We here at Philly 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.
Cloud Runner, Joy Harjo
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Losing a child is one of the most unreconcilable griefs. In Cloud Runner, Joy Harjo reckons with the unspeakable pain of losing her daughter: “Reason has no home in this hour,” she writes. Despite a devasting loss, Harjo constructs a shrine to human resilience, reminding us that the most profound revelations can appear in our darkest hours: “I now know why we construct ceremonial epics of mystery and beauty, / Of enemy and failure: it is so we can pick up our burdens / And go on.”
Harjo’s magical poems are known for weaving myth, song, and spirit. In this searing volume, her poems become essential witnesses to history, especially in our current era of compounded loss: mass shootings, missing and murdered Native women, climate disaster, and political violence. Cloud Runner explores how all grief may be connected; it is a testament to poetry’s power to speak what is unspeakable, to touch what the mind cannot carry.
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2024 Frost Medal, Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and was recently honored with a National Humanities Medal.
do not destroy this, Taylor Clement
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: October 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
do not destroy this is a collection of poems about human resilience in the face of numerous weather disasters like hurricanes and 100-year floods. Poignant and gritty, the poems explore loss and memory, family bonds, and the natural landscapes of south Louisiana when blue tarps unfurl and generators start droning.
A warning and a prayer against future storms, do not destroy this stands as testament to the indomitable spirit of survivors confronted by the inexhaustible forces of nature. In this debut collection, Taylor Clement celebrates the joy and grit of living in the deep south during compound disasters brought on by climate change. These poems explore what happens when ancestral lands and family homes are gutted for years and sacred spaces become empty and unusable. The poems lay bare the threads that hold us together when everything else is gone. Part love song and part elegy, do not destroy this explores why people keep returning to places like Lake Charles.
A native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Taylor Clement is a writer, poet, and researcher. She earned her Ph.D. at Florida State University where she studied Renaissance poetry and visual culture. Her work has been featured in Renaissance Studies and Word & Image. She teaches professional writing and editing courses at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
My Forests, Hélène Dorion, Susanna Lang (Tr)
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Dorion lives surrounded by lakes and forests, rivers and shores, in the fog of memory and in vast estuaries where thoughts flow into the sea. Taking inspiration from this vivid landscape, she delves into the heart of the forest, while also exploring how our relationship with nature has deteriorated over time. Lush and sensual images evoke the forest’s enduring beauty, locating nature within the noise of the world and the passage of time.
By imploring us to listen to the chorus of the trees, My Forests offers the hope that we will protect our shared home and envision a collective future in which all people can live in dignity. Seeking a way out of the darkness, Dorion’s poems lead us toward “a vast and luminous path / that gives meaning / to what we call humanity.”
Hélène Dorion is a poet, novelist, and essayist who has published nearly forty books, including the novel Not Even the Sound of a River, and her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She has won many awards, including a Governor General’s Literary Award. She is a recipient of the prestigious Le Prix Athanase-David, awarded by the Québec government for her body of work and contribution to Québec literature, and the Grand Prix de Poésie of the Académie Française. Her poetry collection, Mes forêts, is the first work by a living woman and a Québécoise to be added to the curriculum for the French Baccalaureate. She was recently named Chevalière of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic and Compagne of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of Québec. Born in Québec City, Dorion divides her time between Orford and Montreal.
Susanna Lang is an award-winning poet, translator, and creative writing instructor. She is the author of three poetry collections and the chapbook Like This, and her fourth full-length work, This Spangled Dark, is forthcoming in 2027. Her translations include two collections of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners and Unfasten the Silk of Your Silence. Her poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in The Common, Asymptote, Tupelo Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Rhino Reviews, Mayday, and The Slowdown. Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France.
Tall, Grass, Girl, Tanis MacDonald
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this searingly honest lyrical collection, Tanis MacDonald examines living in the space between belonging and non-belonging, between victimhood and bold survivorship. She makes no apologies and pulls no punches, taking us on a journey through adoption and assault, to subsequent escapes, and eventually, into full-feathered survivor joy.
This book contends that making one’s way to tenderness can take years, that a good life can come from harsh beginnings, that feeling crazy in an impossible world is more than normal—it’s necessary. Surviving the past can be hard work, and to grow tall, to push past expectations, is to become a person who can refuse and thrive. These poems are a moving testament to remembering oneself via harsh and beautiful terrain, to transmuting past violence, and to finding one’s way back to being a tall, grassy girl self.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of seven works of nonfiction and poetry, including Mobile, which was longlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. She is a two-time recipient of the Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards for Creative Nonfiction and has also won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Teaching Creative Writing. She is the co-editor of the anthology GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for our Times (with Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild). Originally from Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg, she now lives near O:se Kenhionhata:tie (Willow River) in the southwestern Ontario watershed region.
Panax: A Relationship, Rob Budde
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A cross-genre engagement with the being Hoolhghulh, known in English as Devil’s Club, Panax traces Rob Budde’s developing relationship to this northern and coastal BC plant. Blending ecocriticism, animal studies, and decolonial and countercolonial thought, the poems in Panax map a remarkable poetic and autoethnographic journey.
Rob Budde teaches creative writing at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George. He has published eight books (poetry, novels, interviews, and short fiction), and his work has appeared in numerous literary magazines. His most recent books are declining america (Book*hug, 2009) and Dreamland Theatre (Caitlin Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the BC and Yukon Book Prize’s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. He co-edited a selection of Ken Belford’s poetry in The Answer to Everything (Caitlin Press, 2021) and is part of an editorial collective assembling a book of essays on the teaching of creative writing, Creation Story.
notes from recently, Chris Turnbull
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
notes from recently takes stock of loss and change in ecological relationships. Turnbull walks us through various habitats – forests, wetlands, agricultural fields, meadows, streets – in gorgeous, arresting poems that highlight forms of perception and awareness while acknowledging processes of enfolding, endurance, and long time. In notes from recently “we” are indeterminate, challenged to comprehend what we accompany and disrupt while measuring complicity and grief alongside interconnected histories of regeneration and extinction. How do we take meticulous note of the present?
Chris Turnbull is the author of cipher (Beautiful Outlaw Press), [ untitled ] in own (CUE Books), and Continua (Chaudiere Books/Invisible Press). Additional writing, collaborations, and installations are in print, online, and within landscapes. She curates a footpress, rout/e, whereby poetry can be found on trails (www.etuor.wordpress.com). She lives near Ottawa, within the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg.
REDWORK, Laurie Ann Guerrero
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Interwoven with eight images of the author’s intricate redwork embroidery—striking red thread on light textiles—these poems explore reproductive justice, violence, gender dynamics, internalized sexism, and mothers and mothering, bound by the belief that “a red thread ties me, like a vein, to all my mothers.” From a paradigm-shifting slap at a Brownies troop meeting to eating a rattlesnake to a great-grandmother rising from her coffin, Guerrero’s precise, visceral voice threads the imagery of embroidery through unexpected forms. Rhythmic stitches echo in her repetitions, leaving phrases that stay with the reader: “How quietly our trust began.”
REDWORK is a love letter to the women who came before, a cry against gendered violence, and a celebration of the quiet revolutions of women around the world.
Poet, essayist, and visual artist, Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio. Poet Laureate of San Antonio (2014-16) and Texas (2016-2017), her collections include Babies under the Skin (Panhandler, 2008), A Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), A Crown for Gumecindo—a collaboration with visual artist, Maceo Montoya (Aztlan Libre Press, 2015), and I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New & Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2021). Guerrero holds degrees from Smith College and Drew University. She is an Associate Professor and the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio.
The Hummingbird, Matt Longabucco
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
From flower to flower goes the hummingbird, heart pounding, in search of anything sweet. This poet’s attention, meanwhile, hovers and darts toward ever-more attenuated spaces of enlivenment and connection in New York City and beyond, filching lyric possibilities from the shadows of indignity and dread. On riverbanks and in dive bars, hospices and deserted libraries, or “in my coffin/reposting mentions,” Longabucco’s gift is to articulate the specific moment when abjection and edification, shame and satisfaction, banality and profundity tip into one another, only to reveal they were always, inevitably intertwined.
Matt Longabucco is the author of the poetry collection Heroic Dose and of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain, a book-length study of a landmark of French cinema and its creator. He teaches writing, innovative pedagogy, and critical theory at New York University’s Liberal Studies Program, and at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.
Whispering Gallery, Dani Spinosa
Publisher: Assembly Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in Whispering Gallery explore the tensions between analog and digital poetics, language, and materiality. Each poem, first typed on a typewriter and then digitally manipulated, is named for a female or feminine figure (wives, daughters, monsters, mothers, muses) stalled, subdued, or caught in moments of suspension rather than heroic resolution. Paired prose poems translate these mythic figures into contemporary, intimate registers, tracing the quiet violences, care, and survival that shape lived experience.
Drawing on personal and domestic ephemera (thread, spice, old print artifacts), the collection explores repetition, distortion, and persistence as formal and thematic tools. Equal parts intimate diary, scholarly engagement, and playful experimentation, Whispering Gallery offers myth as a site of shared vulnerability, radical care, and connection.
Dani Spinosa is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a computer programmer. She is an adjunct professor, a software developer, a digital and creative project manager, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, president of Canthius, the managing editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and the author of two books: OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.
Fetch, Colin Bramwell
Publisher: And Other Stories
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Celtic folklore a fetch is a shadowy doppelganger that appears from the Otherworld, portending the beholder’s fate. Your fetch ‘fetches’ you to the afterlife, willingly or otherwise. Bramwell’s poetry uses the fetch as a model to explore a number of overlapping binaries – between the reader and the poem, most of all. Fetch also meditates on the differences between music and speech, the sacred and the profane, the written and the real, humanity and nature, Scots and English. Incorporating multitudes of modes, forms, registers and subjects, Bramwell converses with the Anglo-Celtic lyric tradition in our own time and in his own distinctively amiable fashion. In other words, this poet takes poetry seriously––but not too seriously.
Fetch is a tour-de-force debut from one of Britain’s most exciting new poets, in which reverence and irreverence, religion and faithlessness, the living and the dead, nearly rhyme.
Colin Bramwell’s poetry has been published widely in major poetry magazines and in his pamphlet The Highland Citizenship Test. He was the runner-up for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize, and his translations have won the John Dryden Translation Competition and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. From the Black Isle, he now lives in Edinburgh.
Bone Symphony, Michelle Phuong Ho
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Michelle Phương Hồ’s Bone Symphony mines the wreckage of colonialism and imperialist warfare in Vietnam and attempts to reassemble the bones. Told in three movements spanning lyric, documentary, and hybrid forms, Bone Symphony uncovers a world turned upside-down by war: evil is good, saviors are toddlers, children die before their mothers, and civil servants—like the poet’s grandfather—become enemies of the state. The detritus of a shattered nation, family, and psyche serve as building blocks Hồ rearranges with playful irreverence, giving rise to healing poetic turns. One can surrender not just to military powers, but to love. The prison cell where a dissident is held transforms into the womb of God. In a world where no symbol is stable, Bone Symphony reorients us toward curiosity, kinship, and the kind of mercy that sets free those held captive within our imaginations: “Every face / I’ve ever held / hostage,” the poet beholds, “is beginning to bleed.”
Michelle Phương Hồ is the author of Bone Symphony (Boa Editions, 2026), chosen by Aracelis Girmay as a Blessing the Boats Selection. Her work has appeared in Nat Brut, The Offing, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Her honors include a Pushcart nomination, a Friends of Literature Award from Poetry magazine, a BRINK Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing, and residencies from the I-Park Foundation and Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU. Born to Vietnamese refugees in San Jose, CA, she lives in New Haven, CT.
This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed, Mischa Willett
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his new collection, Mischa Willett negotiates with the vibrant voices of recent contemporaries, from Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, and Denise Levertov to W.M. Ransom, David Lee and Fleda Brown. The poems in This Gift Card Has Already Been Redeemed navigate faith, prayer, and church, but also disappointment, displacement, and deep reading.
Both referential and reverent, this striking and deeply moving collection balances humor with the profound seriousness and abiding joy available at the heart of human life.
Mischa Willett has written poems, translations, and essays for Books and Culture, Chronicle of Higher Education, First Things, Comment Magazine, Front Porch Republic, and other such venues. A specialist in Romantic-era aesthetics, he is Director of the new MFA program in Creative Writing at Whitworth University. In This Gift Card Has Already been Redeemed, Willett follows up two previous critically acclaimed poetry books with this new collection that negotiates biblical worldview with contemporary poetics.
Field of Vision, Stephanie Horvath
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Field of Vision, we traverse the thresholds of past and future, reality and dream, as we accompany the speaker through deserts, forests, rivers, and coasts. These poems capture, viscerally and intimately, a sense of deep time in the rural landscape—dark, damp dirt on one’s hands, a desert over which vultures circle, the decay of wet leaves on a forest floor. A meditation on the horror and resplendence of nature, Field of Vision invokes the ancient history that weaves into each of our individual histories—the earth, the animals, the fossils, the primordial echoes that shape us all.
Stephanie Horvath is a lecturer and former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals. She lives in Northern California.
Godspotting, Aleksandar Hemon
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Godspotting ponders and proclaims what it means to live, die, and survive in a world that “doesn’t love any of us.” Considering the fragility and utterly complicated nature of life, Aleksandar Hemon’s deep contemplation of human mortality shifts between surrendering to the disappearing act of death and accepting that this cruel world is still home to beautiful things. Hemon acknowledges the difficulty of living in the present as he interrogates the “shape and form” of joy, meandering through tender and complex memories of family members, his childhood and youth, and valued moments that must end. This collection challenges typically religious understandings of death and what follows, as it teeters from curiosity to radical acceptance to despair at one’s inevitable demise.
Aleksandar Hemon has written poetry, nonfiction, short story collections, and novels, most recently The World and All That It Holds. His earlier novel The Lazarus Project, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Other notable works include his autobiography The Book of My Lives, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award; the short story collection Love & Obstacles; and The Nowhere Man, also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending a brief visit, but while there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. He started writing shortly thereafter and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Hemon now lives in New Jersey where he teaches creative writing at Princeton University. He performs music as Cielo Hemon.
Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes: A Chicano Howl, Juan Felipe Herrera, Lauro Flores (Tr)
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
This book is a powerful poetic exploration of immigration, social justice, and identity. By weaving together autobiographical elements, family history, and broader social topics, Juan Felipe Herrera builds a compelling vision of some of the most burning issues of our time.
From former U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera comes a searing bilingual collection that speaks directly to America and all its peoples. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a lyrical journey through migration, memory, and resistance—an urgent address to a nation grappling with its identity. Blending autobiography and Indigenous, Chicanx, and Beat traditions, Herrera reclaims language as a tool of compassion and truth. With ink drawings and evocative verse, this book honors the migrants who traverse borders and histories, flourishing even in the shadows. A call to listen, to remember, and to act.
More than a poetic critique, this book initiates a conversation—a direct address to readers that invites reflection, solidarity, and action. Drawing on his anthropological training and lived experience, Herrera weaves together the cultural richness of Indigenous Mexico, the urban vibrancy of San Francisco’s literary scene, and the enduring legacy of migrant journeys. Flourishing Shadows / Sombras Florecientes is a vital addition to the Camino del Sol series and a powerful testament to the resilience and humanity of those too often relegated to the margins.
Juan Felipe Herrera was born in 1948 to farmworker parents. He is a graduate of UCLA, Stanford, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The author of thirty-five books in various genres, Herrera served as poet laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017. Herrera has taught Chicano and Latin American studies at California State University, Fresno, and creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and has held numerous visiting positions. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies, Fresno State University, and is the current coordinator for the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at the Fresno State Library.
Lauro Flores is a professor at the University of Washington. He is the author, editor, and translator of several publications, including the anthology The Floating Borderlands, winner of the American Book Award.
Work Lunch, Lee Bains
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Lee Bains’s four albums center what Rolling Stone once called “Southern gospel punk.” In Work Lunch, his poems explore the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a taquería. In sprawling, long-form poems, Bains mines subjects of family, the often invisible work of service, and the horrors and comforts of fast food chains.
A take-out gyro prompts a reflection on religious-nationalist violence, a Cuban sandwich spurs consideration of U.S. imperialism, a hamburger channels into a cry of solidarity with organized labor, and a salad elicits an epic rumination on lineage, class, race, gender, memory, and faith. These poems glimpse sandwiches under shade trees, tables full of boisterous coworkers discussing barbecue, and reflective moments at those dwindling local spots, all fertile ground for investigating Bains’s home places of Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia, the systems of power that shape life there, and the ways in which ordinary people survive, connect and fight back.
Lee Bains is a poet and songwriter from Birmingham, Alabama, who since 2012 has released four studio albums of what Rolling Stone calls “Southern gospel punk,” and will publish his debut poetry collection Work Lunch with Hub City Press in 2026 after several of the poems were first published by the New Yorker in 2021. A cult songwriter forged in independent scenes, his work has carried him all over the U.S. and Europe, has received acclaim from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and The Guardian, and has led him to be a supporting musician for other artists like Lonnie Holley, Moor Mother, and Algiers. Lee has lent his work to support striking coal miners, immigrants’ rights groups, abortion funds, and anti-racism organizations. He has performed and read at Emory University, the University of Mississippi, Tulane University, Auburn University, and The Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden). He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works between tours as a handyman.
Hard and Glad, Amelia Ada
Publisher: DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e)
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Full of eros both bitter and sweet, poet Amelia Ada spins a lyric twist on the tradition of the trans coming-out novel. Written in real time from the midst of a queer marriage’s death spiral, Hard and Glad traces an arc of self-revelation in an epic poem marked by unflinching candor, dark humor, and grace. A powerful debut by a fresh and fearless new poetic voice.
Amelia Ada’s writing has appeared widely in journals including ZYZZYVA, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Southwest Review, and West Branch. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She co-hosts the podcast You Shouldn’t Let Poets Lie To You.
Future Tense, Kelly Grace Thomas
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death.
Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.
Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, coach, and ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is the author of Future Tense (forthcoming from Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She has won the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Kelly has received fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. She is also co-author of poetry curricula, including Voices in Verse: Poetry, Identity, and Ethnic Studies, Stanzas of America: Celebrating BIPOC Poetry, and Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Get Lit), which are currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was a Blackburn Fellow at Randolph College, where she earned her MFA. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she is working on her debut novel and coaching writers online.
Desire Path, Migwi Mwangi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Desire Path explores how everyday life, memory, history, and politics work against and toward each other across communities and national boundaries. This collection pleats numerous lives: a boy sent to the shops, a neighborhood thief, widows, gravediggers, debtors, and inheritors. There are multifoliate Englishes and silences, glimpses of music by icons such as Bi Kidude and Kanda Bongo Man. There is eros, storytelling, and haunting joy here.
Migwi Mwangi is a storyteller from Nairobi. His honors include the George Bogin Award from The Poetry Society of America and the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
My Love is a Durian, Kelly Kaur
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
In My Love is a Durian, Singapore and Canada twine and intertwine, the places adopted and left behind bunch and twist. Kelly Kaur leads readers through markets in Singapore and up mountainsides in Kananaskis. These poems enliven the senses, from the taste of durians eaten fresh to the chill of snow melting on the cheek, as they dance the insider-outsider dance
My Love is a Durian seeks belonging without judgement, a place to rest, a place to work, and a place to grow. It shares the easy happiness of time with friends and family, the tension of coming of age, the fear and joy of making a life. These poems tangle with ideas of colour and race, freedom and acceptance. These are poems that reach out to readers to create empathy, connection. My Love is a Durian lifts up the voices that sing in the margins of the world.
Kelly Kaur is a writer, author, and speaker. Her poems, short stories, and nonfiction have landed on the moon, published on beer cans, danced on stage, and travelled to galleries and museums. She was awarded the South Asian Inspiration Award for Outstanding Achievement in Arts and Culture, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won an honourable mention in the Creators of Justice Literary Awards. She was also awarded The Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award in 2024.
Agape, Patrick Kindig
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The word “agape” can be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it can be read as a noun; in this sense, it signifies the kind of chaste, divine, unconditional love that god has for humankind. On the other hand, it can be read as an adjective; in this sense, it signifies excessive openness, as of a mouth or other bodily orifice. The word thus gestures in two directions at the same time—toward the disembodied love of the spirit and the embodied pleasures of the flesh. In Patrick Kindig’s Alma Award-winning second poetry collection, Agape, both senses of the term are at play. A kind of erotic Bildungsroman in verse, the collection charts the development of a single gay speaker from messy, promiscuous boy into married man. It also locates this narrative within a longer history of queer desire, one that ties lust to violence and pleasure to pain. Interlacing erotic poems, poems that explore gay domestic life, and poems that reimagine key figures in Western myth in (homo)erotic terms, the collection as a whole constitutes a timely exploration of what it means for a gay man to love and be loved.
Patrick Kindig is the author of the poetry collection fascinations (Finishing Line Press 2025), the poetry chapbooks all the catholic gods (Seven Kitchens Press 2019) and Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press 2016), and the academic monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (LSU Press 2022). His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, and other journals. In 2020, he collaborated with classical saxophonist Derek Granger on The Quarantine Variations.
There Was Always Smoke: New & Selected Poetry, Doug Anderson
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Doug Anderson’s There Was Always Smoke: New & Selected Poems brings together poems selected from Anderson’s four critically acclaimed collections of poetry along with a substantial number of new poems, along with an introduction by Paul Alexander. Doug Anderson is best known for his poems on the Vietnam War where he served as a medic and an eyewitness to the distinct horrors of that conflict. But Anderson’s oeuvre is more than that of a war poet. Anderson continues to write poetry more than fifty years after the war, and his work captures the lingering trauma of those days in poems whose topics range from alcoholism to love. To read There Was Always Smoke is to experience a life fully lived and in turn to understand an America whose innocence was lost long ago.
Doug Anderson is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Undress, She Said (Four Way Books). He has received grants from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down was published by W.W. Norton in 2009. He has taught in the Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College MFA programs and Smith and Emerson Colleges. He lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts.
Vega’s Fugitive, Marina Tsvetaeva, Alyssa Dinega Gillespie (Tr)
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Marina Tsvetaeva needs no introduction—a poetic genius, she is one of the most gifted and original poets in the Russian literary canon. All the verse genres Tsvetaeva employed, including lyric poems, poetic cycles, and long narrative poems, are represented here, in Vega’s Fugitive, translated by award-winning translator and Tsvetaeva scholar Alyssa Dinega Gillespie. Tsvetaeva’s poems, some never-before translated, appear in potent English versions that are both highly faithful to the originals and lyrical in their own right. As a result, Tsvetaeva’s verse—with its driving rhythms, striking sound plays, and searing insights—is reborn in a new language and new constellations of meaning. These poems dive fearlessly into themes of place, time, and distance; the female body; the poet’s fate; desire and longing; grief, loss, and immortality. Vega’s Fugitive makes Tsvetaeva’s masterful work not just accessible, but unforgettable for English-language readers around the world.
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was a Russian poet who lived through the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Despite exile and hardship, she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most brilliant Russian poets of the twentieth century. Her early poetry collection Milestones was published in 2002 by Northwestern University Press in a translation by Robin Kemball.
Alyssa Dinega Gillespie is the author and editor of numerous scholarly books and articles on East European literature and a prize-winning translator of Russian and Ukrainian poetry and fiction, as well as a poet herself. This is her first book-length collection of translated verse.
My Destination, Daisy Fried
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: October 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
“When I am reading a poem by Daisy Fried, I often forget that I am reading a poem, and believe myself instead to be experiencing an event. This may be a result of Fried’s effortless command of those aspects of storytelling, like character and action, that we falsely reserve for novelists. But I prefer to think that My Destination succeeds for reasons of poetry—the poet’s unapologetic curiosity about experience, and her remorseless hunger for the right words to know her moment.‘I begin to take an interest in life,’ she writes at a moment few would dare (this is not the only audacious moment here, far from it).This book quite simply embeds itself in human life, and intriguingnew ground is broken, in poems of widowhood, motherhood and more. Fried’s conditions are epic, her voice is human, and her ability to describe the human comedy astonishing. With the tenacity of Athena and the craftiness of Penelope, she makes her way. I admire this book tremendously.” —Katie Peterson
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination, The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. A poetry critic and a member of the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, she lives in San Francisco.
Blood Clot Banana Bag, Billeh Nickerson
Publisher: Anvil Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
On Remembrance Day, 2022, the author ended up in the ER with what was eventually diagnosed as blood clots. This led to a two-week hospital stay that overlooked Vancouver’s Davie Street Village and the nightlife landscapes of his youth. “Banana Bag” is the nickname medical workers give to IV bags, which are tinged yellow from electrolytes and hang above patients like banana bunches. Each bag costs $600.
Blood Clot Banana Bag delves into perceptions of luck and fortune, but also grief and survivor’s guilt, and the privilege of universal health care, all through the lens of the author’s trademark humour and exacting details. It also explores his return to Vancouver’s historic Lee Building, one of the city’s first high-rises, and offers readers a series of meditations on everything from vinyl 45 records to quicksand and Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon.
Billeh Nickerson is an author, editor, and educator whose previous six books include McPoems, the City of Vancouver-Book-Award-Nominated Artificial Cherry, and Duct-Taped Roses. He is also the co-editor of the ground-breaking Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets. He is a former Associate Dean, and long-time faculty in the Creative Writing department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC.
Magic Show, Dean Bartoli Smith
Publisher: Distribution Partners
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Magic Show is an emotionally rich and intricately structured poetry collection by Dean Bartoli Smith that traces a writer’s life through the prisms of family, loss, art, and remembrance. Divided into three sections—Folly Beach, The Venus Looking Glass, and Ancient Eye—the book chronicles experiences spanning childhood in midcentury America, the ache of growing up amid fractured families, the beauty and pain of memory, and the redemptive power of creativity. These poems weave personal history with cultural memory, invoking landscapes from Baltimore to Italy, from amusement parks to seaside towns, revealing how places live on in the imagination.
Through scenes of youth, grief, and artistic awakening, Smith’s voice moves between elegy and vision, intimacy and myth. Magic Show becomes both a family album and a meditation on what it means to inherit and remake a life through words. Magic Show is a deeply introspective poetry collection intertwining memory, loss, love, and artistic awakening, tracing a writer’s life through elegy, exile, and rediscovery across America and beyond. Lyrical, visceral, and often cinematic in scope, this collection captures how love, loss, and faith offer resilience in the face of impermanence.
Magic Show is Dean Bartoli Smith‘s third collection of poems. He’s previously published Baltimore Sons (Stillhouse, 2021) and American Boy (Washington Writer’s Publishing House, 2000). He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season, about the 2012 Baltimore Ravens. He teaches in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University and is the director of Duke University Press.
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Contents
October ’26: Best of the Net, New Staff & New Schedule
Managing Editor Aiden Hunt shares about Philly Chapbook Review’s staff changes, Best of the Net nominations, submission stats, and new publication format in this editor’s note to Issue 14.
“I always feel like I have so much to say to my mother and in this poem, I selected a few memories to share. In a way, this creative choice is symbolic of waving my white flag…” Read three poems by Natalie Zhang, along with a few words about “Flagship.”
The Vocabulary of Disability: On Atropa Belladonna Coursing Through My Veins by Sudikshaa Amar
“Amar’s varied descriptions of embodied experience…let readers see into the work of forging a personal nomenclature for identity and action.” Read the full chapbook review by Contributing Editor, D.W. Baker.