Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during April 2026.
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.
Northwestern University Press
Slow Burn, Evan Wang
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
Persistent yet flickering, Slow Burn unveils a passionate world where love is both impossible and inevitable. Divided into three sections, Evan Wang’s debut chapbook traces the confrontation of the self through a cyclical journey of discovery and contradiction, ultimately leading to the choice of allowance: that which is made by the reader. These poems slowly burn first through our own inner silence, then through the thick dark of night, and finally to abstract closure—or lack thereof. They urge and hold us back, begging us to understand how, amid cultural, societal, and political suppression of the self, we kiss the muscled mouths of the world by carrying our bodies through it. Slow Burn is a romantic’s answer to the search for love, and the strangely comforting realization that the effects of the world mark us all.
Rockwood Press
This Rough Magic, John deSouza
Read Now: A Conversation with John deSouza
This Rough Magic by John A. deSouza ponders questions of memory and loss, grief and forgiveness, from the perspective of someone in the late-middle passage of life. Over the arc of the twenty-five poems that comprise the work, deSouza addresses past memories of childhood, intimate family relationships, as well as questions of literary parentage in language that finds profound insights in the commonplace yet shies away from easy or definitive answers. The work coalesces around the loss of the poet’s father but without becoming an all-consuming dirge. A pivotal poem of the work, “Prodigal,” which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, describes the intimate moment the speaker shaves his father in the ICU: “I see now the moment is everything, makes us what we become / that it’s right to be kind with it, to let yourself forgive.”
Button Poetry
Coin Laundry at Midnight, Carson Wolfe
2024 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest Runner-Up and Winner of The Northern Writers’ Debut Poetry Award, Carson Wolfe’s Coin Laundry at Midnight is an unfolding highway through gendered violence and queer becoming.
Seasoned with fresh and intricate language, Wolfe’s work roams the open road in search of the self—uncovering identity in the aftermath of teen parenthood and urban poverty. A British voice wanderlust in America, this gripping chapbook challenges the male road trip narrative, going so far as to resurrect Jack Kerouac, who appears within these pages to minimise the dangers of sex work and speculate about lesbians.
A painting of truck headlights and motel parking lots, Coin Laundry at Midnight questions what it means to move through a world that is continuously reinforced as unsafe for women and girls.
Ethel Press
Melodies of the Oppressed, Chris L. Butler
Chris L. Butler is a Black American-Dutch poet/essayist from West Philly living in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area. He is the author of 4 previous chapbooks: Inside the Garden of Alchemy with DMX and Karl Marx (Ghost City Press, 2025), marchin’ forward under the empire’s blazing sun (Ghost City Press, 2024), Sacrilegious (Fahmidan, 2021), and BLERD: ’80s BABY, ’90s KID (Daily Drunk, 2021). His poetry has been published by various magazines including Canada Culture Days, The Pinch, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, Lucky Jefferson, Perhappened, and more. His essays have been featured on Medium, FlyPaper Lit, Afros in Tha City, and The Sprawl Alberta. Chris is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a 1x Best of the Net Nominee. He is committed to the collective liberation of all oppressed peoples. He is a proud member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and a graduate of the University of Houston-Downtown, and Xavier University.
Kelsay Books
Superbloom: Requiem for My Sister, Joyce Schmid
“Superbloom chronicles the slow erasure of a sister–through the disorientation of dementia, the erosion of memory, and death–while unearthing the radiant, painful fragments of her life and the bond the speaker refuses to relinquish. Moving across decades and landscapes, from childhood street games in Queens to a bedside in California, these poems bear witness to what love endures and what it cannot save.” —Kimberly Grey
Bottlecap Press
Sweet Queens, Danielle Bero
Sweet Queens is a poetry chapbook that serves as an homage to Astoria, Queens, weaving a tapestry of vibrant memories, personal loss, and cultural resonance. Through powerful verses, it explores the complexities of identity, community, and the raw emotions tied to a city that is both home and battleground. The poems reflect a journey through the multifaceted landscape of Queens, infused with the grit and grace of its streets, as well as the haunting echoes of those who have come and gone. This collection is dedicated to the now-deceased Astoria, striving to capture the essence of a neighborhood that is alive in memory and spirit, even amidst the shadows of gentrification and loss.
Grand Athena, Madeline Weisbeck
Grand Athena by Madeline Weisbeck follows the story of a fictional circus, traveling around the United Kingdom in the early 1900s. Focusing heavily on the trapeze artists, ballerinas, and gymnasts in the troupe. Grand Athena is the name of the train that carries the characters from place to place and she ultimately decides on when and where the characters will land at their destination. Depending on whether or not it is in their cards to continue their journey of stardom. Throughout Weisbeck’s chapbook, the reader can catch snapshots into the lives of the characters: Bonnie, Maurice, Louis, Marnie, Cassie, and Nova as circus performers, and see the subtle romance between Bonnie and Maurice unfold.
Spirit Encased, Ellie M. Lundberg
Spirit Encased explores many themes of selfhood, what it means to belong in a family, love and where our home truly lies. This collection has a linear feel as it goes through childhood, adolescence, a trip far from home trying to connect to those invisible roots, falling in and out of yearning and infatuation, and what waits for us at the end of our life. Throughout it all there is a pulse, like a prayer, asking for guidance from god, ancestors, and her dreams through the journey for love, acceptance and celebration of self.
Hex of Steel, Charlie Stuip
This chapbook collects poems from two years of loitering in hot, dirty cities looking for kicks. Instead, Stuip found the sensitivity and force within every creature, from a dying kitten to a disappointing lover. These poems-bodily, confrontational, irreverent-demand you to surrender to how much you care, to “throw the gauntlet down with a skid mark squealing end-it-all barre chord.”
Hex of Steel covers having a little sister, casual sex, Point Break, breaking and entering, apocalypse, grandpas, biking in LA, among other things. Its sonic, rollicking style is inspired by literary idols such as Joyelle McSweeney, Lou Reed and Wanda Coleman.
Sowing Change, Kayla Brethauer
Growth cannot occur on its own. A new cycle cannot begin without an active participant. In this collection, Kayla Brethauer acknowledges that change takes effort – it must be sown.
Sowing Change is a longing for new beginnings, a feeling of having outgrown the space you had once grown into. The poems in this collection explore the past, present, and future, through vivid imagery rooted in a yearning for something more.
You Are Alive When They Start to Eat You, John T. Leonard
In You Are Alive When They Start to Eat You, John T. Leonard maps a specifically American collapse that is both topographical and deeply internal. Rooted in the Midwest, this collection function as a surrealist tour (and spiritual autopsy). Leonard navigates a landscape where both the infrastructure and soul of the Rust Belt are dying, even as the people of this region remain tethered through shared guilt and pride, domesticity, daily disasters, and an exhausting instinct to protect the few remaining breaths of the land. It is a book about the weight of being a witness to a country that feels increasingly predatory, where the “theatrics of charity” and the “legal ways we kill people” are woven into the same fabric of a Sunday dinner table cloth.
Everything Appeared That Night, Leslie Simon
Ancestors hover here, but so do dreams, a joke or two, and references to how we tell our stories. Starting with the one about a flat tire and how it ties itself to time, the stories these poems spin move from public protest to private repair. The way poets play with words, wrestling them beyond the sounds they make to the meanings they attempt, becomes subject and refrain.
These poems also caress and corral. They pull you in before you even know you are turning over in your head the idea of love and longing—from getting left behind to getting laid to the larger loves and struggles that keep us persisting on, yes, this “holy planet.”
Mood Swings, Mark Katrinak
Mood Swings takes the reader through the seasons, the rain and ice, the desert sunsets of tangerine and peach, an August rouge and purple bruise.
With tight, iambic lines, Katrinak takes the reader through the hidden, darker moments of our lives. Nowhere in Mood Swings is one fooled by surfaces. One must follow the shadows of the birds across the lawn, the shadows of the cottonwoods, our shadows occupying walls and falling across the empty streets.
Watch out for waves that take you far from shore. Investigate your life; do not sugarcoat the plainness of the day.
The Golden Key to the Garden, Jacqueline Jules
Cinderella triumphs because she’s lucky enough to have a fairy godmother to provide a new gown and glass slippers. Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid mirrors the sacrifices of women for centuries when she gives up her beautiful voice to win a man’s love. Like Alice in Wonderland we live in a world where the golden key to the garden is always just out of reach. But maybe we can learn from Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights and save ourselves with stories.
There is a reason why iconic tales are told and retold from generation to generation. A reason why they become reference points in our culture. They reflect our fears and foibles, offering timeless insights. In The Golden Key to the Garden, poet Jacqueline Jules shares personal discoveries gleaned from her favorite stories.
Dreams from the Red House (Felling Difficult Trees), Shawn Keller
Dreams from the Red House (Felling Difficult Trees) is an exploration of time and place through the pulse of abandoned landscapes. Past, present and future come to bear on the author’s vision of a Maine past, or present, or future. Or neither. Or both. Time travel has its own designs. You’ll see.
It is as the boy says, “Art is part heat, part light, part truth, part lies.” Emotion must bring illumination, yet every truth exposes another lie. Which is where the dreams come in. It is said that hypnotism is simply an agreement to dream together.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 4/1 and 4/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”
A Conversation with John deSouza
“Language is a powerful tool and can do great harm both to ourselves and to those most close to us when used cruelly or selfishly.” Poet John deSouza discusses his chapbook, This Rough Magic, his creative process, and the influence of John Ashbery in this interview with editor Danielle McMahon.
Chapbook Poem: from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys
“…what interested me was the idea of a character who didn’t do what he was capable of, not because of external circumstances, but because of either a lack of will or a seemingly perverse one.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for May 2026, from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Love does not exist by Maria Giesbrecht
“This poem was inspired by a dream… I had this strange feeling when I woke up that it meant something more and started writing a poem to see if anything would reveal itself to me.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for May 2026, “Love does not exist” from A Little Feral by Maria Giesbrecht, along with a few words from the poet.
“After a loss in my family, I discovered one grieves for both the living who hide their pain and for the dead who sleep in silence.” Read two poems by Patricia Wallace, our third biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fox.”