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.
Flop Era, Lara Egger
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
Flop Era reckons with the complications of being human, and therefore, with the consequences of being fundamentally flawed. It contends with failed potential and the certain uncertainty of the future, while interrogating the past for clues that might explain why, as the speaker bemoans, “there are never enough nails in the coffin of poor choices.” While Egger throws confetti on the quotidian, she disarms the reader with earnestness and vulnerability. Rich in metaphor, affable and self-deprecating, the poems in Flop Era shine a spotlight on regret, infidelity, the feminine ideal, fear of death, and fear of insignificance.
Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It, which received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Conduit, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Egger is the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and her poems won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry. Egger lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Groceries, Nora Claire Miller
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The winner of the 2023 Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize contest, as chosen by Srikanth Reddy, Groceries is a book-length poem about what to do about objects. On earth everyone is worried about objects—getting them, naming them, maintaining them, destroying them, getting rid of them. Some people say objects will be the end of life on earth. Other people say objects will save us, if we get the right ones.
But as we reckon with these object-mediated futures, we live on an earth full of the stuff itself: fax machines, horseshoes, waves. Groceries is a guide for what to do about these objects—how to speak to them and how to listen for a reply.
Nora Claire Miller is a poet. Their first book Groceries was the winner of the Fonograf Editions Open Genre Contest, selected by Srikanth Reddy, and is forthcoming in fall 2025. Nora’s work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, FENCE, and Chicago Review. Nora is based in Western Massachusetts, where they’re the editor-in-chief of Ghost Proposal. They have an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from Hampshire College.
Burnt Mountain, Emily Wilson
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Burnt Mountain is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being—“that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown”—and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood—and what can sustain us.
Since her first collection, The Keep, Emily Wilson has forged a singular voice in American poetry, one that traces and complicates the dynamic relationships between language and the natural, aesthetics and science, material forms and inwardness. Her new collection, Burnt Mountain, is set on the rugged slopes of an inauspicious mountain, densely wooded, long ago scoured by fire, and marked by generations of human presence. Fiercely attuned to the match and mismatch between mind and mountain—the ways in which the natural and the human construct and deconstruct each other in the contested realms of art, wilderness, history, devotion, and politics—Wilson’s poetics reckon with resistant forces of nature and with the human drive to subdue what eludes us. Above all, these poems encounter the flickering, flowing matrices of being—“that far-forged interior / Outlandish green and flaming cause unknown”—and give voice to the elemental question of what can and cannot be known or understood—and what can sustain us.
Emily Wilson is author of The Great Medieval Yellows, Micrographia (Iowa, 2008), and The Keep (Iowa, 2001). A visual artist as well as a writer, Wilson lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and western Maine.
Abode, Jun-long Lee
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Abode, Jun-long Lee explores homes both material and interior, lost and rediscovered; his poems are excavations of nested domestic spheres furnished by ruin and decay. Lee takes readers through hallucinatory geographies, plant-haunted spaces, and dreamlike corridors flooded with water and light, accompanied by an ever-changing subject that cannot make itself feel at home in its body, its country, or its language.
Jun-long Lee is a Canadian poet, visual artist, and filmmaker. His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Jubilat, The Malahat Review, Riddle Fence, Grain, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere.
No Longer at This Address, Andrew Hemmert
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
No Longer at This Address explores place and the psychology of leaving through the inflammatory lens of the American West. The collection uses the lyric-narrative mode to complicate notions of rootedness and address the ephemerality of where one’s from. The poems visit bison ranches in the Rocky Mountains, converse with a collapsed satellite, and find complicated joy among wildfire ash and lost dogs. No Longer at This Address is a catalog of various departures and arrivals and ultimately paints a portrait of one man’s attempt to make a new home with his loved ones in a volatile and uncertain future.
Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.
YEET!, jason b. crawford
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one.
YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.
jason b. crawford (they/he/she) is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their work has been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary.
A Violence, Paula Bohince
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Hardcover Paperback / eBook
A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.
Paula Bohince is the author of three previous poetry collections, Swallows and Waves, The Children, and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.
Atom and Void, Aaron Fagan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Aaron Fagan’s Atom and Void is a dazzling and haunting meditation on existence and impermanence. This collection of sonnets delves into the fragility of perception, the boundaries between self and other, and the ways language fractures and recombines to illuminate meaning. Drawing on influences as diverse as physics, art, and philosophy, the poems balance precision with abstraction, creating a space where the reader encounters the immediacy of experience alongside its inevitable fading.
What emerges is a deeply personal yet universal reckoning with the nature of being—its joys, its terrors, and the unrelenting beauty of its transience. These poems do not seek to provide answers but to embody the questions that shape our lives. The result is a work that both disrupts and comforts, holding the reader in a delicate balance of wonder and disquiet. With its thematic range and lyrical precision, Atom and Void is an extraordinary contribution to contemporary poetry.
Aaron Fagan is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Pretty Soon and A Better Place Is Hard to Find. His poems have appeared in Harper’s, Granta, The New Republic, and other publications.
A Love Tap, Bernardo Wade
Publisher: Lookout Books
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
Wade’s evocative debut swaggers through time, through family, through love, through the perseverance of growing up in the deep South as a Black son with a white mom. Illustrating the strangeness and cacophony of his native New Orleans, he divines sweet relief in small mercies—a rosary strung with Mardi Gras beads, a Sunday football game, Nigel Hall covering Frankie Beverly in Lafayette Square, bare feet in a stream, a mother kneading dough. In intimate, nuanced portraits of loved ones, in requiems and broken sestinas, he pushes past his trauma, troubling the years he spent in addiction or resenting his father.
As he maps out the parts he played in his life’s most formative moments, he can’t help but “retune the heart / strings of hard men,” teaching us how to become more human, often in the face of inhumanity. Here, he manages to land, not a crushing blow, but a love tap—the softest way to knuckle another’s cheek.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade received the Academy of American Poets Vera Meyer Strube Poetry Prize, the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize, and the Third Coast Poetry Prize. A Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has published in The Nation, Ecotone, Guernica, and The Southern Review, among other places. He is the poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. A Love Tap is his debut collection.
The Furies, Moira Egan
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In The Furies, Moira Egan offers fierce feminist reimaginings of familiar myths and narratives, from Arachne to Echo, from Medusa and Mary Magdalene to the female characters of The Odyssey, in verse that highlights the value of solidarity and collective strength among women. With dazzling erudition and playful ingenuity, she deploys exuberant wordplay and traditional poetic forms to subvert the patriarchal canon. At the heart of the book is a profound exploration of voice, not least the ongoing silencing of women’s voices: Egan blends righteous anger with grief, ultimately finding hope in the transformative power of language.
Moira Egan has published five books of poetry in the United States and four in Italy, including Amore e morte, a bilingual collection of new and selected poems. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies on four continents. Also a prize-winning translator, she lives in Rome with her husband, Damiano Abeni.
Unnameable, Anna Gual, AKaiser (Tr.)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
Anna Gual’s poems express life in all its unexpectedness, whether she is exploring relationships between human beings and the rest of our universe, between and within bodies, or language itself. Scientific inquiry informs her work as she observes both the visible and the invisible. She is a leading figure in the Catalan literary world, a prolific prize-winning author of eight collections of poetry. Unnamable will be Gual’s debut book in English translation and will be bilingual in Catalan and English on facing pages.
Anna Gual is a prolific prize-winning poet and author of eight collections of poetry, a mainstay in the Catalan literary world, with collections also translated into French, Italian and Spanish. Her first book, Implosions (2008), now in its fourth edition, came out when she was twenty-two. Her blog, No caic, em tiro, won the 2012 Prize for the Best Blog Written in Catalan. She has won several prestigious awards for her poetry collections, including the 2022 Miquel de Palol Prize, the Bernat Vidal I Tomàs Prize and the Senyoriu Ausiàs March Prize in 2016, and the 2013 Pare Colom Prize for Mediterranean Poetry. She has been a featured poet at the 2024 Sant Jordi USA festival, the 2024 European Poetry Festival in the UK, the 2022 Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Slovenia, and at readings in Bologna, Turin, Venice, Nice, and elsewhere.
AKaiser, PhD, is the Pushcart Prize-nominated poet of the collection, glint, co-winner of the Milk & Cake Press Prize, and an NEA Fellowship-awarded translator of Catalan, French, and Spanish. Her current translations include the writings of transatlantic urbanista Cebrià Montoliu (1873-1923) and architect Antoni Gaudí; singer/songwriter Anahí Rayen Marilua; and the work of Mexican poet Javier Acosta Escareño. Her translations, poems, and photos appear in Circumference, Harvard Review’s Omniglots Series, Hyperion, Ginosko, Pen + Brush’s In Print, Poetry International, POETRY and The Rumpus. Her poem, “Astronaut, or Blues Singer” was set to music and recorded by Mel.lif.lu.ous.
Cajun South Brown Folk, Shome Dasgupta
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Shome Dasgupta’s latest poetry collection, generational threads weave rich Acadian and East Indian tapestries. Crossing cultures and continents, Cajun South Brown Folk sings across “espresso sunrises” and the “kindred of skin” shared beneath them. Dripping with memory and steeped in history and place, these formally diverse poems take heart in the strength that builds through a multitude of tongues and homes still ever rooted in the search for light and love through connections between Bengali and Cajun ways of life.
Shome Dasgupta is the author, most recently, of Atchafalaya Darling and Histories of Memories. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, New Orleans Review, The Emerson Review, Jabberwock Review, American Book Review, Arkansas Review, Magma Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Lafayette, LA.
The Blues Handbook, Adrian S. Potter
Publisher: Thirty West Publishing House
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
From the author of And the Monster Swallows You Whole and Field Guide to the Human Condition, Adrian S. Potter intricately melds prose and poetry in The Blues Handbook to navigate issues of grief, identity, racism, memory, social issues, and personal struggles. Like the blues that inspired them, the candid poems here will pull you back to listen repeatedly until they replay in your mind.
Adrian S. Potter humbly lives in Minnesota on the traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Dakota people. When he’s not busy silently judging your beer selection and record collection, he’s talking too much or writing poetry and prose. His work has appeared in over 300 literary journals and magazines Potter is the author of three collections of poetry/prose/hybrid work, including the recent And the Monster Swallows You Whole and Field Guide to the Human Condition.
Sweet Repetition, Cynthia Cruz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Integrating Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and the works of other poets, this collection explores narrative through abstraction and considers how repetition holds both the power to constrain and to generate. Freud explains how what we repress—what we know but don’t want to acknowledge—reappears in our actions through repetition. Through slips of the tongue or selective memory, we engage with what our unconscious knows, finding knowledge through unknowing. The psychoanalytic session is centered on bringing forth repressed knowledge through acts of unknowing—speaking without thinking—which brings one closer to recognizing an obscured desire.
The poetry of Sweet Repetition works in ways akin to the psychoanalytic act. These pulsing poems follow the definitions of the word revolution—to revolve, change direction, unroll, unwind, happen again, repeat, orbit around. Images and words reappear in the motion of Cynthia Cruz’s poems, inviting us into their revolutionary, political, and cumulative effects.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight books of poetry, two works of nonfiction, and one novel. Her collection Hotel Oblivion was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School.
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps, Yamini Pathak
Publisher: Milk & Cake Press
Publication Date: October 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps is a meditation on what it means to be a woman in two cultures, connected to loved ones as a daughter, a wife, a mother. Yamini Pathak’s first collection moves between countries and through time as the narrator reflects on her girlhood, the lessons of her parents and other elders, as well as on the shifting pressures on women today. Weaving nuanced description of the domestic and the artistic seamlessly throughout, this is a book of warm, rich imagery and quiet, compelling reflection.
Yamini Pathak is the author of poetry collection Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps (Milk & Cake Press, 2025). She has published poetry chapbooks Atlas of Lost Places (Milk & Cake Press, 2020) and Breath Fire Water Song (Ghost City Press, 2021). Yamini is a member of the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Get the Word Out Poetry Cohort and serves as the editor of Inch with Bull City Press. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, Kenyon Review Writers Workshops, and VONA. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and has been a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s Global Poetry Prize (South Asia). Yamini holds an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and her poems appear in West Branch, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 10/21 and 10/27 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.”