted across time: formal patterns and rhythms, peaceful and hypnotic movements, and elements of terror arising from the moving frontier of “thrill, dread, certainty.”
In this collection, Norma Cole considers the ancient and transcendent patterns of music, finding them through nature, heart sounds, the spectral elegance of blood flow, the murmur of melody, and many diverse patterns and beats. Sounds of summer, massacres, “empathy through distress,” unknowing, energy, suspense, and fragility echo throughout the poems and other writings. Drawing on a poetics that embraces formal freefall and looks forward while holding up the shifting mirror of memory, Alibi Lullaby is a lyrical montage at the edges of musicality.
Norma Cole is the author of poetry books including Fate News, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will, Collective Memory, Spinoza in Her Youth, and Actualities, a collaboration with painter Marina Adams. Her translations from French include works by Danielle Collobert and Jean Daive. Cole has published poems in literary magazines including Gramma, Posit, BrooklynRail, Art in America, Hambone, Sulfur, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies such as American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. Cole was born in Toronto, Canada, and she lives in San Francisco.
Time and Chance, Katharine Coles
Publisher: Turtle Point Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Majestic, playful, brainy, heart-wrenching, Katharine Coles’s tenth collection of poems at once celebrates and elegizes: her teachers and parents—both dead at ninety—who still issue advice (some good, some not) from beyond the grave; the creatures who pass through her canyon quarter-acre; the moon as it rises and sets; even her Levi’s shrink-to-fits, when she realizes she’ll never wear out another pair. The poems “guide us with their empathy, sometimes yoked with a wry irony, around the physics of interactions.” [John Kinsella] More than anything, this is a book about presence: haunted by the past yet firmly rooted in the also-haunting now, Coles keeps spinning, finding herself in words, in her body, in time.
Time and Chance is Katharine Coles’s tenth collection of poems. Turtle Point Press also published her collection (Solve for) X , her collection of essays, The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing, and her memoir, Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-flung Path. A Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and poetics, she has received grants and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the US National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writer Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
That Broke into Shining Crystals, Richard Scott
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Trauma and vulnerability – violation and its aftershock – are explored within a framework of self-determination and radical queerness in Richard Scott’s second collection. In three distinct yet interlocking parts, he documents what it is to have survived ‘seismic assaults, the buried silences’. This is first pursued through still-life paintings: controlled arrangements in which time is frozen. In ‘Coy’, the lexicon of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is repurposed to enact the collapse of language under the pressure of description. In the luminous title sequence, crystals and gemstones evoke themes of fracture and fixative, demonstrating Scott’s power as a poet who casts an uncompromising but ultimately uplifting light.
Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His debut collection, Soho, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Polari First Book Prize. He teaches poetry at the Faber Academy and is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s second full-length collection, Rodeo, is personal yet expansive, as Wilkinson carries her readers through sorrow and confusion, reckoning with seismic losses such as a stillborn son and strained relationships, alongside more abstract and existential pains. In the rural and wild western mountains of northern Utah and throughout the American West, Wilkinson finds solace, uncovering startling moments of hope and healing in the aftermath of suffering.
Throughout Rodeo, Wilkinson masterfully employs forms like the sonnet, sestina, abecedarian, and epistle to bring wholeness in the midst of fracture. Even while staring clear-eyed at its wounds, the collection resists being swallowed by grief, instead celebrating and meditating on the natural world and its vibrancy, including skunks and owls, horses and cows, wildflowers and grasses. The collection presents a full cycle of mourning and healing, beginning “Sometimes you hold your own hand. / That’s all there is to take” and concludes by reaching out from isolation toward connection with “a hand / for one moment holding / another hand.
Drawing from the traditions of poets like Theodore Roethke and Mary Oliver and embodying the interconnectedness between land and spirit, individual and community, Rodeo is a powerful rekindling of hope.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections Rodeo (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Autumn House Press) and The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press), as well as the chapbook The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has been awarded the New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, the Sherwin Howard Award, and the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and teaches at Weber State University. Born and raised in Logan, UT, she now lives in Pleasant View, UT, with her husband and three sons.
The Men Who Killed My Mother | Los hombres que mataron a mi madre : Poetry | Poesía (Bilingual edition), Fernando Valverde, Gordon E. McNeer (Tr.)
Publisher: Swan Isle Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
From the first poem in this bilingual edition of The Men Who Killed My Mother, it is evident that the mother in “Our Mother” (“Nuestra Madre”) is not only Fernando Valverde’s. The soulful refrain of “mother/madre” might be anyone’s mother whose suffering is palpable in a world legislated over by men. Issues such as orphanhood, abuse, violence, manipulation, and fear are treated with the rawness of someone who has tasted the venom of betrayal. This is a lyrical dark garden of faith and family, exposing treachery and cruelty, and anger at injustice, from the voice of a son with deep love for his mother—for her honor, dignity, and dreams.
Valverde leads us into a forest full of wolves and serpents under the governance of civil society. He has received many awards for his poetry and is recognized as one of the most highly acclaimed poets of his generation in Spain. This heartfelt English translation by Gordon E. McNeer captures the power of Valverde’s poetic cadences and its haunting evocative lyricism.
Fernando Valverde is an award-winning poet, journalist, critic, and associate professor of Spanish and poetry at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several poetry collections, and his works have been translated into several languages, including his most recent book, America.
Gordon E. McNeer is a distinguished poet and translator of poetry. He is professor of Spanish at the University of North Georgia. His most recent book is Poemas mexicanos.
Westminster West, Chard deNiord
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: April 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. Chard deNiord divines “the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same.” From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as “Skywriting Over The Rockies,” “With A Bone In My Heart,” and “I Call Out To You,” this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called “each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay” and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls “dust in love.”
Ambitious and masterful, deNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to “the other,” whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a “negative capability” that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it.
Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to “the harsh advice of loss” to the memory of a young couple’s transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry’s irony and blessing.
Chard deNiord is the author of six books of poetry: In My Unknowing, Interstate, The Double Truth, Speaking In Turn with Tony Sanders, Night Mowing, Sharp Golden Thorn, and Asleep In The Fire. He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets: Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century Poetry and I Would Lie To You If I Could.
Nebulous Vertigo, Belle Ling
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: April 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
The realm that belongs to Nebulous Vertigo is both visceral and vibrant, and it is mysteriously familiar. If you come close to it, you will hear how rains eat, how a silken tofu revolts, how the Chinese word for “beans” turns into a speaking persona, and how a telephone bridges the surviving and the afterlife. In Nebulous Vertigo, everyday life is inevitably lost to the inevitable fate. And yet, with unexpected quivers, our fate and life keep surprising us.
Traveling through the cha chaan teng in Hong Kong, you can hear how Mrs. Suen, Mr. Yuen, and Waiter Kuen carry out intriguing conversations; astounded by the night sky in Paris, you will see how constellations narrate the lovers’ quirky destiny; and all the way through the Sayama Hills in Tokorozawa, you will be surprised by the turnings and upturnings of the myths told by a Japanese Uncle. Nebulous Vertigo, as its title beckons, “sighs an unreal cloud / for the fated sun to rise.” If fate can never be changed, how can we embrace its weaving? Every attempt, as the poems suggest, can be calmingly adventurous, unobvious yet magnanimous.
Belle Ling was born and grew up in Hong Kong, China, and has lived in Australia. Her poems have won a number of awards, including the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Merit Scholarship of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and the Playa Residency Fellowship in Oregon. She is also the author of A Seed and a Plant and holds a masters of creative writing from the University of Sydney and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Queensland. She teaches at the University of Hong Kong.
dormilona, Connie Mae Oliver
Publisher: Burrow Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
dormilona is a bilingual book of poetry exploring dream states, distance, and the rituals of sleep. In this collection, the fluidity of language reflects the elusive nature of time and memory, centering on matrilineal consciousness and variable notions of home. The ancient forests surrounding Mount Roraima and the bright pink sands of Playa Colorada inhabit the speaker’s dreams, and in these topographies, she finds harmony with brain wave patterns drawn from sleep studies. Meaning both “nightgown” and “sleepyhead” in Venezuelan Spanish, dormilona weaves a neural network linking sleep to matrilineal memory, time, and geography.
Connie Mae Oliver is a poet and artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her first book of poems, Cosmos A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan Ann Druyan Steven Soter And Me (Operating System, 2017) is about nuclear disarmament. Her second book, Science Fiction Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) is an homage to Miami-Dade County and color photography in the early aughts. Her first novel, Close Encounters, is forthcoming in 2026 from Texas Review Press.
We Look Better Alive, Ali Black
Publisher: Burnside Review Press
Publication Date: April 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
“‘Back then, I didn’t know words / could keep Black women alive.’ Alive talking to the dead across the threshold of death. Alive under lights and music. Alive with words in her mouth and hand. Ali Black writes right into deep zones of feeling. Havoc, sorrow, isolation, togetherness, desire—often all at once. Line after line an assertion of breath carrying its range of memories, details, and astonishments, like: ‘She look so good alive / the bush behind her…’ Black’s words blessing the living with all that daring, honest looking. And blessing the dead, keeping them alive by the utter force of her attention.” —Aracelis Girmay
Ali Black is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of We Look Better Alive (Burnside Review Press, 2025) and If It Heals at All (Jacar Press, 2020), which was selected by Jaki Shelton Green for the New Voices Series and named a finalist for the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, jubilat, Literary Hub, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Balance Point Studios, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making, teaching, and sharing art.
Fourth and Walnut, Jeremy Over
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: April 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Equal parts commonplace book, instruction manual and cheerful vandalism, Fourth & Walnut is absurdly joyful, gathering together words from a wide range of favourite writers and artists, erasing some and fooling with others as variations on themes and tunes are tried out.
‘Advice to a Young Poet’ opens happily with the news that Rilke can be ignored. ‘ Equinox in a Box’ records a day spent gazing upwards in a James Turrell skyspace while the mind remembers, dreams and wanders out of the box.
Interludes on love and death deviate into a sequence promising an essay on reading and unpredictability, which is in turn distracted by counting snowdrops, shellacking cardboard boxes and the urge to take flight.
The book ends with an erasure of an Edwardian book for children on the ‘ art of seeing’ , revealing alternative vistas by looking within, and teasing, the language.
Beyond the whimsy, what the book seeks are the precise coordinates of heaven which Thomas Merton found in Louisville, on the corner of Fourth and Walnut. The search is, we learn, a kaleidoscopic and playful process of collage, digression and invention.
Jeremy Over was born in Leeds in 1961. His poetry was first published in New Poetries II. There followed three Carcanet collections: A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese, Deceiving Wild Creatures and Fur Coats in Tahiti. He currently lives on a hill near Llanidloes in the middle of Wales.
Birds I Cannot Name, Damien Uriah
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Part ritual, part reclaiming of self, the poems in Birds I Cannot Name offer up a chorus of voices in sometimes discordant harmony. Beginning in the Oklahoma Ozarks and migrating toward the Pacific Northwest, this debut collection sings with reverence for the natural world while reckoning with the limits of human community. Damien Uriah crafts a vision of a landscape rooted in liminal spaces that feels deeply mysterious yet mystically familiar.
Damien Uriah is a poet, teacher, regenerative farmer, and musician. Their work can be found in Cimarron Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Thrush, Heron Tree, About Place Journal, and many other publications. Damien grew up on the Cherokee Nation side of the Ozark mountains and has lived, written, and worked in various places, including in their second land-love, the Pacific Northwest. Currently a professor of writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, Damien lives with his wife and many plants and animals on a small eco-farm near his childhood home in Northeastern Oklahoma.
Fearless Now & Nameless, Jon Davis
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Papeerback
In Jon Davis’s latest collection, Fearless Now & Nameless, the poet directs his keen eye toward the ironies on which this life so often depends—the failures of language, the violence of nature, the indifference of death. “Is that what spirit is?” he wonders, considering the nature of birds, the thrasher, the finch “humping in the eaves. Gathering straw and string. / Laying the griefstuck delicate eggs.” As we read, we find our own eyes grow sharper, better able to take it all in.
With echoes of Blake and Dickinson, intimations of Stevens, and whispers of Derrida, Davis gives us a poetry that is playful, raging, and melancholic, sometimes all at once. Fearless Now & Nameless was written for this treacherous and timeless moment.
Jon Davis is the author of six chapbooks and seven previous full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Choose Your Own America (Finishing Line, 2022). Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry; Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic; Poetry is Bread; Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene; Poet’s Choice; Sixty Years of American Poetry; The Best of the Prose Poem; No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets; and Telling Stories: A Writer’s Anthology and have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, and Vietnamese. He performs in the poetry + rock band Clap the Houses Dark. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, two at Salisbury University and twenty-eight at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA, which he directed until his retirement in 2018. From 2012–2014, he served as the City of Santa Fe’s fourth poet laureate.
Chance of Lightning, Kristin Robertson
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Publication Date: April 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Chance of Lightning is a precarious love letter that wagers mystery against easy answers and unflinching vulnerability against inevitable misfortune. Sonnets, prose poems, and experiments in lyrical verse create a world of imaginary lottery winners—from a man who invests his windfall in a dove-release business to a woman who tracks down every person she’s ever kissed—and explore themes of birth, death, loss, and survival.
Kristin Robertson’s Surgical Wing was published by Alice James Books in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Harvard Review, among other journals. Kristin is an assistant professor of writing and literature at Mercer University and lives in Georgia with her husband and daughter.
Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (Bilingual edition), Nasser Rabah, Ammiel Alcalay (Tr.)
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: April 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.
This is Rabah’s first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza.
Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah’s poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one’s relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates—sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair—the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.
This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.
Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2011); Passersby with Light Clothes (2014); Water Thirsty for Water (2017); Eulogy for the Robin (2021), and two novels, Since approximately an hour (2018), and The Enclosure of the Gazelle (2024). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French and Hebrew. He lives in Gaza.
Poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar Ammiel Alcalay‘s over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books, and Follow the Person: Archival Encounters.
Emna Zghal is a visual artist and professional interpreter with an acute sense of poetry in a number of languages.
Khaled al-Hilli is a life-long student of the Arabic language and grammar and now professor of Arabic whose own life journey has immersed him in various Arabic milieus, from Iraqi to Lebanese and Levantine. He lives in New York City.
The Crossroad, Pat Williams Owen
Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in The Crossroad explore memory, loss, the nature of our irredeemably human existence. Like Our Town, these poems see the timeless in the everyday. They remind us to pay attention to the details of our fleeting lives.The Crossroad is one woman’s journey, every woman’s journey.
Pat Williams Owen is the author of four poetry books, including The Crossroad (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2025), Bardo of Becoming (Accents Publishing, 2022), Orion’s Belt at the End of the Drive (Accents Publishing, 2019), and Crossing the Sky Bridge (Larkspur Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, Highland Park Poetry, The Hong Kong Review, The Louisville Review, Raven’s Perch, other print and online literary journals, and several anthologies. She was a finalist in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition and an award winner in the Chautauqua Writers’ Center 2020 Literary Arts Contest.
Lone Yellow Flower, Erika Gill
Publisher: Querencia Press
Publication Date: April 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Rendered in pigeon wing and trachea, worm and teeth, incense and exhaust, Erika Gill’s Lone Yellow Flower manifests the world-ragged, raw, and beautiful-as scrying pools to peer into interiority, to see love and rage and sorrow riot, writhe, and swirl. This is a book for anyone who has stood before the opened earth and let the scent of loam take them elsewhere, for anyone who has cut their palm and saw there an unspoken language. “a millstone at my neck / toss me in the mossy pond / my craft would make me float” -Todd Dillard, author of Ways We Vanish and Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance
Erika Gill (they/them) lives, writes and builds community on unceded Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Ochéthi Sakówi?, hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-t?v?-p?_ (Ute) land in Denver, Colorado. Erika is the Editor in Chief of Alternative Milk Magazine, an independent biannual literary and art magazine. In different lives, Erika has been a flight attendant, social media manager, actor, bartender and a music journalist. They grew up longest in Victorville, CA, which is notable only in being the filming location of The Hills Have Eyes. Erika’s poetry may be found in Rigorous, MORIA, Birdy, and other spaces. This is their first collection of poetry.
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Contents
Book Excerpt: The Prize of Québec by Jennifer Nelson
“I tend to lean into the transconstitutory powers of ekphrasis. … Only in poetry can one go to the moon in a way that critiques the quest for the moon.” Read a poem from Jennifer Nelson’s new collection from Fence Books, On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies.
Chapbook Poem: This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . by Shanta Lee
“This poem explores the levels of our participation in handing ourselves over, often to the people, places, or things that deserve no such delight.” Read a #poem from Shanta Lee’s new book from Harbor Editions, This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . The Slaughter.
Three Poems by Jonathan Fletcher
“Instead of having to choose between religion or the LGBTQ community (which I know many member of the latter feel they have to do), I think it is possible (and maybe even biblical) to integrate both into one’s life.” Read three original poems from Jonathan Fletcher, along with words from the author.
What Happened? On You are Leaving the American Sector by Rebecca Foust
“Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook of poems has a strange prescience. … Foust isn’t alone in making the obvious connection between Trump’s first term and Orwell’s dystopia.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor Rick Mullin.
‘What if we started creating together? What if we looked at who we are from the side and saw a much more complete and honest perspective?” Read four poems by poet Sarah E N Kohrs, along with words from the poet.