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.
Late to the Search Party, Steven Espada Dawson
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.
Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.
A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.
Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is a former Ruth Lilly Fellow and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow. His poems appear in many journals and have been anthologized in Best New Poets, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, and Sarabande’s Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance. He has taught creative writing at universities, libraries, and prisons across the country. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he serves as poet laureate.
One Big Time, Lisa Fishman
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Here is the author at her most exacting and exploratory, in poems that hew with lyric precision to the immediate physical and geologic environment. At the same time, language is an alert, mobile life-form in active investigation of what one thinks one understands, and of where one thinks one is. While the poet quests daily for a passageway from one body of water into another, words live in other words (“the hemlock / is a he / today”), and acrostics are illuminations: s-w-i-m is “sleek widening instant’s magnet.” Surprised by joy, these biocentric poems offer a way of being in the world with wonder and rigor––attentive enough to be lost, unknowing enough to be changed.
Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, a short story collection, and several chapbooks. Her newest poetry book is One Big Time, out on Wave Books in spring, 2025. World Naked Bike Ride was published in Canada by Gaspereau Press in 2022 and was a finalist for the Canadian ReLit Award in short fiction. Other Wave poetry titles are Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (2020) and 24 Pages and other poems (2015). Fishman is also the author of three books on Ahsahta Press: F L O W E R C A R T (2011); The Happiness Experiment (2007); and Dear, Read (2002); the latter was selected by Brenda Hillman as a finalist for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Fishman’s other books are Current (Parlor Press, 2011) and The Deep Heart’s Core is a Suitcase (New Issues Press, 1996).
Enter, Jim Moore
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood—parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages—and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry’s tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. “Please show me how to be you,” he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poet tapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.
Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being “grazed upon by earth.” Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: “I find words. I write of love.”Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems farfetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being ‘grazed upon by earth.” Yet Jim Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: “I find words. I write of love.”
Jim Moore is the author of eight books of poetry, including Underground, Invisible Strings, and Prognosis. His poetry has appeared in the Nation, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy.
Fuel, Rosie Stockton
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Traversing multivalent intimacies from the underworld of California’s Central Valley oil fields to the quotidian domestic and love’s painful retraction, Stockton’s poems articulate the blurry modes of extraction, fantasy, loss, gender, and labor as they interact and overlap in the shadow of environmental and personal collapse. Between gas station gifts, Venmo requests, and nocturnal love letters, Fuel unravels the self and violent systems of domination, longing for a togetherness that transcends its own ending.
Rosie Stockton is a poet based in Los Angeles. Their first book, Permanent Volta, is the recipient of the 2019 Sawtooth Prize, and was published by Nightboat Books in 2021. Their poems have been published by Publication Studio, VOLT, Jubilat, Apogee, Mask Magazine, and WONDER. They hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and are currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA.
Bitter Creek: An Epic Poem, Teow Lim Goh
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
In September of 1885, the Chinese coal miners who were brought into Wyoming as strikebreakers were ambushed and driven out of the town of Rock Springs at gunpoint by white coal miners. Bitter Creek revisits this dark episode—known today as the Rock Springs Massacre—revealing the stories beneath this violent, decade-long culmination of labor struggles and racial hostilities in the Union Pacific Coal Mines.
Through the eyes of the struggling railroad workers, their families, and the corporation working them to the bone, Teow Lim Goh creates an ode to buried history that blends epic tradition with modern composition and astonishing empathy to ask the question, “What turns ordinary people into monsters?”
Teow Lim Goh is a poet and essayist who writes from the nexus of people and place. One of her ongoing projects is to recover the histories of Chinese immigrants in the American West. She is the author of two previous poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and her essay collection Western Journeys (2022) was a finalist for the 2023 Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction. She is based in Denver, CO.
The Lost Nostalgias, Esteban Rodriguez
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
With a narrative voice that translates the unforgettable into something lyrical and magical, The Lost Nostalgias demonstrates Esteban Rodríguez’s exploration of familial moments that move between the tragic, the trivial, and the triumphant. A mother’s decaying teeth lead to questions of self-care and beauty; a quinceañera becomes a meditation on masculinity; a visit to the bank illuminates a father’s existential fears; and a rave suddenly becomes a reflection on migration and survival. Because nothing is off the table under Rodríguez’s tender lens, everything and everyone becomes deserving of admiration, dignity, and love.
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería, and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AG.
Heritage Aesthetics, Anthony Anaxagorou
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
What does it mean to have ‘heritage’, and how do we perform or undo it?
In these daring and sonorous poems, Anaxagorou conducts a researched unpacking of two countries whose dividing lines of a colonial past are still visible and felt.
Uniquely engaged with the complexities of Cyprus and the diasporic experience, these poems map both an island’s public history alongside a person’s private reckoning. They offer a ferocious and uncompromising look towards the damaging historical structures that have led to now.
Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony’s gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.
The Mother Self, Talia Gutin
Publisher: She Writes Press
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Mother Self is a collection of poetry that poignantly unveils the journey of a new mother navigating the complexities of early motherhood. Accessible and engaging, each poem captures a mother’s delicate dance as she embraces her new identity and grieves her past self, all while finding solace in the sacred bond with her son. Readers are invited to explore the beauty and challenges of this period of life with grace and authenticity and to linger in the quiet spaces of a mother’s heart, where love and loss intertwine and a meaningful journey of growth unfolds.
This collection weaves the universal themes of presence, nature, loss, and transformation. It guides readers on a path of healing and empowerment and offers a comforting hand through the transformative power of words. More than a collection of poems, it is a companion for new and seasoned mothers as they turn each page, nodding in recognition.
Talia Gutin is a writer, certified Life Coach (PCC), and mother. She received her master’s degree from New York University, where she studied psychology and creative writing, combining her love of language with a deep curiosity for the human psyche. She is the lead coach at Mindful Marriage and Family Therapy, based in New York City, where she guides individuals and couples on their paths to emotional and mental wellness. Talia lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her husband and two children.
Social Studies: Poetry as History, Ethics, and Journalism, Stanley Kusunoki
Publisher: Polaris Publications
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Kusunoki’s newest collection of poetry is organized like a social studies syllabus and is based partly on a quote from the Guardian that states “…poetry is the new journalism.” Kusunoki reflects on major events like the killings of Philando Castille and George Floyd, and on a more personal level, the death of his father. Keeping with the tradition of the teacher including the work of proteges, Kusunoki has included poems by some of his former students.
Stanley Kusunoki is a teacher, poet, writer, arts advocate, and musician. He has served on panels for the Minnesota State Arts Board and was on the board of directors for S.A.S.E., The Write Place. He has been a liaison between artists and school faculty through the Perpich Center for Arts in Education. He was the recipient of a Loft Asian Inroads mentorship, and a mentor for the Asian American Renaissance “Writers’ Block” and Intermedia Arts “Exchanges” mentorship programs. Kusunoki is currently the High Potential Teacher/Coordinator at Red Oak Elementary School in Shakopee, MN.
From Being to Being, Oh Eun, Shyun (Suhyun) Ahn (Tr.)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
In their sonic play, Oh Eun’s poems bounce dangerously on a tightrope of language. These are poems that in their content and form simultaneously expand the boundaries of language and delight, and in their subject matter engage with both a desire for a shared humanity while offering a biting criticism of Korean society.
A controversial poet, he has received a number of the Korean literary world’s biggest prizes, including the Daesan Literary Award, but also has faced criticism for his daring individuality. Brilliantly translated into a limber and tactile English by Shyun Ahn, co-translator of Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole, English readers will finally have the opportunity to see why Oh Eun’s style and tone set him in a school of his own.
Oh Eun received a Bachelor’s degree in sociology at Seoul National University and received a Master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Oh Eun’s poetry collections in Korean include Pigs at the Hôtel Tassel, We Love Atmosphere, From Being to Being, The Left Hand is Heartbroken, and I Had a Name, as well as essay collections You Are a Dangerous Robot Right Now, You and Me and Yellow, and Consolation. He has won the Park In-hwan Literary Award, the Ku Sang Poetry Award, the Contemporary Poetry Prize, and the Daesan Literature Award. Currently, he is a member of the literary circle Jak-ran.
Shyun (Suhyun) Ahn translates Korean poems to English. He is the translator of Kim Hyun’s Glory Hole, and he founded and served as the editor-in-chief of Nabillera: Contemporary Korean Literature. He graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and international literary and visual studies. He voluntarily left a Ph.D. program in East Asian studies at Princeton University to join the US Army as an officer candidate.
Sprocket, Al Rempel
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sprocket is a series of breathless prose-poems capturing poet Al Rempel’s childhood adventures spent roaming free in the idyllic setting of Arnold, BC, a small farming community tucked into the corner of Vedder Mountain, near the US border. Each poem presents a snapshot of one or two memories, sometimes involving the author’ s siblings, his two “ summertime only” school friends, or any number of other local characters. From climbing up the mountain “ with handholds wet with moss and banana slugs” to finding the best way “ to run full blast through a cornfield just before harvest,” Rempel takes his readers through an age where, as long as you were home by suppertime, you could go almost anywhere on your bike.
Al Rempel’s books of poetry are Undiscovered Country, This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, and Understories, along with four chapbooks: Behind the Bladed Green, Deerness, Four Neat Holes, and The Picket Fence Diaries. His poems have also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, most recently, the Cascadia Field Guide and Sweetwater: Poems for the Watersheds. Rempel was awarded the Prince George Regional Arts and Culture Award for poetry in 2012 and shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell award for excellence in Poetry in 2013. He lives in Prince George, BC. www.alrempel.com
Revolutions, Hajer Mirwali
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Revolutions sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities. Working between a Palestinian and Iraqi poetics drawing from artists like Mahmoud Darwish and Naseer Shamma and a feminist Canadian poetics inspired by Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Nicole Brossard, Revolutions spirals and collapses as we turn and re-turn around its circles.
Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, Brick Magazine, Room Magazine, and Joyland.
Lines, Sarah Riggs
Publisher: Winter Editions
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sarah Riggs’s eighth book of poems pulls from the momentum of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Bernadette Mayer’s Memory to create a survival manual for a Trump presidency and a family crisis.
Riggs’s book-length poetry cycle begins with 47-line poems (corresponding to the author’s age) and breaks its form as it builds, riding on association and assonance. Lines seeks to turn colonial power & patriarchy on its head through the movements of the mind and the sanity of poetry.
Sarah Riggs is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn. She received the 1913 Poetry Prize for her book Pomme & Granite and her translation of Etel Adnan’s Time won the Griffin International Prize and Best Translated Book Award. Word Sightings, her essays on the impact of visual media on US poetry, was published by Routledge. With her partner Omar Berrada, Riggs runs Tamaas, an intercultural arts organization focusing on translation, film and education, and co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (Litmus). Written during the 2016-20 Trump presidency, along with The Nerve Epistle (Roof), Lines is her eighth book of poems.
The Mirror of Simple Souls, Leah Flax Barber
Publisher: Winter Editions
Publication Date: May 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Taking its title from Marguerite Porete’s fourteenth-century Beguine classic, The Mirror of Simple Souls embodies the metaphysical thorniness of the book-as-object through sources as wide-ranging as Renaissance theater, Low German and Old French mystical texts, Kate Bush lyrics, and the melancholy dialectics of Walter Benjamin. In Flax Barber’s stark, brutally compressed poems, the performance of writing is charged with the eros and anxiety of coming after: “Will it all be destroyed? / Definitely / I will hear it on my radio / In the 22nd century.”
Leah Flax Barber is a writer from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Conjunctions, Cleveland Review of Books, The Common, Peach Mag, and Reading in Translation. The Mirror of Simple Souls is her first book.
Black Swan Theory. Kyle Marbut
Publisher: Burnside Review Press
Publication Date: May 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
“When I read the poems in Kyle Marbut’s Black Swan Theory, I thought there was no place else I’d rather be. These poems have brought the world to you, even when they say, ‘Winter and not a world in sight.’ They have the quality of a diary or log, though ‘This is not a daybook. All I have to report on are my days, tethered to shadows tethered to sky.’ In the days that go by, memories drift alongside the never-ending present full of emotions and scenarios, which turn into a future. There are insights and torments, certainties that dissipate, and conversations with plants, animals, windows, stars, fields, loves. Day by day, there is a partial view of a plot, but most of life is the current beneath larger events, something I, and I imagine other readers, know intimately. As Marbut says, ‘I don’t know anything about myself other than this pear I’m eating.’” —Arda Collins
Kyle Marbut is the author of Black Swan Theory, selected by Arda Collins as the winner of the 2023 Burnside Review Press Book Award. A writer and bookmaker from Ohio, they live in Richmond, Virginia.
Site Specific: New and Selected Poems, Elaine Sexton
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: May 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
“Elaine Sexton enlarges on what Modernism observed,” writes Joyce Peseroff of Sexton’ s fourth collection, Drive, pointing to the qualities and breadth of her work as an artist, editor, essayist, and poet. With Site Specific, Sexton’ s new and selected poems, readers will witness the formation of a poet and artist whose work evolves thrillingly with each new publication. Featuring selections from her first four books, Sleuth, Causeway, Prospect/Refuge, and Drive, as well as twenty-seven new and previously unpublished poems, Site Specific demonstrates how the poet’ s early origin narratives become her materials for experimentation and artmaking. In the epigraph to her poem “ Subjects Matter,” Sexton quotes Lucien Freud, “ for me the paint is the person.” Here, the poems are the poet.
Elaine Sexton is the author of four collections of poetry: Sleuth (New Issues, 2003), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015), and Drive (Grid Books, 2022). Her poems, reviews, and artwork have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and sites, including American Poetry Review, O! the Oprah Magazine, and Poetry. She is a member of the faculty of the Writing Institute of Sarah Lawrence College, and frequent guest faculty at various writing and art centers in the US and abroad.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 5/6 and 5/12 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.