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.
plastic: A Poem, Matthew Rice
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.
Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor—making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.
Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.
Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in poetry from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently undertaking a PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, highly commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and included in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.
I Am the Wounded Victim of a Suicide Bomber, Fazel Ahad Ahadi, Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi (Tr.)
Publisher: Ilex Foundation
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
I Am the Wounded Victim of a Suicide Bomber presents a selection of poems, translated into English and including the Perisan texts, by Fazel Ahad Ahadi, a scholar and poet driven from his home in Afghanistan by the political and social disruptions that have beset his country since the mid-twentieth century. Drawing heavily on these years of warfare and domination by outsiders and by extremists, this collection highlights the struggles of Afghans to keep alive their individual and collective identities along with the loneliness and cultural dislocation of exile—conditions experienced by too many the world over. While Ahadi’s poems can be joyful and hopeful, most evoke the pain of separation and isolation mixed with the determination to endure, persist, and resist.
Fazel Ahad Ahadi’s works include scripts, plays, and poetry in Persian and Cyrillic. He was Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Kabul University and a visiting professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She is the co-translator of Hafez in Love: A Novel, winner of the 2021 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize.
Patricia J. Higgins is University Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at SUNY Plattsburgh and was a Fulbright lecturer at Tehran University. She is the co-translator of Hafez in Love: A Novel, winner of the 2021 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize.
E, Noa Micaela Fields
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
C’mon, take the E pill (is it estrogen? ecstasy? something else entirely?). E practices mishearing as a bodily reworking of language alongside the poet’s hormonal transition, stretching the upper limits of homophonic translation to unleash the unexpected queer resonances of Louis Zukofsky’s “A.” Ealchemizes mishearing into a political possibility of glitching, noncompliance, and protest. Not a translation, but maximally trans, mishearing transmutes language to generate new possibilities: how hormones change the body; how relationships evolve, multiply, and implode over time.
Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant (trans poet with hearing aids) in search of the hypervivid in her one and only captionless life. She is the author of E, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2025. Find her poems and art writing in Tripwire, Zoeglossia, Tyger Quarterly, Jacket2, Poem of the Day, Sixty Inches From Center, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she is the public programs curator at the Poetry Foundation.
Midsummer Count: New and Selected Poems, Robin Becker
Publisher: UNM Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Midsummer Count collects the best work of Robin Becker, considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. With selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems, readers enter Becker’s lifelong exploration of childhood, animals, cherished places, complex friendships, and romantic intimacy. A life-affirming current yokes these narratives across time, even as a sister’s early suicide haunts the decades. In blank and free verse, in couplets, quatrains, and sonnets, the poet wrestles formal tensions, creating a present-day idiom for beauty, grief, and compassion. Lovers of Becker’s work and those new to it will find in Midsummer Count a master class by one of today’s most dynamic poets.
Robin Becker is the author of eight previous books of poetry, including The Black Bear Inside Me and the Lambda Award winner All-American Girl, both published in the Pitt Poetry Series. A liberal arts research professor emerita in English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she lives in central Pennsylvania and southwestern New Hampshire.
The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems, Tomas Venclova, Ellen Hinsey (Tr.)
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
With The Grove of the Eumenides, the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova affirms his place as one of Europe’s greatest living poets, the heir to Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Miłosz. Venclova’s masterful poetry upholds a vision of the world that enables us to endure the darkness of our time through his singular insights, ethical endurance and profound compassion. With classical grace, yet manifesting a deep commitment to remain a witness to the contemporary world, The Grove of the Eumenides is a collection of great wisdom.
Venclova’s poetry addresses the desolate landscape of the aftermath of totalitarianism, as well as the ethical constants that allow for hope and perseverance. Bloodaxe published another selection of his poetry, The Junction, in 2008, bringing together new translations of his most recent work from that time as well as a selection of poems from his 1997 volume Winter Dialogue.
While The Junction covered poems written while he was still in Lithuania before his forced emigration – and poems from his first decades in the US dealing with exile – The Grove of the Eumenides addresses ‘later life’ issues of democracy, memory, climate, travel, ethics and aging. There is no overlap between the two editions.
Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements, making friends with Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Lyudmila Alexeyeva and other members of the literary and human rights underground. He made his living by translating Baudelaire, Saint-John Perse, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and many others into Lithuanian. Venclova was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Venclova is Emeritus Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University where he taught from 1985. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the 2005 New Culture of New Europe Prize, and the 2023 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius. His poetry has been translated into English in books including Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997), and two retrospective editions with no overlap between them, The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova by Ellen Hinsey was published by University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer in 2017. After many years in New Haven, Connecticut, and a period spent in Kraków, he returned to Lithuania and now lives in Vilnius.
Ellen Hinsey (editor & co-translator) has published ten books of poetry, essays, dialogue and literary translation, with a focus on Eastern Europe and democracy. Her poetry collections include The Invisible Fugue (Wildhouse Poetry, USA, 2023); Update on the Descent (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), a 2007 National Poetry Series Finalist; The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 2002; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2003); and Cities of Memory (1996), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. A former Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, she has been the recipient of Lannan and Rona Jaffe Foundation Awards, among others. Born in Massachusetts and long resident in Paris, she was educated at Tufts University in the US and at the University of Paris, and has French and American nationality.
Diana Senechal (co-translator) was born in Tucson and holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Her selected translations of Tomas Venclova, Winter Dialogue, first appeared with Northwestern University Press in 1997, and a selection of these were republished in The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). From 2011 to 2016 she taught, advised, and led the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School, before moving to Hungary.
Rimas Uzgiris (co-translator) is a Lithuanian poet, translator, editor and critic. His many translations include Then What: Selected Poems by Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University, and teaches translation at Vilnius University. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages.
Punishment Bag, Jake Fournier
Publisher: UNM Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jake Fournier’s Punishment Bag asserts that poetry ought to exceed its author’s intelligence. At once caustic and tender, this daring debut spans from dense, refractory lyrics to lucid narratives. As ghosts materialize at the periphery of late-night dialogues and spiritual seekers slide into hedonic disaffection, ordinary objects—creamer cups and plush koalas—accrue bizarre, sacred resonance. The collection hopscotches from the American Southwest to the exurbs of Paris and culminates in a piercing, Eliotic prose poem created from a destabilizing selection of autobiographical notes. Tracing the growth of a poet’s mind, Punishment Bag extends its readers an irresistible invitation to grow in turn, to delight in the tactile density of language, and, against a backdrop of ecocide and systemic injustice, to discover new ways to make meaning.
Jake Fournier is a firefighter living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems, Jeanette Lozano Clariond, Forrest Gander (Tr.)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Even Time Bleeds is a revelatory selection of the work of Jeannette Clariond, a major contemporary Mexican poet known for her sensuous lyricism and philosophical gravity. Translated and introduced by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Forrest Gander, this volume gathers poems from across Clariond’s career and presents the English translations and the original Spanish texts on facing pages. Whether writing about science or Romanticism, childhood or the Chihuahua Desert, ancient Mexican myths or the pandemic of Mexican femicides, Clariond displays a complex self-consciousness that captures much about contemporary identity in Mexico and beyond. Born in 1949 into a Lebanese family that emigrated to Mexico, Clariond has spent much of her life traveling between Mexico, the United States, and Spain, and she writes about varieties of exile and the fearsome complexity of the US–Mexican border with rare insight. Even rarer: she gives voice to her own interiority in a way that is accessible and piercing, as though her true country is inside of each reader.
Jeannette L. Clariond is an award-winning Mexican writer and translator. She has published many collections of her own poetry as well as Spanish translations of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Primo Levi, and other writers.
Forrest Gander is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and translator whose most recent book of poems is Mojave Ghost. His many translations include Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda and It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho.
Songbird, Carol Ann Davis
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Utilizing the short lyric poem in long sequence, Songbird addresses matters both urgent and ancient: what it is to grow from a child into an adult, how to remain inside one’s body, what it means to open the mouth and sing. Guided by the images, senses, and sounds provided to her by the natural world, the poet invents a stuttering natal language to approach the unsayable aspects of interior life. In doing so, the poems collectively trouble the binaries that beset modern existence: the simultaneous push-pull of sexual desire; the interior and exterior landscapes that shape our perceptual fields; the reckoning of violence with beauty; the human need for both permanency and flight. Songbird is a daring and necessary book.
Carol Ann Davis is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), and a collection of essays, The Nail in the Tree (2020). A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is Director of the Low-Residency MFA and founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that provides poetry curricula to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol Ann has read her work at the Library of Congress, Poets House, on the website of the PBS NewsHour, and at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Her work regularly appears in literary magazines and periodicals, including The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Georgia Review, Image, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review, and Agni.
The Near and Distant World, Bianca Stone
Publisher: Tin House
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her latest, brilliant collection, Bianca Stone continues to explore and interrogate the full spectrum of life, from an unexpectedly intimate conversation with an internet technician in Brooklyn, to a deep dive into Greek mythology, psychoanalysis, and modern philosophy. “I am thinking of what it means to be alive in this world,” Stone muses, “I want to get it not right but near.” With her signature incisive perspective, Stone debates the paradoxes of finding one’s own self amid parenthood, global change, and the constant press of mortality.
In these fifty-one poems, Stone seamlessly ties together allusions to Jordan Peele’s Nope, Rilke’s elegies, and other cultural touchstones to arrive at new revelations. With fluidity and wryness, she brings readers to the brink of psychic wounds, operatic dramas, and strange dreams, with a fresh narrative in the rich mytho-poetic tradition.
Bianca Stone is a Vermont-based poet and scholar currently serving as Vermont’s poet laureate. Stone is the author of over many books, including the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite which received the 2022 Vermont Book Award and The Near and Distant World, out from Tin House in 2026. Her poetry and writings have appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poets and Writers, The Nation and the Best American Poetry series. In 2013 she co-founded the poetry-based nonprofit, Ruth Stone House, where she organizes events and retreats, teaches classes on poetry and poetic study, hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast.
Transit, David Baker
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
We are all human and nonhuman on the move. The poems in Transit emerge from just such a walk through the world. In keenly observed verse, David Baker carries us across physical and emotional geographies, moving seamlessly from deep woods, city streets, and creek beds to the contours of his psyche and the larger cultural circumstances that mark off our lives. Several of the poems operate as field notes, drawn from Baker’s work assessing bird migrations, streamflow, and geological movements alongside environmental scientists.
Because of his ecological orientation, Baker’s work is also grounded in a deep sense of home, which is captured in the double meaning of the collection’s title. Each piece in the collection acts like the eyepiece of a surveyor’s transit—a finely tuned short-range telescope, intricately balanced and calibrated to survey the surrounding geography.
Through this lens, Baker pays studied attention to the topographies of the world around us and the terrain of the heart. Both an imaginative point of departure and a love letter to familiar places, Transit poses poignant questions about what we seek as we find our way through the world.
David Baker is a poet, critic, and educator. He has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, and more. Baker lives in Granville, Ohio, where he is emeritus professor of English at Denison University.
Elements & Offerings, Dan Beachy-Quick
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poet Paul Celan noted that, in his view of language, thinking and thanking are cognate, innately connected in their roots and connotations. Elements & Offerings, a new collection of poems by Dan Beachy-Quick, is a book-length poetic investigation of that hope—that to think is to learn to thank; that to thank is to learn to think. The first two sections seek a way to work toward poetic origins, taking inspiration from the alphabet, first philosophy, grammar, and prophecy; the last section offers poems composed over many years, simple gifts of gratitude to teachers and friends.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar, and serves as interim chair of the English department.
Called by Distances, Biljana D. Obradovic
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Called by Distances, Biljana D. Obradović looks back at a life that includes surviving the demise of her native country of Yugoslavia, the loss of her parents in the same year, and displacement from Hurricane Katrina. Her poetry encompasses loves and deaths, international travels and adjustments to American culture, often accompanied by a feeling of not belonging anywhere. What emerges from these richly evocative poems is a portrait of an artist who resists the call to assimilate, and instead carves her own unique path, continuing to dream.
Biljana D. Obradović is a Serbian-American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She has published collections of original poems, including Little Disruptions, poetry translations, and anthologies of work by contemporary Serbian writers.
False Spring, Amie Zimmerman
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: January 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Amie Zimmerman revisits moments in the street and memory in the body, examining the individual in relation to the collective, figuring it out as we go. And sudden beautiful conclusions appear, hard won, opening new paths. This book is a gem.
Amie Zimmerman is the author of four chapbooks, including Compliance (Essay Press) and, with artist Samantha Yun Wall, the collaboration 31 Days/The Self (Ursus Americanus). Alongside Hajar Hussaini and Matthew Klane, she co-curates the poetry and performance series Salon Salvage. Zimmerman is from Portland, Oregon, and lives in upstate New York, where she works as a hairstylist, labor organizer, and PhD candidate.
Chatty Fossils, Bob Perelman
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: January 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
In this new collection, Chatty Fossils, Bob Perelman probes the zeitgeist with an anthropologist’ s zeal for detail and an ironist’s ear for the dis in public discourse. These poems leave no doubt about the present civilizational crisis, but even the most dire come off with the wry humor of someone who loves the world for what it is. They love to “ talk poetry.” Chatty indeed, but far from fossils.
Bob Perelman has published over 15 volumes of poetry, most recently The Future of Memory (Roof Books) and Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press). His critical work focuses on poetry and modernism. His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). He has edited Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), a collection of talks by poets.
Elegies, Emmanuel Hocquard, Cole Swensen (Tr)
Publisher: NYRB Poets
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Emmanuel Hocquard’s Elegies, written over some twenty-five years, lie at the core of his oeuvre, one of the most admired in contemporary French poetry. They sound the depths of the past, finding it ever deeper, and they pose the question: To whom does the past belong? Like air and water, Hocquard suggests, the past is a commons shared by all. His Elegies are full of quotidian detail—the life of the street and the marketplace, overheard conversations, glimpses of private existence—even as they make room for the ancient world from which the form of the elegy descends.
Hocquard has distinguished between two types of elegiac poet—what he calls the classic and the inverse. The classic ruminates on the past; the inverse remakes it. Hocquard is an inverse elegiac poet: Rich with the past, his poems lead us into an ever-expanding present.
Emmanuel Hocquard (1940–2019) was a French poet, editor, and translator who grew up in Tangiers. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Invention of Glass and Theory of Tables, and he has translated into French the work of writers such as Charles Renikoff, Paul Auster, Michael Palmer, and Fernando Pessoa.
Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry; a collection of hybrid poetic essays, Art in Time; and a volume of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A former Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, she also translates poetry and art criticism from the French and has won the PEN USA Award in Translation, the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize. She divides her time between France and the United States.
et al., Andrew Brenza
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
et al. by Andrew Brenza is a daring work of erasure, carved from the bones of a discarded dark fantasy novella and reborn as an experimental epic. What emerges is a haunting narrative poem—a surreal journey through a shifting, Sisyphean mindscape where meaning flickers, dissolves, and reassembles. Both intimate and expansive, et al. pushes the boundaries of erasure poetry, transforming failure into fertile ground for myth, memory, and the uncanny.
Andrew Brenza is an American experimental poet and librarian. His recent chapbooks include Poems in C (Viktlösheten Press), Bitter Almonds & Mown Grass (Shirt Pocket Press), Waterlight (Simulacrum Press), and Excerpt from Alphabeticon (No Press). His full-length collections of visual poetry include Gossamer Lid (Trembling Pillow Press), Automatic Souls (Timglaset Editions), Album, in Concrete (Alien Buddha Press) and Alphabeticon & Other Poems (RedFoxPress).
Beginning of the Hollow, Albert Mobilio
Publisher: Black Square Editions
Publication Date: January 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
I’m sorry. It’s impossible to characterize Beginning of the Hollow. In the early pages, Albert Mobilio lavishes on us the spellbinding pacing of acrobatic, recursive sentences—aka his “narrative difficulty”—which, though they include riveting observational details, “strange turns” of syntax, understated humor, and a pentathlon of competing dictions—feel somehow like CAT scans of the soul. Then there are softly spoken introspective poems and, toward the end, a long sequence of short gnomic declarations and fragments so strikingly various in tone, so linguistically alive and entertaining, they might be renga composed by some hard-boiled detective and a lovelorn Buddhist philosopher. Charged with vivacity, totally “unbuttoned,” psychologically alarming, and fashioned with a dexterity few poets can match, Mobilio’s Beginning of the Hollow comes fully loaded. And here you’ll find even “better words than the words/ that make people do things.” —Forrest Gander
Albert Mobilio is the author of four books of poetry (Same Faces, Touch Wood, Me with Animal Towering, The Geographics), a book of fiction (Games and Stunts), and a collection of essays (Reading Against Type). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing and a Whiting Award. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and won an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant. A former editor at Bookforum and Hyperallergic, he is an associate professor of literary studies at Eugene Lang College at the New School.
James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems, Baron Wormser
Publisher: Slant Books
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
The capstone of a distinguished literary career, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems is Baron Wormser’s eleventh book of poetry. It speaks to matters that have haunted and obsessed the author for a lifetime—especially the ways that a finite poem can intersect with the infinitude of being.
The book is arranged like a work of fiction, with titled chapters and with single poems of a personal nature standing between each chapter—a thread woven throughout the book. Each chapter reflects themes of longstanding concern: the duality of masculine and feminine, political history, literary progenitors, prophetic voices, and the ways people struggle with the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Baron Wormser wrote eleven books of poetry, a book of short stories, four novels, a memoir that went into a new edition in 2023, a book of biographical essays, and many topical essays that have appeared in recent years on the Internet site Vox Populi. Two of his biographical essays were chosen for Best American Essays. In addition, he maintained a Substack site entitled “The Exciting Nightmare” where he posted essays of around one thousand words about different aspects of modern times.
An avid gardener, Buddhist practitioner, dog lover, devotee of classic movies, and fan of his hometown baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, he lived in Vermont from 2007 until his death in October 2025.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/13 and 1/20 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.