Contributions
- Two Poems by Gerald Yelle
Read two poems by Gerald Yelle, our second biweekly poet of the Fall 2025 issue, along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
About the Contributor
Gerald Yelle has worked in restaurants, factories, schools and offices. His books include The Holyoke Diaries (Future Cycle, 2014), Dreaming Alone and with Others (Future Cycle, 2023), the bored and Evolution for the Hell of It (Alien Buddha, 2025). His chapbooks include No Place I Would Rather Be (Finishing Line, 2021) and A Box of Rooms (Bottlecap, 2022). He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Recent Books
Evolution for the Hell of It, (Alien Buddha Press, 2025)
In Evolution for the Hell of It, Gerald Yelle builds a world just barely removed from our own, where factory-basement experiments, bake-sale biotech, and tattoo-based photosynthesis collide with late capitalism’s filthiest instincts. This is Yelle’s second book with Alien Buddha Press, following The Bored, released earlier in 2025, and it’s even sharper, darker, and more irreverent.
Yelle has worked in restaurants, factories, schools, and offices, and it shows. His stories are saturated with the grit, absurdity, and hard-won wit of lived experience. The volunteers in these stories take chlorophyll injections for twenty dollars they’ll never see. They barter sex and pain meds in the ruins of Menlo Park and Newark. And yet, through the madness and mishaps, something grows, an anarchic green tendril of resistance, possibility, and bleak laughter.
The Bored (Alien Buddha, 2025)
In a world where chlorophyll tattoos promise salvation and internet implants blur the line between reality and another dimension, Rudy stumbles through heartbreak, addiction, and a society teetering on collapse. When misinformation about “tattification” laws sparks a war, the population vanishes, leaving Rudy alone to navigate the fallout. Desperate to survive, he turns to the very technologies he once avoided. Gerald Yelle, author of The Holyoke Diaries and Dreaming Alone and with Others, crafts a tale that is as unsettling as it is prophetic, weaving Rudy’s descent into a disorienting new reality with piercing commentary on identity, technology, and isolation.
A Box of Rooms, (Bottlecap Press, 2022)
A Box of Rooms pretty much sums up this chapbook’s physical appearance. Though only some of the pieces, or “rooms,” are about rooms, they all have a kind of boxy look: solid justified micro-fiction paragraphs, many of them conveying a sense of claustrophobic confinement, within the boxlike confines of the covers. Rooms and boxes being three dimensional, there was also the idea that the contents add depth to the sheets of paper.
There is also something dreamlike about a box of rooms: large containers stacked or squeezed into a smaller container. Many of the pieces have that dreamlike quality, and because the speaker knows that what is being described isn’t real, he is free to indulge exaggerated emotions: loneliness, cruelty, sadness, elation, anger and frustration, all of it masked by desperate stabs at humor.
Older Titles
Dreaming Alone and with Others, Future Cycle Press (2021)
No Place I Would Rather Be, Finishing Line Press (2021)
Industries Built on Words, Yavanika Press (2020)
Restaurant in Walking Distance and Everything, Cawing Crow Press (2016)
The Holyoke Diaries, Future Cycle Press (2014)
Recent Links
- Poem: “Go Ahead and Run If You Must” (MudRoom)
- Poem: “Married Life of the Adult Child” (Wordpeace)
- Two Poems by Gerald Yelle (Does It Have Pockets)
- Poem: “We Need Appointments to See Friends” (Streetlight Magazine)
Contributor Q & A
What do you want readers to know about you?
I've worked in restaurants, factories, offices and schools. I like hiking and hanging out with old college friends, reading, going to movies and watching TV with my wife.
How long have you been a writer and how did you get started?
It's something I wanted to do since my early 20s. Getting into the UMASS MFA program and getting my first poem published in the Sonora Review; those I consider breakthroughs.
What’s an accomplishment in your writing life of which you’re proud and what do you still hope to achieve?
I'm proud of the fact that I was able to revise and combine two previously published manuscripts and get them published with Alien Buddha Press. I still have several unpublished manuscripts I would like to see in print.
Who are your favorite writers?
Celine, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Henry Miller, James Tate, William Faulkner
Contents
Chapbook Poem: When I Was Straight by Dustin Brookshire
“‘When I Was Straight’ prompted me to think about a common queer experience—how most parents assume their children are ‘straight’ and expect their children to live a ‘straight’ life.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: American Girl: Fort Hood, 2023 by Thea Matthews
“[W]eaving in and juxtaposing the lyrics of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl.’ The song’s themes of desperation, wanderlust, and longing are subverted by Ana’s life and tragedy at Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, Texas.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
“It seems such a shame that a beautiful location is just gathering dust and overgrowth, and I wanted to lean into the juxtaposition of that.” Read three poems by Bryana Fern along with a few words about “Women on the Wall.”
Bodies in Transition: Sacred & Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
“There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole.” Read Gray Davidson Carroll’s full review.
“In ‘No Breaks’ I was writing about something I hope I never have to experience. … I tried to keep despair at bay and show some defiance and resilience.” Read two poems by Gerald Yelle along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
November ’25: New Staff, Issue Archive & Donations
Read a note from Editor Aiden Hunt about our new Poetry Readers, the additions of an Issue Archive and a Contributor Fund, Fall poetry submissions, and Gaza.
Chapbook Poem: Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh by Rebekah Wolman
“Settling on the mirror form opened the way into the parallels between the original image of the egrets, their reflection, and their ambiguous relationship and the shifting, even reversing, roles of an adult daughter and her aging mother…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2025 along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
“Subsequent drafts enabled me to … uncover the metaphor of exile, whose meanings are intended to move readers from an experience of alienation to one of discernment of the liberating qualities of outsiderhood.” Read three poems by Alexandra Burack, along with a few words about “To Know Blue From the Color of Snow at Dusk.”
Book Excerpt: Rondo by Yamini Pathak
“The sculpture gardens are located on … the native land of the Lenape people. The poem is a conversation between sculpture, land, and its human and more-than-human inhabitants.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for November 2025, “Rondo” from Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps by Yamini Pathak, along with a few words from the poet.
Two Poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth
“As I shaped the poem, the olive trees became a witness to a deeper experience—to a region’s ongoing, collective pain. It was the land I wanted to make speak in a place where I did not have words.” Read two poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth, along with a few words about “Before.”
A Conversation with Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes
“We wanted something that was alive, highlighted an ever-expanding list of books by these poets, and that will hopefully survive the both of us and flourish under the curation of a fresh set of poets.” Read the full interview about the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook series.
Chapbook Poem: Red Tide by Mary Gilliland
“Reflection, research, a public service announcement, an old Zen koan, and 3 weeks of bicycling for groceries with a bandana tied around my nose and mouth inform ‘Red Tide’.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for December 2025, “Red Tide” from Red Tide at Sandy Bend, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Veronica Tucker
“’You Left the Fridge Open Again’ transforms an ordinary domestic moment into a meditation on tenderness and decay. The open refrigerator becomes a quiet altar, its hum a hymn to what lingers after love’s warmth has cooled.” Read three poems by Veronica Tucker, along with a few words about “You Left the Fridge Open Again.”
Book Excerpt: The Samadhi of Words by Richard Collins
“Zen poets, past and present, who experience deep absorption in the grandeur of this world may even gain wisdom through the way of poetry, Shidō (詩道). This is the samadhi of words.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for December 2025, “The Samadhi of Words” from Stone Nest by Richard Collins, along with a few words from the poet.
December ’25: Pushcart Prize Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to, and a carousel of, the nominated poems.