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.
Becoming Ghost, Cathy Linh Che
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Split, winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History, and Becoming Ghost. Her writing has been published in The New Republic, The Nation, and McSweeney’s and she has received awards from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She currently lives in New York City.
come from, janan alexandra
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, and through language—feeling for its limits and possibilities. come from searches for what might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward each other.
Drawing on both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker “back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parables in the form of an Arabic abecedarian, through which the speaker recovers parts of her mother tongue—invoking personal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.
come from investigates what is deeply interior while reaching toward the world with tenderness and generous attention.
janan alexandra is the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Beirut-born American father. Her life has been nothing if not peripatetic, with roots scattered in Cyprus, Pakistan, Lebanon, and many corners of the U.S. Since 2015 she has taught creative writing in community-based literacy centers and schools, working with young folks in Los Angeles, Maine, Washington DC, and Southern Indiana. A 2021-2022 Creative Research Fulbright Scholar, janan has also received support from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. You can read some of her work in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Mizna, and elsewhere in print and online. Most recently, janan has landed in New England where she teaches creative writing, organizes poetry events, and plays fiddle with the Sweet May Dews.
Son of a Bird, Nin Andrews
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
Son of a Bird is a memoir in the tradition of Dorothy Allison and Flannery O’Connor. Surrounded by farm hands and wild, lush isolation, due to constant eye surgeries, the youngest of six children, Nin Andrews observes the world at a tilt. In this collection of prose poems, hunted by death and the brutalities of farm life, Andrews begins to connect the small black dots of her upbringing–her father’s relationships with men, her mother’s autism, and the burdens of childhood awakenings–ultimately cracking through the shadows that haunt her.
Nin Andrews is the author of the six chapbooks and ten full- length poetry collections including The Last Orgasm (2020), Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook Prize, and the Gerald Cable Award. Her book, Southern Comfort, was a finalist for the Forward Prize for Poetry 2010, and her collection, Why God is a Woman won the Ohiona Prize for Poetry in 2016. Her work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, four editions of Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian writer, Henri Michaux.
Local Woman, jzl jmz
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
Enter: Local Woman, an archetypal figure, fresh from the forest into the streets of Portland, Oregon. She is a Black trans woman, seeking survival and satisfaction, giving seduction, disenfranchisement, and the contradictions of femme womanhood a face, body, and soul. In sensual, evocative lyrics, Jzl Jmz documents Local Woman’s movement through natural disaster, anti-fascist protest, romantic engagements, and an expanding sense of personal autonomy.
jzl jmz (FKA Jayy Dodd) beamed down in Los Angeles ’92 and is reuploading herself to the internet. She is the author of Mannish Tongues (2017) and The Black Condition ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books, 2019). She edited Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2 (2017) and A Portrait in Blues (2019). She has been a Lambda Literary Fellow, a Precipice Art Grant Recipient through Portland’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Artist-in-Residence at Ori Gallery, and her film and performance works have been installed & screened across the country. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
My Heresies, Alina Stefanescu
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu’s poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
Interrobang, Mary Dalton
Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The spirit of the interrobang, a punctuation mark merging the questioning and the exclamatory, informs Mary Dalton’ s compelling investigations of home and identity in this, her sixth poetry collection— in extraordinary poems of aging; of despised plants once revered; of rites and sites of community abandoned. The “ flared mouth” of Dalton’ s acclaimed musicality gives voice to lost souls and a lost sense of the earth. The collection’ s unique mix of bleakness and beauty is also reflected in various riddle and riddle-like series with their ambiguity, open-endedness, playfulness, and unexpected linguistic shifts. Interrobang movingly fuses notions of exploration — of glancing at things slant— with an emotional range that feels new and visionary. This is a steely, brilliant book from a major Canadian poet.
Mary Dalton’s volumes of poetry include Merrybegot, Red Ledger, and Hooking, as well as two prose works: the miscellany Edge and The Vernacular Strain in Newfoundland Poetry, a print version of her 2022 Pratt Lecture. Dalton’ s work has been widely anthologized in Canada and abroad. She has won numerous awards, including the E.J. Pratt Poetry Award, and been shortlisted for various others, among them the Pat Lowther Award, the Atlantic Poetry Award, and the Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. She lives in St. John’ s, Newfoundland.
One River: New and Selected Poems, Ricardo Sternberg
Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Selected from Ricardo Sternberg’s four collections, along with astonishing new poems, One River is a major event. A poet who, according to one reviewer, “ has divined the secret connections between the words,” Sternberg’s voice is unlike any other: witty, earthy, exuberant, inventive. His poems also forgo conventional subjects. Alchemists, mermaids, angels, and “ jongleur” grasshoppers share space with all manner of eccentrics: a trapeze artist, a pilot who navigates by smell, a millionaire who sneaks into heaven disguised as a camel. At the heart of Sternberg’ s practice is prestidigitation: the sleight of hand that inheres in effortless turns of phrase, brisk syntax, and bold forms. “ Leave it to me,” he says to his muse, “ to come up with something / that while not highfalutin, /carries a whiff of the sublime.” Charismatic and original, Sternberg’ s enduring work is captured in all of its extraordinary range in this new book.
Ricardo Sternberg‘s previous books include The Invention of Honey, Map of Dreams, Bamboo Church, and Some Dance. He is also the author of a book on the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. His poetry has been widely published on both sides of the border in journals such as Descant, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry (Chicago) and Ploughshares. He lives in Toronto.
Meditation on a Tooth, Kenneth Sherman
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Kenneth Sherman’s new collection are by turns lyric, ironic, and prophetic, ranging from the personal to the political. In “A Walk Along Lakeshore Drive,” and “Spy Balloon,” Sherman shows himself to be a poet who listens to the voice of Canadian soil while being attentive to the European theme of the soul in conflict with the world and time. At the centre of the collection is the powerful seven-part poem, “Meditation on a Tooth,” a work which oscillates between history and science, never wavering from its spiritual quest.
Kenneth Sherman is a Canadian poet and essayist. He has written ten books of poetry. His 2017 memoir, Wait Time, was nominated for the RBC Taylor Prize for non-fiction. He is a three-time winner of the Canadian-Jewish Book Awards.
The Installation of Fear, Jon Curley
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Installation of Fear is a relentless, furious autopsy of our contemporary social and political landscape. It offers radical honesty and critique in striking poetry for readers who admire the innovative and the experimental; those who embrace alternative visions of where we are— and where we could be, today.
Jon Curley is a poet and teacher. His poetry collections include Scorch Marks (2017), Hybrid Moments (2015), and Angles of Incidents (2012). He also wrote Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland (2011) and coedited The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller (2015). He teaches in the Humanities Department of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The Hand of the Hand, Laura Vazquez, Shira Abramovich (tr.), Lénaïg Cariou (tr.)
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Hand of the Hand brings us to a future or an alternate universe in which earth, animal, and human intertwine—where stomachs have meadows, milk pours itself over trees, and flies wash the dead. Vazquez pulls deceptively simple, bare language into puzzling formations, creating an ambient unease. By turns lyrical and absurd, The Hand of the Hand explores the mystery and strangeness of what it means to be both speech and body, tongue and dirt.
Laura Vazquez (1986–) is a French poet. A 2023 recipient of the Prix Goncourt, considered the highest literary honor in France, she has published seven poetry collections since her 2014 debut with La Main de la main, which itself won her the Prix de la Vocation for young poets. She leads the poetry journal Muscle, where she has published poets such as Cole Swensen, Kenneth Goldsmith, Michèle Métail, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Santiago Papasquiaro, and Frédéric Forte. Her poetry, characterized by its polyvocal and sonic play with spare language, has previously been translated into eight languages, not including English.
The Utopians, Grace Nissan
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Built around a sequence written entirely with language from Thomas More’s Utopia, The Utopians invents a new world, from the pieces of the old one, to formally explore the contradictions of liberation. A series of letters to Thomas More, and a poem called “THE WORLD” about Utopia’s vexed escape, encircle the remixed no-place as they elaborate Utopia’s double edge.
Grace Nissan is the author of The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books) and War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions / isolarii). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were exhibited in the 59th Venice Biennale. They received a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.
Phantom Limbs, Lee Min-ha, Jein Han (tr.)
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
First published in Korean in 2005, Phantom Limbs is Lee Min-ha’s debut book of poetry. Critically lauded for its visceral imagery and world-building through word-play, this collection of surreal and fabulistic poems reminds readers that poems are spells and incantations.
Lee Min-ha is a Korean poet based in Seoul. She is the author of five poetry collections including Phantom Limbs (『환상수족』), Musically Scandalously (『음악처럼 스캔들처럼』), Imitation Woods (『모조 숲』), and All the Secrets of the World (『세상의 모든 비밀』). Her most recent book, Microclimate (『미기후』), received the Jihun Award and Sanghwa Award.
Footprints, Es Lv
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Methodical, restrained, and intimate, Es Lv’s footprints is a space for accounts of worlds that have existed, for the rawness of the worlds we live in, and for worlds we can write into existence. The poems gather narrative, perception, imagination, and formal intricacy, exploring how their confluences might reframe each other. The collection embraces environments as holders of meaning and the wisdom of spaciousness.
Es Lv’s poems are invitations to build together, connections and worlds. Born into a Taiwan under martial law, they have lived many places and through various occupations. In art framing, in solidarity movements, in seasonal work, and many others. In their writing live those nested sensibilities, generative tensions, and the camaraderie. And much luck.
From the Founding of the Country, Cristina Pérez Díaz
Publisher: Winter Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Taking root in the discordant influences of Walt Whitman and Puerto Rican poet Manuel Ramos Otero, and in the exposed cracks of the nation-building project, The Founding of The Country is simultaneously utopian dream and post-colonial critique. The long poem tells a fragmentary narrative of two lovers—one languid and liquid, the other sharp as exclamation points—who are also two nations bound in a horrendous love. Whitman’s athletics finds itself dismembered in the impossibility of the colonial situation. The non-optimistic voice takes over to renounce the hopes of tamable landscapes and sings the erasure of the tropes of foundational histories.
Puerto Rican writer and translator Cristina Pérez Díaz holds a PhD in Classics from Columbia University and a Masters in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her critical bilingual edition of José Watanabe’s Antígona was published by Routledge and won the 2023 ASTR Translation Prize. She has published two chapbooks of poetry in Spanish: Adentro crían pájaros (Parawa) and Nueva anatomía imaginaria (La impresora). Her poems and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Hayden’s Ferry, Eterna Cadencia, and Periódico de Poesía, among other journals. She teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras).
Requiem: & Other Poems, Aharon Shabtai, Peter Cole (Tr.)
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the incantatory “I’m Sad,” the great Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai wails: “I’m sad, / sad, sad /about the dead, /I’m sad /about the dead /about the dead, /about the wounded, /sad /about the homes / sad, /sad, sad /also about the fork /thrown onto the floor, /about the bulbs, /burnt-out and broken /or left behind, /still alive / dangling from the ceiling …” Long one of the most outspoken Israeli critics of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as “one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today” (Ha’aretz). Though some may feel that this is not the time for Israeli voices, others believe change must come from within as well as from pressures from outside Israel.
Born in 1939 and educated on a kibbutz, and at the Hebrew University, the Sorbonne, and Cambridge, Aharon Shabtai is the author of sixteen books of poetry and the greatest contemporary translator into Hebrew of Greek drama.
Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is The Invention of Influence, which follows his remarkable collection Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. His previous volumes—Rift and Hymns & Qualms—were collected as What Is Doubled: Poems, 1981–1998. In addition to his ND books with Aharon Shabtai and Yoel Hoffmann, Cole’s translations from Hebrew and Arabic include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492, Taha Muhammad Ali’s So What: New & Selected Poems 1973–2005, Avraham Ben Yitzhak’s Collected Poems, and The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition. With Adina Hoffman, he is the author of a volume of non-fiction, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Cole has received numerous honors for his work, including fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Translation Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut.
Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, Hank Lazer
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
Portions, spirit, elegy, lyrics, awakenings, sutra, serendipity, loss, mindedness, rebelling, reveling, unraveling, sounderings, melody, offkey, noisily, rhythm, negation, improvisation, abandon, deflection, renewal, cascade, cadence, grace, weaving, enigma, shekinah: a door, a jar. These are a few of his favorite things. — Charles Bernstein Hank Lazer’ s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems shows how Lazer thinks with and through writing. All of it is literally experimental in that each new project is a challenge he gives himself, a way to experience life differently. Here we have his “ shape writing” but also short, jagged lyrics reminiscent of Creeley, and long narrative poems about losing one’ s parents. What unites this work is Lazer’ s joint commitment to mindfulness (a quest to find the sacred within the everyday) and to relationality, to dialogue. His books arise and exist in conversation with others: philosophers— such as Levinas and Merleau-Ponty— as well as Zen monks, and admired poets including Emily Dickinson and Creeley. This work may be heady, but it is also deeply human. — Rae Armantrout
Hank Lazer has published thirty-five books of poetry, including his most recent, As We Vanish from Public View (7 Points Press) and field recordings of mind in morning (with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo – available on YouTube). Along with Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, Lazer has published a companion volume of essays, poetics, and interviews: What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006– 2024 (Lavender Ink). In April 2015, Lazer was selected for the state of Alabama’s highest literary award, the Harp.
Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood, Emily Bright
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
With a journalist’ s eye for detail and a poet’ s capacity for won- der, Bright captures the intense moments of early motherhood. Here are the worry and the fierce delight, the 3 a.m. wake-ups, and the floor strewn with Cheerios. These poems read like snapshots, freeze-framing days that feel both fleeting and unending, even while the rest of the poet’ s life hums in the background, waiting for its turn to thrive.
Emily Bright is a weekend host for MPR News, where she also covers arts and books. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota and a BA from Williams College. She is the author of a chapbook, Glances Back, and co-author of Powerful Ideas in Teaching: Creating Environments Where Students Want to Learn. She lives in the Twin Cities with her family.
Again, Charles Douthat
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Again, Charles Douthat charts a profound journey through love, loss, and the complicated grace of survival. Moving from childhood’s luminous moments to the raw territories of grief, these elegies for his parents and sister transform personal sorrow into a larger meditation on how family shapes and haunts us: “They were gone for good. They light my way.” With remarkable tenderness, Douthat explores the ways we carry those we’ve lost, finding in memory not just pain but also unexpected mercy. From California beach towns to New England woodlands, these poems remind us that even our deepest wounds can open into moments of startling beauty and revelation.
Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist. His first book of poems, Blue for Oceans, won the PEN New England Award. His new book, Again, chosen by Peter Campion for Unbound Edition Press, is forthcoming in 2025. Born, raised and educated in California, Charles has lived in Connecticut for many years.
Groom, Austin Segrest
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Groom, Austin Segrest confronts the intricate architecture of memory and power, examining how formative relationships shape and alter us. Through a masterful sequence that moves between past and present, these poems map the complicated territory where mentorship blurs into manipulation, where desire tangles with control. With striking clarity and remarkable formal precision, Segrest explores how we process and survive what shapes us, transforming a difficult personal history into art that reveals that “someone has heard.”
Austin Segrest is the author of Door to Remain, winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and the Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award. Originally from Alabama, he lives in Appleton, Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University. His poetry appears in Poetry Magazine, VQR, The Common, The Yale Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. He was a 2018-19 poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Time, & Its Monuments, Matthew Cooperman
Publisher: Station Hill Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Human folly is to believe our ziggurat is real, a really long time. But as the founder of modern geology Sir George Lyell declared only as recently as 1830, “ Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’ s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them.” Watching the days go by, we write, we build, we grasp, we render frangible towers in the sky. Matthew Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument captures this eroded sequence by tracking signs of human impermanence: solve et coagula, the inevitable falling away and coming together of all matter, how and what we watch, and who, and the collaborative acts of empathy by which humans might, if not extend, meaningfully ornament the Anthropocene. These are prose poems, cut ups, necessary collages. They vary in such matters as Wittgenstein, the panopticon, and the Gulf Wars to the poetics of drought emerging through erasure with Ed Dorn’s The Shoshoneans, his famous study of the Great Basin. Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument frames the artifacts of the human set: “ in the long run recurrence / the stacking of shells / days certain seasons / the steeple accrues.”
Poet, critic, editor, educator, Matthew Cooperman’s work explores the inter-disciplinary boundaries of poetry, ethnography, ecopoetics and visual arts. He is the author of, most recently, Wonder About The (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023), winner of the Halcyon Prize. Other works include NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), w/Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), & Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016). Matthew Cooperman is a Professor of English at Colorado State University, and lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, & their children.
Broke Stay Broke, Stafford Stafford
Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
Publication Date: May 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Before becoming an educator, Tim Stafford worked as a telemarketer, burger flipper, jiu-jitsu instructor, MMA referee, and print shop lackey. His book, Broke Stay Broke explores the world of the working poor, the world of second jobs, side-hustles, and accumulated debt. Stafford’s poems are filled with insight and humor from someone who has lived through the struggle but still finds time to celebrate the come-ups. Through these poems, Tim illustrates the delicate balancing act of work, relationships, fatherhood, and art. Sometimes he gets it right, sometimes wrong, but the poems are always honest.
Tim Stafford is a poet and educator from Lyons, IL. He is the editor of the “Learn Then Burn” anthology series (Write Bloody) and he is the author of the collection The Patron Saint of Making Curfew (Haymarket Books). As a former Chicago Poetry Slam Champion, he has performed at festivals throughout the US and Europe including the German National Poetry Slam, WOERDZ Festival (Switzerland), and the International Spoken Word Festival (Germany). He currently teaches at a restorative justice-based alternative high school in Cook County, IL and teaches poetry workshops all over the country.
Wickerwork, Christian Lehnert, Richard Sieburth (Tr.)
Publisher: Archipelago
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
Wickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.
Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”
With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.
Christian Lehnert was born in Dresden in 1969. Since 1995 he has published poetry with Suhrkamp Verlag, and in literary journals, including German Academy of Arts’ Sinn und Form. In 2010, Lehnert’s libretto for Hans Werner Henze’s opera Phaedra was performed at the Barbican. Lehnert’s work has been awarded several prizes including the Eichendorff Prize in 2016, and the German Prize for Nature Writing in 2018. He is the head of the Liturgical Studies department at the University of Leipzig.
Richard Sieburth is a translator from French and German, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He has gained recognition for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Sieburth is the editor of multiple volumes of Ezra Pound’s writings and translations.
Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, Angie Estes
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
A dedication to the transformative power of language itself defines Estes’ Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City. These poems excavate Baudelairean correspondences – secret relations in the world of things – reveling in the ways that etymology uncovers the ancient life of language, even as the play and slippages of language access alternative modes of being.
In his poem “A Song on the End of the World,” Czeslaw Milosz evokes an apocalypse that is grounded in the quotidian and intimate: “There will be no other end of the world.” Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City enacts this intimate apocalypse as two women forge a “Song of the End of the World” that looks both backward and defiantly, improbably, forward.
Language in this work becomes a way of moving across, questioning time and culture. Somewhere between seduction and annihilation, between Pavlov and Pavlova (as one poem puts it), at the end of days, of light, what are the words we would want to speak?
Angie Estes is the author of seven books of poems. Among her many honors are the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poets, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her book Tryst was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. She has received fellowships from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?, Anne Kaier
Publisher: Nine Mile Arts
Publication Date: April 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
How Can I Say it Was Not Enough? is a generous book. Let’s say for argument’s sake that poetry readers are, even in the twenty-first century, eager to find community on the page. The generosity I’m describing must always remain invitational. If the body is unreliable, if abjection remains a lifelong struggle, then the imagination should of necessity suggest something beyond mere confession. Empathetic visions are what’s called for in every aspect of life. Kaier’s poems deliver.
Anne Kaier‘s memoir, They Said I Couldn’t Have a Love Life, was a finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize. Her essays have appeared widely in venues such as The Kenyon Review, 1966 Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the anthology About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of The New York Times. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies including the 2012 ALA Notable Book Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.
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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.
Book Excerpt: Challenger by Colleen S. Harris
“If we look beyond the voyeuristic tendency to focus on the tragedy, what might we see? This poem was a chance for me to zoom in on the calm before the storm.” New poem from Colleen S. Harris’s new book from Main Street Rag, The Light Becomes Us, along with words from the poet..
Chapbook Poem: What I Did This Summer by Elinor Serumgard
“I love New Year’s and the promise of a new start, but I like to remind myself that you can start fresh at any point throughout the year.” New poem from Elinor Serumgard’s chapbook from Bottlecap Press, Analogous Annum, along with words from the poet.
Four Poems by Christa Fairbrother
“Since women aren’t allowed the power of our anger, we take it out on each other, and that’s what this poem is hinting at.” Read four poems by Christa Fairbrother, along with words from the poet.