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 New Economy, Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You” poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary” one poems says. “Why don’t we have a name for it?” Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022–2023.
Hell Yeah, Rachelle Toarmino
Publisher: Third Man Books
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Hell Yeah, Rachelle Toarmino’s highly anticipated second collection of poems, is an intimate, ecstatic examination of the wonders of common speech. As automatic and wholehearted as a hell yeah between friends, the poems interject into various sites of the interpersonal—from a work email and doctor’s office to a long-distance call and Yahoo! Answers rabbit hole—to measure the strange, mundane, and ancient ways we relate and respond to one another. In an alternating rhythm of logic and lyric, doubt and doubling down, Toarmino regifts plain and inherited language to arrive at a theory for familiarity and something like faith: how we know what we know and why we share what we know. With curiosity, generosity, oddball intellect, and charm, Hell Yeah captures that gut impulse to feel yes, say so, and sing it.
Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.
The Seeds, Cecily Parks
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Cecily Parks draws on literary sources ranging from nursery rhymes to The Odyssey to examine how we form relationships with the natural world. The lessons of these poems are in processes that underscore humanity’s power to alter nature and powerlessness to control it: an epiphyte’s fall from a live oak, an urban creek’s response to drought, or a roof rat’s nest-building in the attic of the poet’s home. Motherhood positions the speaker to revisit her girlhood relation to the earth, and as her two young daughters exemplify the ease with which children can become nature’s intimates, the speaker must confront the ecological disturbances that arise from her own attempts to prevent upset to the garden through aggression by weeds, animals, and weather.
The Seeds deconstructs what it means to love nature, especially when the natural world challenges our desires for beauty, abundance, and safety. Looking to more-than-human guides with an open mind and heart, Parks’ third book is a collection of unconventional contemporary environmental histories, in which places become biological and emotional primers for those who will inherit them.
Cecily Parks is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, and the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in venues such as The New Yorker, A Public Space, the New Republic, and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.
Inquest, Michael McGriff
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Michael McGriff’s book-length poem Inquest is an oblique ode to Pablo Neruda’s posthumous masterpiece The Book of Questions. Each sentence is rendered as an unanswerable query, be that a consideration of poverty, aesthetics, place, Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations, the absurdity of everyday life, the exhumed body of Pablo Neruda, or the sanctity of common objects. Deeply surreal and humane, this collection centers unknowing and wonder as twin forces central to self-articulation, social witnessing, and survival.
Michael McGriff is the author of six poetry collections, Inquest, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. His other books include the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (co-authored with J.M. Tyree); an edition of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire; and a translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. He co-directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Idaho.
tours, variously, Drew McEwan
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
A poem as a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms. Asking how words form spaces of shifting relation, tours, variously dwells on narration as an operation that works on spaces and bodies as they negotiate their place among framed exhibits and pinned specimens ready for misrecognition. These poems saunter through an abstracted network of transformational encounters where bodies struggle with and against a game of follow-the-leader, postured by the series of connected rooms we share. Together they guide the reader through an interrogation of the ways we tour the spaces of language, always stepping between the sayable and the unsaid.
Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater and If Pressed. She also works as a researcher with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric. She lives in Toronto.
Existing Music, Nick Thran
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.
Nick Thran’s previous books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Thran lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller.
Flatfish: A Bilingual Edition, Moon Tae-jun, Brandon Joseph Park (Tr.)
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In his poetry collection, Flatfish, Moon Tae-jun offers an aesthetic that emphasizes the author’s exploration of the inner self. At times sparse and allusive, his poems use blank space and other stylistic considerations to convey a voice and thought that ranges from the contemplative to the surreal and absurd. Moon’s poems suggest Buddhist ideologies, natural images, and Korean temples, as the collection explores individual experiences within the context of a search for understanding a greater whole.
While Korea is certainly the setting of these poems, the works remain largely free of cultural-specific imagery and are, instead, naturalistic or universal. This first bilingual edition is a critical resource for students, poets, translators, and general readers alike.
An emerging voice in South Korean literature, Moon Tae-Jun has published a number of poetry collections in Korean (Crowded Backyard, Barefeet, A Shadow’s Development, and more). In poems that range from short, broken lines to longer prose-like forms, Moon Tae-jun evokes a sense of longing, as if searching for moments in the past that help inform the present.
Brandon Joseph Park is a lecturer in the Korean Program at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University – New Brunswick, and in the Writing Program at Rutgers University – Newark. He is the co-translator of You Call That Music?!: Korean Popular Music Through the Generations.
Everything Alive, Molly Johnsen
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
With desperate longing and raw vulnerability—but also surprising humor—Molly Johnsen’s debut collection confronts trauma and disability like long-lost relatives. Johnsen relies on the power and shortcomings of language to highlight the ways “we are manhandled by mortality.” From a therapist’s office, to a cave in Italy, to the raspberry patch in her childhood backyard, the borders of the material world switch from roadblocks to entryways and back. Johnsen’s work is grounded in precise imagery and keen observation, with cycles of family, trauma, and language at its heart. The reader is literally invited in as Johnsen shifts from begging her brain and body for mercy to forcefully reclaiming her selfhood.
Molly Johnsen is a Vermont-based writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in the Nashville Review, Indiana Review, Cider Press Review, and others. A previous version of Everything Alive was selected as a semi-finalist for the Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University.
Lola the Interpreter, Lyn Hejinian
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Lyn Hejinian’s Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an ‘I’ and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian’s lifelong exploration of thought’s infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to My Life and A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian’s life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence.
Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) was a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She was the author of numerous books including Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, and the bestselling, My Life and My Life in the Nineties. She was a co-founder and co-editor of a number of publishing ventures and literary journals including Nion Editions, FLOOR, Atelos, Tuumba Press and Poetics Journal. She was the John F. Hotchkiss Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kadupul Flower, Kimberly Vargas Agnese
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Fresno, California, may be the nation’s breadbasket, but it is also a food desert to some who call it home. Summer temperatures find their niche in the triple digits, and resilience makes its name in the fields and on the streets . . . it pours from the mouths of the children. But dignity, all too often, comes with a price tag. The last $5.48 left on the food stamp card or the $200-plus it costs to ship over plant cuttings from Ecuador. Because even nature isn’t immune to commercialism. Peel back the price tags and recall the meaning of worth in Kadupul Flower, a social-environmental justice collection from debut poet Kimberly Vargas Agnese. Social and environmental justice converge in the intersectional work of Kadupul Flower. The poetry collection is distinctive in its uniting of several themes. The set deals with poverty – including homelessness – as well as racism, sexual assault, and ecological justice. The collection is, at its heart, about dignity, but the theme of dignity extends beyond the typical concept of ‘human’ dignity to encompass ‘environmental’ dignity, as well.
Kimberly Vargas Agnese makes her home in the smoggy California Central Valley. Kimberly spends her time cultivating a young food forest called Meadow Arc, praying and writing advocacy poetry. Her writing appears in Anacua Literary Arts Journal, The Seventh Wave, Rappahannock Review and Awakened Voices, among others. Kimberly’ s full-length collection, Red String on a Saguaro Cactus was named a finalist for the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, awarded biannually by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Glove Money, Sophia Dahlin
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this joyful and irreverent exploration of the role of poet-as lover, Sophia Dahlin plays Sappho, O’Hara, romantics and troubadours, assembling a self seaworthy of romance. With humor and a light touch, Glove Money dismisses bioessentialist gatekeeping and expands the lesbian imaginary.
Sophia Dahlin is a poet in Berkeley. She leads generative poetry workshops, teaches youth creative writing, and is one of the several curators of a new weekly reading series in the Bay Area. With Jacob Kahn, she edits a small chapbook press called Eyelet. Her first book, Natch, was released in 2020.
Our Hands Hold Violence, Kieron Walquist
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through encounters with the everyday beauty and brutality so much a part of rural and urban Missouri, Our Hands Hold Violence explores what it means to experience and/or perpetuate small and significant acts of violence, toward others and the self.
What does it mean to hunt (be hunted), haunt (be haunted), and other (be othered)? Abiding by a chronological arc told in four movements (HERE, THERE, TOGETHER, ALONE), OHHV follows the speaker(s) as they come up in the Show Me State and come to terms with queerness, mental disability, addiction, and loneliness in the largely Christian, conservative, and hyper-masculine landscape. Other themes / aspects of note include familial dynamics, estrangement, labor, neglected and decaying natures, waste, and the confluence of wildlife and mankind.
OHHV indulges in alliteration, assonance, repetition, and a colloquial registry of language. The voice(s) in the poems can range from anxious, reflective (nostalgic), sensual, and tender, but all are compelled by and circle the manuscript’s themes, which become obsessions. Hauntings. Ultimately, OHHV is a collection troubled by the desire to belong to/in a place and to beloveds that have “been home” while, in ways, “feeling like an outsider” at home and within one’s local community.
Kieron Walquist [he/they] is a queer neurospicy poet + visual artist from mid-Missouri. Their work appears in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, IHLR, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Waxwing, + elsewhere. Their chapbook, Love Locks, was selected by Luther Hughes for the 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest. He holds a BA from Lincoln University of Missouri, an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Monson Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City.
the past is a jean jacket, Cloud Delfina Cardona
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Cardona’s speaker explores their gender through sex and relationships, searches for belonging in their family lineage, and copes with depression using movies, indie bands, cigarettes, and Tumblr.
Featuring compelling visual collages and inventive imagery throughout, these poems are firmly rooted in Southern Texas. Cardona brings readers to a jukebox on S. LBJ Drive, underneath a Catholic girls high school, and to “San Marcos sunsets above the H-E-B parking lot” with weighted and poignant reflection. Each careful line produces a soundtrack to a passionate coming-of-age and implores us all to be gentle, yet honest, with our younger selves.
Evocative and blunt, the past is a jean jacket asks the essential existential questions: “where did all the wishes of my ancestors go? / what memory of me will play in someone’s head before i die for the final time?”
Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they) is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize. She is the co-founder of Infrarrealista Review, a literary nonprofit that publishes Texan voices. Their poetry can be found in The Offing, Prairie Schooner, The Boiler, The Los Angeles Review, and more. She currently works as an associate for Letras Latinas and moonlights as DJ Mexistentialism. She believes in a free Palestine.
Disaster Tourism, Rena J. Mosteirin
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Disaster Tourism is a poetry collection that offers glimpses of disasters at once personal and global. The term “disaster tourism” refers to the offensive practice of visiting sites after a cataclysm. Steeped in violence, injustice, immigration stories, and accounts of police brutality, Disaster Tourism gives us a lens to re-imagine our dangerous surroundings in the hopes that we strive toward a better existence, even when it hurts.
Born of a Cuban refugee father and a mother whose homeland of Gottschee is now considered Slovenia, Rena J. Mosteirin’s identity and poetry are shaped by the respective lost homelands of her parents. Bold, unflinching, and lyrical, yet laced with a disarmingly clever and sometimes wicked sense of humor, these poems sift through various sites and forms of devastation to reveal moments of love and joy.
Mosteirin uses observational wit and arresting clarity to bring us closer to the fires burning all around us. Yet, through it all, there is the interconnectedness of family and community – including our world community – entreating us to carry on with an eye toward helping each other through this challenging life.
Rena J. Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her work has been published in The Common, The Rumpus, New York Magazine, New England Review, The Southampton Review, no tokens, The Puritan, and elsewhere. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine and lives in Lyme, NH.
(On |Un-)Becoming, FreeQuency
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
(On Un-)Becoming is a collection of stories, reflections, forgivenesses and offerings rooted in conversations and conflicts with FreeQuency’s mother, chosen family & other selves. The anti disciplinary project liberates the concept of “transitioning” from the realm of Westernized notions of gender and expands exploresexplodes the concept of (un)becoming in relationship to international Blackness, migration movement, geographic and corporeal displacement, spiritual mental health and the ties between personal and communal transformation.
FreeQuency is a Kenyan, Immigrant, Shoga|Queer storyteller & feeler. Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, TEDWomen speaker & ranked 3rd at the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam, FreeQuency is a highly sought after performer, host, social justice teaching artist & workshop leader. Rooted in various global communities & having spent their life at the intersection of arts, education and activism, their work in Reproductive Justice, #BlackLivesMatter organizing & activism, LGBTQ+ advocacy and writing have been featured on The Independent, the New York Times, TEDx, Huffington Post & more.
the book of sentences, rob mclennan
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
Fantastically rooted in the local and in the family, the book of sentences captures small, quiet, and intimate domestic moments with snippets of grammar lightly held to themselves by lineation and punctuation. These poems move quickly, processing the wonder of the everyday with careful observation, speculation, memory, citation, and play.
Radically and everywhere metalingual, the book of sentences builds on mclennan’s previous meditation on domestic joys, the book of smaller and the work of other poets while naming its own writing in the vocabulary of linguistics. It proceeds in a family tuned series of adjustments, amendings, resistances, and acceptances, reflecting on parenthood, childhood, family far and near, the past, the present, and the future.
With finesse of phrase and rhythm, patience and savouring of the moment, and care for nuance and association, rob meclennan shares work that is meditative, witty, humorous, and tender. Conjuring a special sense of immediacy, the book of sentences affirms the wonder and pleasure of everyday life.
rob mclennan is an editor, publisher, critic, and the author of more than fifty titles. He has won the John Newlove Poetry Award, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. He lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair.
Crossroad Mirror, Hussain Ahmed
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Crossroad Mirror many poems begin after sundown—in quiet moments when the bounds between the past and the present, the living and the dead, blur. War and its aftershocks often form the backdrop for these scenes, though Ahmed’s verse rarely brings us to the battlefield itself. Instead, we hear the stories of refugees, civilian casualties, and ordinary soldiers trying to make sense of their circumstances. “There’s no vocabulary in the army—for grief, or death,” writes Ahmed. “Each door you exit, leads to another parade ground.” A group of soldiers wait out a rainstorm—and the war—together in a tent. Their families linger by the radio and listen for news. The “missing” loom as large as the dead.
Tracing the threads of migration that war so often catalyzes, Crossroad Mirror takes us from grassland to cornfield to coastline and explores the role storytelling and spirituality play in leaving and grieving.
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist and author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile and Blue Exodus. He is the winner of the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the 2024 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and his poems have been featured in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The Best American Poetry, A Public Space, and elsewhere.
Middletown, Stephanie Rogers
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Middletown, her third book of poems, Stephanie Rogers reflects on her chaotic childhood in the drug-addled industrial wasteland of Middletown, Ohio. In an engrossing collection of formal beauty, sardonic wit, scathing anger, and class resentment, Rogers’ uniquely vivid voice describes a transformation from a frightened but defiant little girl to a desperate, angry adolescent, and finally, to an adult coping with the death of her estranged father, an addict. In the end, Middletown reveals the rage and rapture of growing up feeling unloved in the middle of nowhere.
Stephanie Rogers is the author of three books of poetry, including Middletown (2025), Fat Girl Forms (2021), and Plucking the Stinger (2016), all published by Saturnalia Books. She was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio and attended The Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Adroit Journal, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and Tin House, among others. She currently lives with her husband and two cats in Lebanon, TN.
The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep, Trace Peterson
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The second book of poems by Trace Peterson, The Valleys Are So Lush And Steep, attempts to answer the question: what do you do after you’ ve introduced yourself? Modeling aspects of trans interiority, embodied experiences, struggles, and desires from the era before the “ trans tipping point” to our present state of emergency, this book also speaks to universal issues of how self, imagination, language, and the environment are intertwined; how gender can structure anyone’ s experience as both limiting and enabling. Through lyric poems, prose poems, serial poems, and texts that disrupt prosody and invent new forms, Peterson uses humor, non sequitur, equanimity, and anger to critique deserving targets and celebrate trans joy where she can glimpse it.
Trace Peterson is a poet, editor, and literary scholar. She is the author of two books of poetry: The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep (Saturnalia Books), and Since I Moved In, which won the 2007 Gil Ott Award from Chax Press and was republished as Since I Moved In (new & revised) in 2019. Peterson is co-editor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). She also edits EOAGH, a literary journal and small press which has won a National Jewish Book Award and two Lambda Literary Awards.
The Midnight Work, Jennifer Moxley
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: October 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
Jennifer Moxley’s The Midnight Work is a meditation on the fragility of memory and love in the increasingly mediated post-Covid world of polarized politics and climate change. Oscillating between the intimate and the expansive, Moxley addresses old friends, living and dead, in a series of epistles among more condensed lyric poems. Lacking the exhortation to contentment found in Horace, these poems nevertheless bend toward an Epicurean temperance and resilience amid folly, disappointment, and inevitable loss.
Jennifer Moxley was born in 1964 and grew up in San Diego, California. She is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, two books of essays, and a memoir, The Middle Room. She works as a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.
Mercurial, or Is That Liberty, Rachelle Rahmé
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
A lyrical reckoning with a dualism that has been accepted, rejected, embedded in an endless cycle of self-critique, until the boarder between its apparent halves became chipped, scuffed, no longer fitting together, then scoured, submerged in a watery subconscious, faded, and a gradient was formed by the fractal nature of its bonding, making something mercurial, or is that liberty?
Rachelle Rahmé is a Lebanese-American writer and scholar interested in collaborative liberation methodologies. Rahmé is the author of the chapbooks Count Thereof Upon the Other’s Limbs (72 Press, 2019), Puce Commodity (earthbound, 2020), Bataille’s Eggs (blush, 2021), At Crepuscule Remember Aqueducts (Wonder, 2023), Protest and Orison (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), and Hieroglyphics Then and Now (Spiral Editions, 2023). Her translations of the philosopher Georges Bataille’s occupation poetry were published by o•blēk in 2021 as 27 Poems on Death. Superveillance, her speculative fiction novella, was published in an artist’s edition by Aventures Ltd in 2019.
Earthly Conditions: Selected Poems, Birhan Keskin, Öykü Tekten (tr.)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
A representative selection of acclaimed Turkish poet Birhan Keskin’s work, Earthly Conditions explores the loss and longing of the human condition in the context of its separation from the non-human world. Keskin’s ability to shift voices between seemingly distinct subjectivities creates a rich texture and an ambiguity that sits at the heart of her poetry. This poetry is often autobiographical, but the “I” of these poems is merged with non-human voices—stones, penguins, oceans, trees, glaciers, among others—in a way that might be termed organic. Each poem in the book opens the door to introspection in an aching search for wholeness. Although Keskin has been a major voice in the Turkish literary scene since the 1980s, she does not publish often because, as she puts it, “writing too many poems is a betrayal of both words and trees.”
Birhan Keskin is a Turkish poet and editor. She graduated from Istanbul University with a degree in sociology. Her first poems began to appear in 1984. In the late 1990s, she was joint editor of the literary magazine Göçebe. She has since worked as an editor for a number of prominent publishing houses in Istanbul. She is the author of nine books of poetry, and previous English translations include her book-length cycle Y’ol (Spuyten Duyvil) and the selected volume & Silk & Love & Flame (Arc Publications). Keskin is the recipient of Turkey’s prestigious Golden Orange Award and the Metin Altıok Poetry Prize.
Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, archivist, and editor. She is also a founding member of Pinsapo Press, an art and publishing experience with a particular focus on work in and about translation, and a contributing editor and archivist with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. She is the co-translator of İlhan Sami Çomak’s Separated from the Sun (Smokestack Books) and the translator of Betül Dünder’s Selected Poems (Belladonna*). She is the general editor of the Kurdish Poetry Series for Pinsapo Press, as well as a co-editor of the annual Best Literary Translations anthology from Deep Vellum.
The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife, upfromsumdirt
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
The shoes of the fisherman’s wife are coated with Kentucky dust and soil. They travel across oceans to ask questions of Egypt’s deities, of Mali’s Mansa Musa, of Nigeria’s musician-activist Fela Kuti. In sonically rich, surrealist poems with nature at their heart and a touch of absurdism, upfromsumdirt creates an experience on the page that is of our moment and beyond it.
Simultaneously mythic and realist, this collection is an invitation to sway in a swell of Black love and to stomp in protest against the world’s injustices. The voice in these poems is both intimate and international, welcoming us into his soul and taking us on a sweeping journey through the Black diaspora. In the process, upfromsumdirt demonstrates the complexity of Blackness by examining the portal of his own body through space and time and interrogating its binds.
The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife is a place to linger and wonder, to mourn and laugh, and to bear witness to the living and the dead.
upfromsumdirt, aka Ronald W. Davis, is an autodidactic poet, visual artist, and designer from Louisville, Kentucky. He is the illustrator of A Is for Affrilachia and the NAACP Image Award–winning Perfect Black. He is the author of many chapbooks and the full-length collections The Second Stop Is Jupiter: Poems, To Emit Teal, and Deifying a Total Darkness.
Soul Patch, Elton Glaser
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: October 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Soul Patch was selected for the 2025 Off the Grid Prize by poet Gregory Orr, who describes it as a work “full of strong lyric wit and moral fervor.” It is also full of fight. Glaser’s irreverence and fury (“I take my adrenaline straight, with a dash of bitters”) act as a balm, a proverbial patch in these times of daily injury, bracing readers for the next blow. “Listen,” the poet urges. “Sometimes things have to get ugly / Before beauty shows itself.”
Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Akron, where he also directed the University of Akron Press and edited the Akron Series in Poetry. Glaser has published nine full-length collections of poetry, most recently Ghost Variations (Pittsburgh, 2023). With William Greenway, he coedited I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (Akron, 2002). Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, the Iowa Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Poetry Award, and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in the 1995, 1997, and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has also won a Pushcart Prize.
Girl in a Forest, Elline Lipkin
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Elline Lipkin’s Girl in a Forest filters feminist themes through the lens of the Brothers Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel. These poems lay a trail of breadcrumbs through permutations of grief as a mother realizes her mortality, a girl awakens to possibility, and an elder reckons with loss.
Elline Lipkin’s Girl in a Forest explores the roles and tropes of women at different life stages, filtered through the lens of the Brothers Grimm tale of Hansel and Gretel. These poems lay a trail of breadcrumbs through permutations of grief as a mother realizes her mortality, a girl awakens to possibility, and an elder reckons with loss. Lipkin invites the reader to step into the enchanted, “the grip of night, / a swarm of marble /feelings set / inside a storm” and to question, reinscribe, and reverse the tensions of womanhood in both the fairy tale and contemporary life.
Elline Lipkin is a poet, nonfiction writer, and academic. She holds an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing and Literature and has been a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Berkeley and a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award. Her second, Girls’ Studies, is part of the Seal Studies series. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and was a California Resident at Yefe Nof. She has served on the selection committee for the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. A past mentor with AWP’s Writer to Writer program, she is active with WriteGirl in Los Angeles and writes for Ms. magazine. For two years, she served her community as Poet Laureate and editor of the Altadena Poetry Review.
Stone Nest, Richard Collins
Publisher: Shanti Arts
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
In the tradition of the ancient Chinese poets who went to the mountains to be closer to nature and themselves, Richard Collins delivers these dispatches from his mountain retreat called Stone Nest in Sewanee, Tennessee. As a Zen monk, teacher, and abbot, Collins pays tribute and attention to the art of nature and the nature of art, always with a questioning sensibility that asks: what more do the voices of mountains and waters have to tell us? How can we listen to and truly see what is all around us? How can we live our lives with authenticity and daring, yet with compassion and concern for all beings, sentient or not? Stone Nest explores the seasons of the mind and its responses to the seasons of a particular patch of land and the journey one has taken in time and space to settle there. How do poetry and painting, philosophy and religion, sensation and memory distort and disclose the gifts of the natural environment? The title captures the kind of comfort we can expect when we make a rugged landscape our home and meditation hall.
Richard Collins taught at universities in the United States, Wales, Romania, and Bulgaria before retiring as Dean Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at California State University Bakersfield. He spent a decade at Louisiana State University (where he was the first faculty advisor for New Delta Review) and a decade at Xavier University of Louisiana (where he edited the Xavier Review). He has been a Fulbright researcher in London and Fulbright senior lecturer at the Universities of Bucharest and Timişoara, as well as a Leverhulme Fellow in Wales. He has translated poetry from Romanian and books from French, including Taisen Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk (Hohm Press, 2022) and Philippe Coupey’s Zen Fragments: Teachings and Reflections of a Zen Monk in Paris (Hohm Press, 2024). He also edited Deshimaru’s Mushotoku Mind: The Heart of the Heart Sutra (Hohm Presss, 2012). His own books include John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000), No Fear Zen: Discovering Balance in an Unbalanced World (Hohm Press, 2015), and In Search of the Hermaphrodite: A Memoir (Tough Poets Press, 2024). Since 2016 he has been abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple and now resides in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he directs Stone Nest Zen Dojo.
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Contents
Chapbook Poem: When I Was Straight by Dustin Brookshire
“‘When I Was Straight’ prompted me to think about a common queer experience—how most parents assume their children are ‘straight’ and expect their children to live a ‘straight’ life.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: American Girl: Fort Hood, 2023 by Thea Matthews
“[W]eaving in and juxtaposing the lyrics of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl.’ The song’s themes of desperation, wanderlust, and longing are subverted by Ana’s life and tragedy at Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, Texas.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
“It seems such a shame that a beautiful location is just gathering dust and overgrowth, and I wanted to lean into the juxtaposition of that.” Read three poems by Bryana Fern along with a few words about “Women on the Wall.”
Bodies in Transition: Sacred & Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
“There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole.” Read Gray Davidson Carroll’s full review.
“In ‘No Breaks’ I was writing about something I hope I never have to experience. … I tried to keep despair at bay and show some defiance and resilience.” Read two poems by Gerald Yelle along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
November ’25: New Staff, Issue Archive & Donations
Read a note from Editor Aiden Hunt about our new Poetry Readers, the additions of an Issue Archive and a Contributor Fund, Fall poetry submissions, and Gaza.
Chapbook Poem: Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh by Rebekah Wolman
“Settling on the mirror form opened the way into the parallels between the original image of the egrets, their reflection, and their ambiguous relationship and the shifting, even reversing, roles of an adult daughter and her aging mother…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2025 along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
“Subsequent drafts enabled me to … uncover the metaphor of exile, whose meanings are intended to move readers from an experience of alienation to one of discernment of the liberating qualities of outsiderhood.” Read three poems by Alexandra Burack, along with a few words about “To Know Blue From the Color of Snow at Dusk.”
Book Excerpt: Rondo by Yamini Pathak
“The sculpture gardens are located on … the native land of the Lenape people. The poem is a conversation between sculpture, land, and its human and more-than-human inhabitants.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for November 2025, “Rondo” from Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps by Yamini Pathak, along with a few words from the poet.
Two Poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth
“As I shaped the poem, the olive trees became a witness to a deeper experience—to a region’s ongoing, collective pain. It was the land I wanted to make speak in a place where I did not have words.” Read two poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth, along with a few words about “Before.”
A Conversation with Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes
“We wanted something that was alive, highlighted an ever-expanding list of books by these poets, and that will hopefully survive the both of us and flourish under the curation of a fresh set of poets.” Read the full interview about the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook series.
Chapbook Poem: Red Tide by Mary Gilliland
“Reflection, research, a public service announcement, an old Zen koan, and 3 weeks of bicycling for groceries with a bandana tied around my nose and mouth inform ‘Red Tide’.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for December 2025, “Red Tide” from Red Tide at Sandy Bend, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Veronica Tucker
“’You Left the Fridge Open Again’ transforms an ordinary domestic moment into a meditation on tenderness and decay. The open refrigerator becomes a quiet altar, its hum a hymn to what lingers after love’s warmth has cooled.” Read three poems by Veronica Tucker, along with a few words about “You Left the Fridge Open Again.”
Book Excerpt: The Samadhi of Words by Richard Collins
“Zen poets, past and present, who experience deep absorption in the grandeur of this world may even gain wisdom through the way of poetry, Shidō (詩道). This is the samadhi of words.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for December 2025, “The Samadhi of Words” from Stone Nest by Richard Collins, along with a few words from the poet.
December ’25: Pushcart Prize Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to, and a carousel of, the nominated poems.