Dear Readers,
Welcome to Issue 13 of the Philly Chapbook Review covering the Summer 2026 period! I want to start with news and changes.
What’s New
With this issue, we begin publishing original fiction and prose book excerpts. We’ve also added weekly full-length fiction book posts and monthly prose chapbook round-ups. These additions made our “of the Month” excerpts feature unmanageable. While we will continue to look for and include both prose and poetry book excerpts among what we publish, there will no longer be one from each category, each month. Some issues will have more excerpts, others less, depending on what we have available to us and our content needs for that issue.
Spring Submission Stats & New Rule
Our submission totals reached new heights during our Spring call. Our first original fiction call yielded submissions from 139 writers in 23 countries. We ended up accepting 5 stories, for a fiction acceptance rate of about 3.5%. We also hit a new high for original poetry submissions, with 1,079 poems submitted by 266 poets in 32 countries. We accepted 16 poems from 6 poets, for a poetry acceptance rate of around 1.5% Thanks to everyone who submitted as well as our great editors and readers.
One problem we ran into during this submission period was authors submitting to both the original poetry and original fiction categories. Since we didn’t have a policy in place, I allowed it for the remainder of the Spring call. However, moving forward, authors will only be permitted one submission per period: either poetry or fiction. If both are submitted, we’ll read whichever we receive first and reject the other. Please note that this rule doesn’t affect reviews, interviews, or excerpts, to which we are always open.
New Staff
PCR is welcoming two new staff members: Zach Omitowoju will be our second Production Assistant and Audrey Kim, who has been handling our Instagram account, will be our Social Media Manager going forward.
Thanks for reading and supporting us. If you have the means and the will, you can donate to our Contributor’s Fund through our Donate page. You call also support our mission by reviewing and rating our publication on websites like ChillSubs or spreading the word on social media and elsewhere.
Warm regards,
Aiden Hunt
Managing Editor & Creator
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”