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.
The Book of Alice, Diamond Forde
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
When her grandmother died, poet Diamond Forde inherited a well-worn family Bible to remember her by. In The Book of Alice, she retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. A Black woman born in the Jim Crow South, Alice joined the tide of the Great Migration when she made her exodus to New York City. She married, divorced, and raised eight children, all while struggling to define herself in an America that looks frighteningly like our own. Using found forms like recipes, a family tree, and a US Census Report alongside imagined psalms and scriptures, Diamond draws bold parallels between biblical narratives and the lived experiences of those often relegated to the margins of history. The result is both a heartfelt elegy and a new sacred text.
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and CLA’s Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and other honors. She is a Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow whose work has appeared in Boston Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she serves as the interviews editor for Honey Literary. Diamondholds an MFA from The University of Alabama and a PhD in creative writing with concentrations in African American poetics and fat studies from Florida State University. She is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.
The Palace, Andrés Cerpa
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through the speaker’s deep engagement with love and the natural world. Still, throughout the speaker grapples with his understanding of change: what can we, and what can’t we expect to leave behind in life? What does it mean to move on, to grow?
Marked by solitude and inquisition, the poems of The Palace note the physical nature of their existence as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual. Featuring recurring motifs of the labyrinth, addiction, fecundity, fragility, and future, Cerpa evokes the sense that one can move on from an environment or way of being in the world, but never from oneself. The Palace is a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world.
Andrés Cerpa is the author of two previous books of poetry, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (2019) and The Vault (2021), which was longlisted for a National Book Award and celebrated as one of the best poetry books of 2021 by The New York Times. A recipient of a McDowell fellowship, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is an educator and faculty member of the Randolph MFA Program.
Chamorrita Song, Danielle P. Williams
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk songs. It is a return and a homecoming. These poems are artful homages powered by a lineage of storytellers and their traditions, created in conversation with their collective pain and triumph.
For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection.
Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.
Here Williams reveals capacious contemporary forms that speak to the future as well as to the past and that further ground lineages in homelands, finding strength and beauty in collective pain and triumph. These poems transform and spread the messages of those long silenced. They act as song and prayer.
Danielle P. Williams is a Black and Chamorro poet, translator, essayist, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina, who believes in the power words have to inspire, educate, and enact change.
Avail, Erin O’Luanaigh
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Avail features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.
Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O’Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.
Erin O’Luanaigh worked as a jazz singer before receiving her MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida. Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Bad Lilies, AGNI, The Southern Review, Subtropics, 32 Poems, Nimrod, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Connecticut, she currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Avail is her first book.
New Cemetery, Simon Armitage
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
A few years ago, in the poet’s home county of West Yorkshire, the Local Authority began converting a series of cow fields near his home into a new cemetery. As the graveyard takes shape, its presence on the brow of the hill casts a lengthening shadow over the imagination and enlivens the poet’s landscape, both inner and outer. These poems, in regular, cascading tercets, sparked into being as he daily walked the site, with moorlands rising beyond it and the wind turbines of Brontë country to the north. Eventually the muddy construction scene gives way to fresh headstones and mown lawns, and, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the spectacle of gravediggers in hazmat suits. The poet retreats to write in his garden shed, charting his losses, conversing fruitfully with the dead, and engaging the world in the perilous present.
The sharply observed lyrics in New Cemetery—each fancifully named for a species of moth, a creature whose numbers the poet sees dwindling across a lifetime of night walks—remind us to turn a cool eye on the doings of man, and yet to embrace all we love while we still can, as “Time, what else,” stands “propped in a corner / like a cricket bat.”
Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. A recipient of numerous prizes and awards, his collections of poetry include Seeing Stars, The Unaccompanied, and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He writes extensively for television and radio and is the author of two novels and three nonfiction bestsellers; his theater works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and, in 2018, he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
Designated Stranger, Gion Davis
Publisher: Thirdhand Books
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback
A soul dive and a psalm, Gion Davis’ s Designated Stranger spans years, states, genders, and climates as it confronts the concurrent apocalypses of being trans and poor in America. Like the designated hitter or designated driver, the trans poet is brought in to get everyone home. The poems in this collection are about living — not forever, but for the ride.
Gion Davis is a trans poet from Españ ola, New Mexico, where he grew up on a sheep ranch. His debut collection, Too Much (2022), was selected by Chen Chen for the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize. For the past four years, he has toured and performed with the DIY music collective Clementine Was Right, and his contributions to songwriting have been highlighted in publications such as Paste and Stereogum. He graduated with his MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.
Dreaminations: Prose Poems, Jianqing Zheng
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dreaminations is a collection of prose poems in haibun or tanka prose style. Haibun or tanka prose links prose and haiku or tanka to complement each other through juxtaposition to gain a new sensibility, an insight into a significant moment. The linked forms also stand independently with their complete meanings that present two views of each moment, inviting the reader to leap in between for an aesthetic appreciation. That’s the uniqueness of haibun and tanka prose and the fascination of writing them. This collection explores the self and the world through the working of the senses. It is a quest about where to posit the self and how a human being gains learning from nature and human nature.
Jianqing Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation, A Way of Looking, and five poetry chapbooks and e-chapbooks; editor of seven scholarly books, including Conversations with Dana Gioia and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku; and coeditor of four scholarly books, including Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic. He received the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Prize, 2001 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and three poetry fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, among other awards and honors. He is professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University, where he serves as editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature and Valley Voices. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Another Chicago Magazine, Birmingham Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Mississippi Review, and Spillway.
face-to-faces, Kristine Esser Slentz
Publisher: Thirty West Publishing House
Publication Date: January 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
From the author of Exhibit: an amended woman and depose, comes an experimental collection, as during the time it was written: the COVID-19 lockdown and the proceeding global pandemic. face-to-faces explores the loft virtual world vis-à-vis the brutal reality, with themes of mental health, technological reliance, polyamory, panic, and scarcity. This book adds visual and interactive elements for the reader to indulge in additional senses beyond what words on the page can conjure. A daring, eclectic book of poetry and mixed media.
Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and Face-to-Faces (Thirty West Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. Kristine is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and the IndyFringe Festival.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/20 and 1/26 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.”