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.
An Optimism, Cameron Awkward-Rich
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Here is collection of poems about finding oneself in a life—an ordinary life that one could not have imagined—and making the decision to live it. Against our terribly ambivalent present—in which Black, trans, and other minoritized forms of life seem at once more possible than ever and, also, relentlessly under attack—An Optimism gives us poems in search of ways to survive—and even thrive. Anchored by an epistolary sequence directed to the 20th century poet and activist Pauli Murray, and looking to the work of other trans, queer, and black feminist writers like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan for company and counsel, Cameron Awkward-Rich situate us in spaces intimate and capacious, from lovers’ beds to the Gamma Quadrant across the Milky Way. Although it speaks resolutely and intimately from a particular “I”, An Optimism turns to the creativity of the motley we to, in Hortense Spillers’ words, make “a space for living.” These are poems for the living, infused with hope and ancestral wisdom.
Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch (Persea Books, 2019). His creative work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, and the Lannan Foundation. Also a scholar of trans theory and expressive culture in the U.S., Cameron earned his PhD from Stanford University’s program in Modern Thought & Literature. His more critical writing can be found in Signs, Trans Studies Quarterly, American Quarterly and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Duke University’s Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the ACLS. His book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment was published by Duke University Press in Fall 2022. Presently, he is an associate professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Natural Order of Things, Donika Kelly
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.
The Natural Order of Things is a brilliant and moving book, one that reaches toward equilibrium and something like happiness.
Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield Wolf Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
New York Trilogy, Peter Balakian
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In an inventive, elliptical language, New York Trilogy explores one man’s journey from the late 1960s to the twenty-first century, as he moves through a series of experiences centered in New York City and the surrounding New Jersey Palisades. Throughout this long poem in three parts, the protagonist’s life is impacted by historical events including the Armenian Genocide, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, the attacks of September 11th, the US war in Iraq, and the climate crisis.
Comprised of three multi-sequence poems originally included in Peter Balakian’s collections No Sign, Ozone Journal, and Ziggurat, the sections of New York Trilogy come together to form a poetry that embraces interior and aesthetic experiences, celebrates human intimacy, and bears witness to history. The historical power and psychological depth of Balakian’s work expands on the tradition of the American long poem with a lyrical narrative that weaves intimate personal moments into the vastness of shared history.
Peter Balakian is the author of nine books of poems including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ozone Journal. His memoir Black Dog of Fate won the PEN/Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response was a New York Times bestseller. Balakian’s work has been translated into many languages, and he teaches at Colgate University.
Dead Things and Where to Put Them, Marina Carreira
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Marina Carreira’s Dead Things and Where to Put Them shares the hardships of marriage and motherhood during a pandemic. The exploration of loss within the context of various relationships provides a nuanced look at how grief manifests in everyday life, especially in the face of isolation and uncertainty. Carreira’s third collection highlights moments of strength, connection, and hope, and inspires readers to locate their own resilience amidst loss and the unprecedented. With vivid imagery and bittersweet moments, Carreira navigates the space between life and loss.
Marina Carreira (she/her/hers) is a queer Luso-American writer and multimedia artist from Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Save the Bathwater and I Sing to That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back.
Cord Swell, brittny ray crowell
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the dead and the living? In her debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the generations of her family from her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. She preserves her relatives’ stories in writing and in works of collage, a style of archive that layers the past and the present literally and poetically.
This unique approach transforms Cord Swell into an altar, an artistically enshrined space where crowell communes with the past and looks to the future. The title poem, in which crowell speaks to an aunt who passed away, poignantly asks, “if there’s any such thing / as paradise . . . / better than the warmth / of your neck . . . / how close am i / to that context of space?” Her question acts as a provisional thesis statement for this collection, a poetic attempt to reveal, redress, and interpret those who came before her, especially in the absence of physical traces. Each poem imagines ways to access family members who have died and calls out to ancestors crowell never met.
In the process, crowell demonstrates capacious syntactical range, nimbly leaping from haibun to erasure poems, interviews to sonnets. She also invents forms she calls “grooves,” which are structured as album tracklists. These techniques marry form with meaning, echoing the voices of lost loved ones in indelible verse. Rhapsodic, inventive, and ambitious, Cord Swell establishes crowell as one of the most creative and dynamic new voices in poetry.
brittny ray crowell is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University, where she teaches courses in poetry and composition. She is a recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Archive of Desire: A poem in four parts for C. P. Cavafy, Robin Coste Lewis
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In her first book, Robin Coste Lewis’s poems exploded the imagery of the Black female figure from antiquity through the present day. Her second book was an expansive hybrid photographic and poetic study of human migration and the human family. Now she delivers a “poem in four parts,” which originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with the composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu, with Lewis on the microphone offering a live reading of this sequence. Ignited by their encounters with Cavafy’s archive, in the heart of Athens, the multimedia quartet exalted the liminal spaces where desire and diaspora meet—where art often asserts itself most forcefully. In this volume, Lewis brings this performance to life on the page, where the poem weaves in and out of Cavafy’s bedrooms, notebooks, and the suppressed erotic excavation underpinning all of his work. Lewis converses directly with Mr. Cavafy: “often you / reminded us that // the only true / barbarians are the ones / raging in silence inside // of our own / minds.” But she also brings equal parts of herself to this study of artistry and sensuality, as in the short, tender section entitled “Cavafy in Compton/Closet Anthem: Self-Portrait at Sixteen, 1979.”
As in all Lewis’s works, here she reaches across centuries to express what is timeless and not bound by our current moment or our single selves: the discipline and glory of art, the give-and-take of love, the kiss that lives in the moment, and the unfolding journey of being human, whose contours become clear only with the passage of time, the igniting of memory, and the words we find to describe the journey.
Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, her first collection of poetry. The book was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and it was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Literary Hub named it one of the best books of the last twenty years. Her second book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was the winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award for Oustanding Literary Work in Poetry. She is also the coauthor, with Kevin Young, of Robert Rauschenberg: Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The former poet laureate of Los Angeles, Lewis holds a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California, an MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a BA in post-colonial literature and creative writing from Hampshire College. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Transition, and The Massachusetts Review. She is currently a professor of poetry and poetics at USC.
No, Idea Vilariño, María José Zubieta (Tr.)
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
In No, Idea Vilariño strips poetry to its essence—distilling love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time into spare yet searing verses. Renowned as a leading voice of Uruguay’s “Generation of 45,” Vilariño’s final collection is at once a defiant refusal and an unrelenting assertion of existence. From its stark nihilism emerges a poetic voice that insists on being heard, even as it denies life’s joys.
Now available in English for the first time, No has been masterfully translated by María José Zubieta, in collaboration with poet and musicologist J. Martin Daughtry. This bilingual edition preserves Vilariño’s rhythmic precision and existential intensity, giving readers a rare glimpse into a body of work that continues to resonate far beyond its origins. No is a testament to the power of poetry to confront the void, and to carve meaning from silence.
Idea Vilariño (1920–2009) was a renowned Uruguayan poet, translator, literary critic, and university professor. Her poetry collections, including Poemas de amor and Nocturnos, cemented her reputation as one of Latin America’s most influential literary voices.
María José Zubieta is a literary translator and professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she teaches literary translation, translation theory, and creative writing. Originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, she has coordinated multiple international translation projects, leading to the publication of works such as Every Body Is Totem, an anthology of poetry by José Watanabe.
Markers and Shrines, Margot Schilpp
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Markers and Shrines, Margot Schilpp traces the moments that define us—the losses that strip away our former selves and the resilience that emerges in their wake. These poems illuminate the way the past etches itself onto the future, displaying how experience, no matter how painful, strengthens and redefines us.
With lyrical precision and a musician’s ear for language, Schilpp crafts a world where memory lingers and meaning deepens. Her unembellished eloquence and eye for striking detail turn the everyday into something enlightening, reminding us that even in loss, there is beauty. Markers and Shrines is a reflection on survival and the unseen forces that shape who we become.
Margot Schilpp teaches at Southern Connecticut State University and Quinnipiac University. She is the author of four earlier volumes of poetry, including Afterswarm. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband Jeff Mock, and two daughters, Paula and Leah.
Pine, Jonathan Johnson
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
To grieve is to search. In Pine, Jonathan Johnson’s poems travel across continents: through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Scottish Highlands, the Greek islands, and the mountain wildernesses of the American Northwest, seeking meaning in the spaces left behind. These poems embrace the raw physicality of place, uncovering the deep textures of the natural world as both a witness and companion to loss.
Amid the perpetual elegy of everything, Pine offers moments of improbable wonder. Johnson’s voice is steady and rich with narrative, guiding us through landscapes of memory and wilderness alike. In this intimate collection, grief and grace are intertwined, and the world—against all odds—goes on.
Jonathan Johnson is a poet, author, and MFA professor at Eastern Washington University. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, appeared in Best American Poetry, and heard on NPR. His previous works include three books of poetry, Mastodon, 80% Complete, In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, and May Is an Island, as well as two memoirs and a play. He migrates between his hometown of Marquette, Michigan; the coastal Scottish Highlands; and the American Northwest.
The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fleda Brown
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
What does it mean to exist in a universe that refuses to stay still? In The End of the Clockwork Universe, Fleda Brown weaves together the vastness of cosmic discovery with the intimate textures of daily life. Ranging from quarks to catalytic converters, snapping turtles to black holes, these poems trace the mysteries of time and perception, offering a voice both unsentimental and deeply compassionate.
With wry humor and unending curiosity, Brown walks the fine line between knowing and not knowing, between order and entropy. Her poems wander through scientific revelation and personal reflection and capture the quiet astonishment of existence. The End of the Clockwork Universe does not seek to solve life’s uncertainties, but sings to them, leaving behind echoes of resilience and the sheer joy of paying attention.
Fleda Brown is a poet and author. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize among many other accolades. Her recent memoir is Mortality, with Friends. Her earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are on Fire: New & Selected Poems.
The Green Lives, Sara Gilmore
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
It’s a month, a year. Wander, tramp, escape, trespass: people have every reason under the sun—and no reason at all. In new syntax and a fitful sense of the poetic line, The Green Lives finds joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand. It opens in familiar signs (safehouse, railroad, dog) that are made strange in their service to warn or welcome. In its turn, a reversal of place emerges where no marker will be left: an example of yellow petals, a thousand miles of strip malls, air filling with dust, glitter, and sulfur. Ever receptive to beautiful intrusion, so fast, Gilmore reckons with the infinite.
Sara Gilmore’s poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presse’s Second Factory and 6×6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived for seventeen years in Seville, Spain, and now lives in Iowa City with her young son. She has worked extensively on translating the work of Antonio Gamoneda.
Reel, Colleen O’Brien
Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
A playful debut collection of poetry; O’Brien’s shattering sonic sensibility tethers us to the material world via humor and a vibrant commitment to precision.
“I didn’t mean to be at this party,” writes Colleen O’Brien in Reel, as the reader realizes they too have been absorbed into a spirited, spinning acceleration. In this mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, O’Brien’s shattering sonic sensibility tethers us to the material world via humor while a vibrant commitment to expansive precision moves us “closer farther.” The poems in Reel occupy a liquid, naturalistic desire for language play with Modernist-influenced winks of resistance to absolute cohesion. O’Brien’s wry, sly, kaleidoscopic lines turn mid-word toward surprise, exacting a powerful attention to too-often overlooked beings and images: stones, peas, pearls, rhymes, animals, children. Here is an oblique yet deeply relational poetics: vulnerable, alert, observant.
Colleen O’Brien is the author of the story collection All Roads (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press) and the poetry chapbook Spool in the Maze (New Michigan Press), which won the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her full-length poetry collection, Reel, will be published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and other journals, and her story “Charlie” won a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Lehigh University.
We’re Somewhere Else Now, Robyn Sarah
Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
We’re Somewhere Else Now moves with ease from the particular to the abstract. These are poems of grief and unexpected change, of quiet awe at the human experience. Each poem is a window for the reader to look into, “lit room to lit room,” tracking desultory days of isolation and uncertainty, while also highlighting reasons to pay attention: playing with a grandchild, the rarity of a leap year, the calls of birds.
Poet, writer, literary editor, and musician, Robyn Sarah has lived in Montreal since early childhood. Her writing began to appear in Canadian literary magazines in the 1970s while she completed studies at McGill University and the Conservatoire de musique du Québec. Her tenth poetry collection, My Shoes Are Killing Me, won the Governor General’s Award in 2015. As well, she has published two collections of short stories, a book of essays on poetry, and a memoir, Music, Late and Soon (2021), that interweaves her youth as a professional-track clarinetist with her return at fifty-nine (after a lapse of thirty-five years) to the piano teacher who was her life mentor. From 2010 until 2020 she served as poetry editor for Cormorant Books.
The Jacarandas Whisper, Alberto Ruy-Sánchez, Rhonda Buchanan (Tr.)
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez adds yet another “secret garden” to his opus of wonder. The Jacarandas Whisper is carefully structured into six sections of lyrical poems that reflect upon the paradoxical nature of the jacaranda trees, their immortal yet transient character, their origin myths, their multicultural history of migration, and the lessons they offer on the human condition. The book closes with a final “Resounding Coda” that celebrates the jacaranda’s power of communication: “She whispers things when silent, / and says even more if you listen.”
Closed Season, Monika Herceg, Marina Veverec (Tr.)
Publisher: Sandorf Passage
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Hardcover
In Croatian, lovostaj means “closed season” — a time during the year when hunting is prohibited. Animals that are hunted by humans are allowed to relax during this time of year, not having to live in fear of being shot. The poems gathered in this award-winning collection by Monika Herceg use this symbolism to explore new ways to express the horrors women the world over have been, and are continually, forced to deal with in a painfully patriarchal world.
Monika Herceg, a Croatian poet, screenwriter, dramatist, editor, and activist, is the author of three poetry books: Pocetne koordinate (2018), Lovostaj (2019), and Vrijeme prije jezika (2020). She has received many prestigious national and international awards, including Goran za mlade pjesnike, Kvirin, Fran Galovic, Slavic, Mostovi Struge, Na vrh jezika, Biber, Zvonko Milkovic, Lapis Histriae, and European Poet of Freedom Award 2024. A physicist by profession, she spent her childhood in the village of Pecki near Petrinja. A mother of two, she lives and works in Zagreb.
Marina Veverec is a student of literary translation at the University of Zadar, Croatia. Her English-language translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Exchanges, Poetry International Web, Asymptote, Verseville, Harvard Review, and Words Without Borders. She also translated Initial Coordinates, Monika Herceg’ s first book of poetry to appear in English.
No Rhododendron, Samyak Shertok
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Part elegy, part poetry of witness, and part poetry of exile, No Rhododendron is a lament to the poet-speaker’s father and fatherland and a grief-wrought love letter to his mother and mother tongue. The collection is haunted by an existential question about Shertok’s oral mother tongue, Tamang: How do you write about a language that has no script? Exploring the erasure, ambiguity, multiplicity, violence, and unknowability signified by “X,” the poems dwell on the lip of a new ghost language, which ultimately fails itself. The polyphonal witnessing of the decade-long Maoist conflict in his native Nepal from schoolchildren’s perspective reveals how a war can fracture the psyche of an entire generation. The final thread of the book, a “reverse-elegy” for his mother, meditates on the impending loss of a loved one as a potential site of mourning, impermanence, gratitude, memory-making, and mythopoeticism.
Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His honors include the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Nepal, he was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.
Burn, Barbara Hamby
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess—how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, “How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn’t. But I will.”
Barbara Hamby is the author of Holoholo, Bird Odyssey, and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Burn is her eighth book of poems. In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai’i, Lester Higata’s 20th Century,won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares,and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University, where she is distinguished university scholar, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Goose, Melanie Dennis Unrau
Publisher: Assembly Press
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Tracing words the way a tracker moves across land, Goose collects hand-copied details from Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region authored by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Melanie Dennis Unrau’s poems explore extraction and the relationship between humans, non- humans, and the land, resulting in an act of irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism.
Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet, editor, scholar, and climate organizer of mixed European ancestry from Winnipeg, Manitoba, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anishininewuk, Dakota Oyate, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Red River Métis. She is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). A former editor of The Goose journal and Geez magazine, Melanie also co-edited I’ll Get Right on It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis (Fernwood, 2025).
What Remains, Leylâ Erbil, Alev Ersan (Tr.), Amy Marie Spangler (Tr.), Mark David Wyers (Tr.)
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this remarkable novel-in-verse, a young woman named Lahzen comes of age grappling with a culture gripped by interethnic tension. Bearing witness to the mutilation of a Kurdish journalist, the political imprisonment of her lover, and the violence of the man her widowed mother has taken up with, Lahzen reaches back into the past, searching for the root of this evil.
From the Byzantine Empire to the twentieth-century Turkey of Erbil’s experience, What Remains searches urgently for a way to escape these recurrent cycles of suffering, while preserving hope in the smallest acts of kindness. Now available for the first time in translation, with an introduction by Ayten Tartici, What Remains is a fearless, deeply felt collection from one of the most influential Turkish writers in recent history.
One of the most influential Turkish writers of the 20th century, Leylâ Erbil was an innovative literary stylist who tackled issues at the heart of what it means to be human, in mind and body. Erbil ventured where few writers dared to tread, turning her lens to the tides of social norms and the shaping of identities, focusing intently on emotional conflict, and plumbing the depths of history and psyche. In 2002 and 2004 Erbil was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature by Turkey PEN. She died in Istanbul in 2013.
Ayten Tartici is a Turkish-born, New York-based writer. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Slate and The Yale Review, among other venues. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, where she was awarded the John Addison Porter prize for best scholarship university-wide. She was selected as an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown and has taught literature at Columbia University. She is a 2025-2026 Writer-in-Residence at the James Merrill House, where she is working on a memoir that blends in cultural criticism.
Generic Husband, Rebecca Hazelton
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Generic Husband presents a queer take on an old, beloved, and troublesome subject: the husband. While the “generic husband” of the cultural imagination has remained relatively static, the reality of the husband in contemporary marriage proves multidimensional and complex. Alternatively tender and bitingly funny, Rebecca Hazelton’s poems unpack the inequities created by gender, power, and patriarchal legacies, unraveling what a “husband” can be, both personally and culturally.
Rebecca Hazelton is an award-winning poet, writer, critic, and editor. She is the author of Fair Copy, Vow, and Gloss, a New York Times “New and Notable” book. Her poems have been published in literary journals and national magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and Boston Review.
Girl With a Bullet: Selected Poems, Anna Malihon, Olena Jennings (tr.)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: October 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Ukrainian poet Anna Malihon’s English-language debut gathers daring, resilient, open-eyed poems written before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The difficult fates voiced by the protagonists of Malihon’s poems intertwine with her own experience, weaving an alarming but beautiful world where the young grow old and love is met with war. This world, at first shocking, holds the reader in suspension, compelling a desire to rethink and reread. With deft allegory and startling metaphor, Malihon crafts a poetry that seeks to influence the course of events, to reroute history.
Anna Malihon is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, and the author of six books of poetry and a novel. Her work has been published in numerous Ukrainian literary journals, included in several anthologies, and translated into Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Georgian, Armenian, and French. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion forced her to leave Ukraine. She lives in Paris, France.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press), the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press). She is the translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, and Vasyl Makhno. Her translation of Yuliya Musakovska’s The God of Freedom was released in 2024 from Arrowsmith Press. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.
Aase’s Death, Aase Berg, Johannes Göransson (Tr.)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
One might expect a book by Aase Berg with the title Aase’s Death to be dark, and it is. You may also expect it to be parodic, and maybe it is that too. But if it’s parodic, it’s darkly parodic. A defiantly dark laughter animates the book.
It’s also—like most of her writing—a slangy, linguistically playful book. Berg has argued that at the heart of language is “a kind of happy babbling for the sake of babbling.” But in Aase’s Death, the babbling is not happy or paradisical; it’s drudgy and slow as if underwater. This feeling is apparent in the way the words move in the poems. The grammar is sometimes random and purposely fails to comply with the rules of good writing. If the deepsea state of mind is a kind of depression—even “death”—we can also see in this failure to comply with rules, a kind of bodily, mimetic rebellion, a kind of insurrectionary depression. This is the state of Aase’s Death: a poetics of failing to use the right words, failing to be good, failing to be alive.
Swedish poet Aase Berg began her artistic trajectory as a member of the radical organization, the Surrealist Group of Stockholm. Her books include With Deer (2009), Dark Matter (2013), and Hackers (2017)—all translated by Johannes Göransson into English and published by Black Ocean.
Johannes Göransson is the author of nine books of poetry in English, including Summer, and the translator of several books by Swedish poets. He is the co-editor of Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
The Book of Interruptions, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
Publisher: Buckrider Books
Publication Date: October 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
In The Book of Interruptions Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi has brought together a collection of poems written with scalpel-like precision. Infused with “pre-emptive violence” these poems mark the intersection of war, immigration, sexuality and history, with lines often placed at the crossroads of Perso-Islamic and Western thought. Moving between an Iran that is marked with “tulips from the martyr’s blood” and Toronto, a city that is always screaming but where the author is a “ghost, anecdotal,” Mohammadi writes unflinchingly of the reality that faces them and others like them who straddle two worlds. But within this fierce collection there is also room for art, and for pleasure, and for words that invite us all with “gentle patterns of light against light against light.”
Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi (they/them) is a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer and translator. They are the winner of the 2021 Vallum Poetry Award and the author of nine chapbooks of poetry. The Book of Interruptions is their fifth poetry book.
As When Waking, Daniel Schonning
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems of Daniel Schonning’s debut collection range from personal examinations of childhood suffering and loss of faith to deep observations of images and objects to the foreclosure of a family home, a father estranged by addiction, mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed, and a door to the underworld. With all its component pieces, As When Waking aims to apprentice itself to the medium of letters, inviting readers to listen and learn from the systems and symmetries of alphabets.
Schonning employs structural paradigms to explore themes of poetic lineage. Twenty-six of the poems in this collection are abecedarians, a form where the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet, with the lines of the first poem proceeding alphabetically from A–Z, while those of the second poem move from B–A, and then C–B, all the way to Z–A. This structure is tied to Jewish mystic texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which probes the relationship between the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the world they inhabit.
Daniel Schonning’s poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, Poetry Daily, POETRY Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and serves as a poetry editor for Seneca Review.
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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.
“From the height of the camel, I could see the ruins of Palmyra and a medieval castle on a hill. Present day Wadi Rum in Jordan has no evidence of an ancient civilization in the desert until one arrives, by car not camel, in Petra.” Read two poems by Sandy Feinstein, our sixth and final biweekly poet of the Fall 2025 issue, along with a few words about “Souvenir.”