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 Ruins, Ye Hui, Dong Li (Tr.)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Here’s a witch poet walking backward into the future. There’s an architect dispelling illusions and inviting us into communal living. The poems collected in The Ruins rise from a primordial wisdom that resists the quarrels of the marketplace, that keeps company under a leaky authoritarian roof and rubs off its burn, that carves out its own impossible freedom. In Dong Li’s luminous translation of Ye’s first full-length collection, each poem braids myth and mystery, inviting the reader into a liminal space where “echoes of the ancient, the imagined, and the ‘now’ sound off each other” on the page (The Cincinnati Review).
Ye Hui is an acclaimed Chinese metaphysical poet who lives in Nanjing. His poems in Dong Li’s English translation have appeared or are forthcoming in 128 Lit, The Arkansas International, Asymptote, Bennington Review, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Circumference, Copihue Poetry, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Nashville Review, POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Zocálo Public Square.
Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. He is the English translator of the PEN/Heim winning The Gleaner Song by Song Lin, and The Wild Great Wall by Zhu Zhu. His PEN/Heim winning The Ruins by the Chinese poet Ye Hui is forthcoming from Deep Vellum. His debut collection of poetry, The Orange Tree, was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and a finalist for the Poetry of Society of America’s T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize.
Let the Moon Wobble, Ally Ang
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Let the Moon Wobble considers multiple speakers’ journeys through the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. With humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity, Ang uses varied forms and poetic traditions to process feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. These poems ache for connection and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, plumbing the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.
Coursing through Let the Moon Wobble is the deep desire for wildness, freedom from convention and constraint, and to be seen. The speaker refuses erasure, often taking up so much space that they’re impossible to ignore. Ultimately, we arrive at a place of hope and possibility where what’s “freshly broken” can give way to blooming. Ang’s debut is a testament to the ways queer joy and community can fuel resistance and allow us to imagine radical new ways of being.
Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle, WA. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, Muzzle Magazine, ANMLY, and elsewhere. Ang is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and MacDowell fellow. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2025.
World of Dew, Lindsay Stuart Hill
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
How do we make sense of our suffering? World of Dew grapples with this question by embracing impermanence—the death of a loved one, the transmutation of an old belief, the adoption of a new culture. Moving from the tide pools of Maine to the streets of Hyderabad, Lindsay Stuart Hill entwines grief and awe, beauty and violence, truth and delusion. These poems form a scrapbook of missing girls, clothes drying on a line, and lingering romances. This is the world of dew—a gorgeous and fragile cosmos where we know nothing lasts, and yet we remain—questioning, dreaming, hoping.
Lindsay Stuart Hill grew up in New Hampshire and lives in Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Blackbird.
The Appendectomy Grin, Charles Rafferty
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
Compact in size, but massive in scope, these poems explore the death of self, country, and planet, while remaining grounded in humor and the miracles of everyday life. In a world that is changing faster than ever, The Appendectomy Grin is a deep breath, a meditation, a rhythmic tickle fight, a slightly off-kilter manual on how to remain present and lucid in a world that seems intent on destroying itself.
The result is an argument you cannot disbelieve by a poet leaving his unique scuffmarks on the linoleum kitchen floor of the world. Does the executioner have a rationale for the order of our beheadings? Ask Charles Rafferty. The answer is in the book.
Charles Rafferty is the author of 15 poetry books and chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O: Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT.
At Some Point, David O’Connell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
Time is slippery. At Some Point openly acknowledges this while exploring the intersections between past and present, childhood and adulthood, midlife and mortality. Joyously and solemnly tugging on the threads that connect us—to life, to the planet, to each other—David O’Connell finds meaning in the small things. An earworm, a sudden memory, the arrival of a fox in the neighborhood, even camaraderie among other patients awaiting colonoscopies—all are grist for O’Connell’s ability to view the world simultaneously anew and as it once appeared. From the quotidian to the profound, this is a collection that hovers around your consciousness, reshaping your own vision and insight.
David O’Connell’s poetry collections include At Some Point, Our Best Defense, and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall. His work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Southern Poetry Review, and North American Review, among other journals. O’Connell lives in Rhode Island with his wife, the poet Julie Danho, and their daughter.
Blood Harmony, Bruce Snider
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
An unflinching tale of selfishness and sacrifice, guilt and resentment, hope and despair, Bruce Snider’s fourth collection tells the story of two brothers torn apart by opioid addiction. These sublime poems paint a singular portrait of rural working-class America populated by shuttered tool factories and country gay bars, hidden fishing holes and Dolly Parton drag queens. Drawing on music and myth, science and history, Snider interrogates the bonds of family, exploring themes of masculinity, devotion, sexuality, and the biology of addiction. Yet for all its competing tensions, Blood Harmony leaves us with an enduring portrait of brotherhood defined as much by tenderness as by pain.
Bruce Snider’s previous collections include Fruit; Paradise, Indiana; and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is a coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. Snider’s awards include an NEA fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Common Disaster, M. Cynthia Cheung
Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
As a front-line physician, M. Cynthia Cheung started writing poetry during the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her remarkable debut collection, Common Disaster, chronicles these experiences. Confronting not just the coronavirus but also war crimes and the death of loved ones, Cheung shows us that the pandemic is only one of many disasters we hold in common. In poems that look to both the past and future, she takes a stand against the extinction of self and memory, challenging the violence of erasure.
The period covered by the book is geologic and vast. It examines present-day evidence of ancient human activity and natural history, including the Lascaux caves, asteroid craters, tar pits, and Viking ruins. The poems include ghazals, thoughtful free verse, and work that takes up the page in reframing classical Chinese oracular texts to situate the pain of a doctor in crisis.
As a physician-poet, Cheung asks us to see beyond the every day to the devastating truths about the human condition.
M. Cynthia Cheung is an American poet whose work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, swamp pink, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Houston, Texas.
Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
During Elizabeth Robinson’s six years working with chronically unhoused people in Boulder, Colorado, her relationships with the community’s most vulnerable deepened—even as they were filtered through a web of paperwork, systems, and strictures. The Vulnerability Index questionnaire is just one such system. Ubiquitous in shelters across America, it is representative of the endless tasks that people living on the street must complete to receive even minor assistance.
Moving between the local court, jail, shelter, and soup kitchen, Robinson’s poems capture the strange juxtapositions of the intimate, bureaucratic, and absurd that such spaces demand: a frostbite victim wants to share his state-sponsored recovery room with a friend from the street, a domestic violence survivor must change her name and even her social security number, an unhoused activist joins a vigil for another woman only to discover that she is, mistakenly, the person being mourned. Spare yet richly empathetic, Robinson’s verse works to implicate the reader’s own vulnerability on every page.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, including Pure Descent, the National Poetry Series winner, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize, and On Ghosts, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.
Song of Gray, Asha Futterman
Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Song of Gray approaches Black experience by clarifying the concrete worlds that exist between humanity and objecthood. Asha Futterman renders this in-between space as it reveals itself in performance: in a contemporary performance workshop, at an audition, in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in the dailiness of the YMCA, her porch, the walk to the train.
These poems build new logic systems. Futterman stands at her grandmother’s grave and proclaims, “how powerful how dense and naked how inaccurate.” With quiet, deadpan, and piercing language, Song of Gray offers earnest, felt relationships to race, empathy, pleasure, and nonsense.
“There wasn’t a sunrise / just gray / then brighter gray.” In Song of Gray, blackness is not definite—it is an ambivalent hole as much as an area of hope. Blackness is a song of gray.
Asha Futterman is an actor and poet from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her chapbook empathy was published by The Song Cave in 2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Bennington Review, Conduit, and The Journal. She currently teaches children in Brooklyn.
The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird, Kim Farrar
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird delves into how the impossible happens every day. The hummingbird should not be able to fly—its body too heavy for its slight wings— and yet it does. We should not be able to love, laugh, and find joy in the face of so much grief, labor, disability, and hardship—and yet we do.
Kim Farrar is a writer and collage artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Familiar and The Brief Clear, both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Salamander, Rhino, New Ohio Review and other literary journals. Her essays have been published in Illness & Grace, Voices of Autism, and Reflections. Her manuscripts, The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird and Calamities of the Natural World, were semi-finalists in Grayson’s poetry contests in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Orbits and Bonds, a chapbook of poems and collages, was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices contest by Finishing Line Press in 2022. In 2020 her poem “Powerful Forces” received an honorable mention in the Gemini Poetry Contest. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
Smoke Drifts: Selected Poems, Nadia Anjuman, Diana Arterian (tr), Marina Omar (tr)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: November 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
Afghan poet Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) drew on the lineage of Persian and Sufi writing and her life under Taliban rule, attending to love, oppression, myth, and devotion through lyrics that both embrace and resist tradition. Anjuman grew up in the Herat, Afghanistan, a city known for centuries for its poetry. While the Taliban was in power, Anjuman met with other women in what appeared to be a needlepoint school, one of the few sanctioned pastimes for women, to secretly discuss literature and poetry. After the fall of the Taliban, Anjuman was finally able to attend university. She wrote and published a celebrated volume of poetry and was set to publish another before her early death due to domestic violence. Selections from both of Anjuman’s collections are presented here for the first time in English.
Born in Herat, Afghanistan, Nadia Anjuman (1980-2005) surreptitiously gathered with women in the Golden Needle School to discuss literature under the guise of practicing needlepoint—one of the few Taliban-approved pastimes for women. After Afghanistan’s liberation from the Taliban, Anjuman attended Herat University and published Gul-e-Dodi (Flower of Smoke). She died in 2005 after being severely beaten by her husband. Her second volume of poetry, Yek Sàbad Délhoreh (A Basket of Doubt), was published the following year. Flower of Smoke has been reprinted three times and sold over three thousand copies with readers in Iran, Pakistan, France, and beyond. Her poetry has since been translated and published in Italian and Portuguese.
Diana Arterian holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is the author of the poetry collections Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press) and Playing Monster :: Seiche (1913 Press), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with fellowships from the Banff Centre, Caldera, Millay Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, she writes “The Annotated Nightstand” column at LitHub and lives in Los Angeles.
Marina Omar moved to the US from Afghanistan in 2001 and received her PhD from the University of Virginia in Political Science in 2016. Marina has published an article on Afghan constitution selection in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Her research has been supported by multiple fellowships and grants, including The Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, The Robert J. Huskey Travel Fellowship, and Quandt International Research Fund. She has taught at the University of Virginia, Mary Washington University, and Mary Baldwin University.
Brillo, Paul Cunningham
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“Brillo-shaped / block / fragment / of life / locked behind / a window / artifact of devotion” What does it mean to “see the old face in the altered one”? Taking his cues from Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing-in,’ Paul Cunningham’s Brillo is more than a poet’s meditation on Paul Thek’s 1965 “Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box,” it’s a perception-expanding experiment that challenges readers to become spectators—to visualize poet as painter. Just as Thek signed his letters to his friend Susan Sontag as “Vincent” (after Van Gogh), Cunningham, navigating the psychology of advertising, leaves a different kind of signature on a box of—a book of—questions concerning the art market, the meatpacking industry, mechanical reproduction, visual modernity, and Catholicism. Brillo might not be the answer to the (sin)ewy riddle oozing inside Thek’s pop art reliquary, but, like the knife-sharp clouds of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, this box/book might force you to look in directions you’ve never dared to before. As Andy Warhol once said: “Art is what you can get away with.”
Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books. He is the author of Sociocide at the 24/7 (New Michigan Press, 2025), Fall Garment (Schism Press, 2022), and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). He is a collaborator in Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books, 2025). He is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Poem-A-Day, Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, Bat City Review, Quarterly West, and many others. His poems, essays, and translations have been anthologized in Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024); A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing (Indiana University Press, 2023); Selections from Gobbet (Schism Press, 2023); and Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos (Snuggly Books, 2021). Cunningham’s poem-films have screened in museums and festivals in Mexico, India, Denmark, and Czechia. He manages the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Total Art, Laura Paul
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Total Art, Laura Paul wrestles with issues of art and violence in a book-length meditation spanning the mediums of painting, photography, movies, music, and more. Inspired by the term Gesamtkunstwerk, the unification of multiple arts for one expressive aim, Paul pushes the limits of what it means to let art, or love, consume all of life until nothing else remains. By reckoning with our sharpest moments of brutality and our most extravagant displays of creativity, Paul shows that art isn’t extraneous to survival, but at the very center of it. A timely examination for a frightening era, this book isn’t only a bold argument about the need for beauty during upheaval, but is as compassionate as it is commanding.
Laura Paul is a writer and artist published in The Brooklyn Rail, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other outlets. Her work has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts, Other Places Art Fair, L.A. Zine Fest, and West Hollywood Book Fair. She earned her B.A. from the University of Washington, where she was named a Mary Gates Scholar in the Arts and Humanities, and her Master’s from UCLA, where she received the Gilbert Cates Fellowship for Artistic and Academic Merit. Her first published book, Film Elegy, was released in 2024 by PRROBLEM Press and is now on its second printing.
A Limited Number of Miracles: a walk through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden, Jonathan Penton
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Publication Date: November 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In A Limited Number of Miracles: a walk through the New Orleans Sculpture Garden, poet Jonathan Penton explores sixty-six pieces from the Sculpture Garden and the feelings they evoke. He uses these sculptures to process and discuss themes of grief, family, relationships, and sexuality. The result is a complex tome of ekphrasis and emotion, covering a wide range of subjects and themes, all centered in the beautiful New Orleans Sculpture Garden.
Jonathan Penton founded the online journal Unlikely Stories in 1998 and continues to run it. He has served in editorial, management, and technical roles for numerous arts organizations, including the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Rigorous: a journal by BIPOC, MadHat, Inc., and Big Bridge. His previous books of poems are BACKSTORIES (Argotist Ebooks), Standards of Sadiddy (Lit Fest Press), Painting Rust and Blood and Salsa (Unlikely Books), and Last Chap (Vergin’ Press). He lives in New Orleans with his family.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/11 and 11/17 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.”
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.