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.
Guide to Recollecting the Future: Selected Poems, Xiaobin Yang, Canaan Morse (Tr.)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: January 27, 2026
Format: Paperback
Yang Xiaobin is a household name in both Chinese and Taiwanese poetry circles. He was part of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and after the government crackdown, left for graduate school in America. While in the US, he began a prolific career as a poet before moving to Taiwan, where he now lives, writes, and teaches. Several of the book’s poems satirize the use of “-ism” ideology, which was popular among Chinese intellectuals after the country opened up in 1978. Others come from his “Guidebook” series, offering “instructions” on different aspects of a rapidly commercializing lifestyle. While most of the poems are recent, the book will include some of his most representative and best-known older poems, without which no first collection could be complete. The volume includes a critical afterword by the translator.
Yang Xiaobin is a poet, scholar, and photographer. Born in Shanghai, China, he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Yale University and taught at the University of Mississippi for many years before accepting a position at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Widely recognized as one of the most important Chinese-language poets of the last thirty years, Yang has published several collections in China. His poetry invokes postmodernism as satirical power and attempts to articulate the genuine through verbal play.
Canaan Morse is a translator, poet, and scholar of premodern Chinese literature and oral performance. An original member of the Chinese literary translation collective Paper Republic, he has published translations of contemporary Chinese poetry and prose in multiple international journals. His latest two translations, both of novels by Ge Fei and published in the NYRB Classics Series, have respectively won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation and been named Finalist for a National Book Award.
Stages, Tramaine Suubi
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: January 27, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this breathtaking companion poetry collection, inspired by the evolution of our brightest star, Tramaine Suubi offers poems alluding to the history of how it came to be and its effects on each human life. Readers will discover poems exploring everything from the gimmicks of capitalism to the false promises of tranquility.
This is another brilliant collection that will only reinforce Suubi as a rising star of her generation.
Tramaine Suubi is a multilingual writer from Kampala, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They are the author of phases and stages, and their creative writing has appeared in over twenty literary anthologies, journals, magazines, and reviews. They work towards the total liberation of all oppressed people.
Singing Under Snow, Anne Haven McDonnell
Publisher: Wheelbarrow Books
Publication Date: February 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
These poems explore queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” Through vivid imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells, these poems blur our understanding of the biological, individuality, and death.
These are poems of queer ecology—poetry that “exults in the grit and texture of the natural world, in the unassuming and overlooked wonders beneath our feet and beyond our doors—in lichen and snow, in martens and mushrooms.” In reckoning with a mother’s aging, a breakup, or grief and disorientation in the face of the climate crisis, these poems seek a spiritual meaning in ecological belonging. Central to the collection is a series of poems exploring science, ceremony, and personal encounters with fungi. Fungi and lichen blur what we consider biological, what we think of as an individual, and how we understand death, and these poems reflect this complexity through imagery, juxtaposition, leaps of imagination, and sonic spells.
Anne Haven McDonnell lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she teaches as a full professor of creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell, she is the author of Breath on a Coal—winner of the Halcyon Poetry Prize, runner-up for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment book prize, and long-listed for The Laurel Prize—and the chapbook Living with Wolves. Her poetry has been widely published in journals such as Orion Magazine, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, and Terrain.org. Her honors include a Narrative Annual Poetry Contest prize, a Ginkgo Ecopoetry prize, the fifth annual Terrain.org poetry prize, and a special mention for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. She has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Wrangell Mountains Center in McCarthy, Alaska. She is currently a poetry editor for the online journal Terrain.org.
More Flowers, Susan L. Leary
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
With lyrical acuity, philosophical insight, and deep reverence for girlhood, womanhood, and the wildly intelligent spirit that is the female imagination, Susan L. Leary’s newest collection, More Flowers, unfolds as self-interrogation, tribute, and template for survival. At its center is the figure of the mother, whose fierce brutality in navigating the world offers the speaker ambition, tender affirmation, and a necessary understanding of her origins. In particular, images of nature abound: at each turn, animals, weather patterns, changing landscapes, and the strength and fragility of flowers mirror life’s emotional complications and teach the will to outlast. Most of all, these poems celebrate the idea of excess, that sensation of always wanting more-more time, more meaning, more love, more flowers-because despite every trial and every sadness, this life, quite simply, is never enough.
Susan L. Leary is the author of four previous poetry collections: Dressing the Bear (Trio House Press, 2024), selected by Kimberly Blaeser to win the 2023 Louise Bogan Award; A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Indiana Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Smartish Pace, The Arkansas International, Harpur Palate, Tahoma Literary Review, and Verse Daily. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN. Visit her at www.susanlleary.com.
Glassful of Prayer, Anthony Ceballos
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
A stunning debut collection, Anthony Ceballos’ Glassful of Prayer, wrestles with questions of identity against the backdrop of loss, heritage, family ties, addiction, nature, and urban Minneapolis. Ceballos relentlessly delves into the experience of claiming and defining a self with vivid imagery of reflections and nature, and through dreamed or imagined dialogue with an alcoholic father he never knew: “I am not/my father’s boy, I am not/his body, I am not nobody..” In another poem, his grandmother’s spirit asks, “Who? Who do you want to be?” Ceballos connects these themes of negative and positive identity through a single thread prevalent throughout the collection, authenticity, leading us through a landscape of darkness and ash to a place of self-acceptance and love.
Anthony Ceballos’ work has been published in Yellow Medicine Review, Water~Stone Review, Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose, and Pride, and the anthology Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. A Fellow in two Indigenous Nations Poets retreats, Ceballos is also an alumni of The Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program, the Hamline University BFA program and the Randolph University MFA program. He is a first generation descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, and lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
say, said, Fred Dale
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Publication Date: January 27, 2026
Format: Paperback
Fred Dale’s full-length poetry collection say, said, winner of the Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize is a lyrical exploration of a life through a blending of voices, pop culture, and language experimentation.
Dale utilizes form by playing with punctuation and spacing to create something both uniform and surprising. A lifetime collapses into a sequence of stories told by a distinct and powerful speaker.
This collection, in its interrogation of a life, is lush and imagistic, with themes of masculinity, family, love, the natural world and Catholic iconography. Saints populate the rugged American territory. The speaker searches for truth in the past and, in doing so, invites the reader into a contemplation built on genuine understanding.
Fred Dale is a husband to his wife, Valerie, a father to his good dog, Miss Trixie, and a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of North Florida. He holds an MFA from the University of Tampa, but mostly, he just grade papers. His work has appeared in Spillway, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Summerset Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. He has published two audio chapbooks: The Dream of Blue Moon Flowers and A Boy’s Pirating Eye. Three of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/27 and 2/2 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.”