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.
New Arcana, Jessica Traynor
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Moving from teenage friendship and destructive relationships towards a tangling with the realities of family life, domesticity, and desire, this highly inventive collection builds into a heartbroken letter to a dear friend (personified in the poems as ‘lydia deetz’) who died by suicide. Interwoven with numbered poems from a newly imagined Major Arcana, New Arcana celebrates both the holding on, and the letting go.
Among other awards, Jessica Traynor has received Hennessy New Writer of the Year and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2023. New Arcana is her fourth collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Dedalus and Pit Lullabies (2022) from Bloodaxe.
Jessica Traynor was born in Dublin in 1984 and is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and in 2016 was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was an Irish Times poetry books of the year choice for 2022. Pit Lullabies was shortlisted for the inaugural Yeats Society Sligo’s Poetry Prize in 2023 and Jessica Traynor received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry 2023. She is poetry editor at Banshee.
Lives of the Female Poets, Clare Pollard
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet’s own everyday life – from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane – all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages. Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the ‘Poetess’ over time, there are also poems about writers’ lives – sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.
Whether imagining a ‘three-martini afternoon’ at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She is a poet, editor and translator and has published five collections with Bloodaxe: The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), which she wrote while still at school; Bedtime (2002); Look, Clare! Look! (2005); Changeling (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Incarnation (2017) and Lives of the Female Poets (2025). She has also written an illustrated book for children, non-fiction and two novels for adults. Her debut novel Delphi (Fig Tree, 2022; Avid Reader, US, 2022) has been translated into German, Dutch and Spanish. She won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize in 2025 for her novel The Modern Fairies (2024), an award given to works that combine storytelling fiction and non-fiction in original ways, encompassing a range of artistic genres, disciplines, cultures and subjects. Clare Pollard was Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2017 to 2022 and was appointed Artistic Director of the Winchester Poetry Festival in 2022.
Ruins and Other Poems, Samer Abu Hawwash, Huda J. Fakhreddine (tr)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
In these poems, Samer Abu Hawwash stands upon ancient and modern ruins, engaging with the archetypal Arabic qasida and its echoes in the present, set against a backdrop of exile, displacement, and genocide. The site of the ruin, the journey, and the return home are the three movements of the archetypal Arabic form with which Samer contends in his book-length poem. Writing in and from the moment of crisis, the poet keeps returning to ruins, forfeiting the journey and the hope of return and resolution, rearranging the elements of poetry in the Arabic tradition in search of closure or consolation—in a gesture, a shadow, a memory, an object. The five poems that follow “Ruins” in this book root themselves in monumental loss. When “it no longer matters if anyone loves us” and “we will lose this war,” nothing remains but the poem, the witness, the signpost in the wasteland of history.
Samer Abu Hawwash (b. 1972) is a Palestinian poet, novelist, editor, and translator, born in Lebanon. He is the author of 10 poetry collections including his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997), I’ll Kill You Death (2012), One Last Selfie with a Dying World (2015), Ruins (2020), and From the River to the Sea (2024). He is also the author of three works of fiction: The Journal of Photographed Niceties (2003), Valentine’s Day (2005), and Happiness or A Series of Explosions that Rocked the Capital (2007). Abu Hawwash is the translator of more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose from English including works by William Faulkner, J.G. Ballard, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Yann Martel, Hanif Kureishi, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, and many others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain where he currently works as the director of the Culture & Society section at Almajalla Magazine.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). Her translations include Jawdat Fakhreddine’s poetry collection Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) and a poetry collection, Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures.
#evolutionarypoems, Mihret Kebede, Anna Moschovakis (tr)
Publisher: Circumference Books
Publication Date: November 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
The 100 poems by Ethiopian writer and artist Mihret Kebede in #evolutionarypoems are rhythmic and direct reactions to contemporary political events. These poems turn over hard questions about protest and power with an attention to everyday life that is woven inside political witness. #evolutionarypoems shows how revolution is not linear and how a deep connection to homeland lives inside of critique. The book is Kebede’s first published in English and Amharic.
The book #evolutionarypoems is a collaboration between Kebede and the writer and translator Anna Moschovakis. The two met in Addis Ababa in 2009. A decade later, they came together to translate these poems from Amharic into English, meeting throughout the pandemic to discuss the poems, their context, and how to transport them into English. The result is a bilingual book that is also a living conversation between friends, contexts, and languages.
About the book, Uljana Wolf writes, “At once archive of the present and activation of silenced histories, Mihret Kebede’s #evolutionarypoems powerfully ignites an imaginary of resistance in order to change the rules of the game: “let me become flame / I am the people … not fuel, nor tool.” In this first English edition, Anna Moschovakis’s superbly energizing translation from the Amharic—document of sustained friendship and dialogue—is an expansion of that collective imaginary.”
Mihret Kebede is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She co-founded the Tobiya Poetic Jazz series, the Netsa Art Village Artists Collective, and the Addis Video Art Festival. Her work has been featured in several books, including Wax and Gold: Poetry Jazz, Stille Macht: Silence und Dekolonisierung, Modernist Art in Ethiopia, and Songs We Learn from Trees, the first ever anthology of Amharic poetry in English. Her poems have been published in Washington Square Review, Poetry International, Lyrikline, World Literature Today, Circumference Magazine, and in the chapbook Eight #evolutionarypoems from Dirt Press.
anna moschovakis works with poetry and prose as a writer, editor, translator, publisher, teacher, and designer. Her six books include An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (2024), and They and We Will Get into Trouble for This (2016). Her translation of David Diop’s novel At Night All Blood Is Black (Frère d’âme) was awarded the 2021 International Booker Prize.
The Lamb With The Talking Scroll, Courtney Bush
Publisher: b l u s h
Publication Date: November 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
What began as a simple fascination with a single image from one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus spiraled into a personal quest to find a real grail via dreams, frogs, physics, gauntlet feelings, and a haunted Fisher Price farm animal sounds wheel. In her fourth full-length collection, poet and filmmaker Courtney Bush puts forth a poetic tour de force in her unrelenting search for the divine in the quotidian.
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of Every Book Is About the Same Thing and I Love Information.
Southernmost: Sonnets, Leo Boix
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Southernmost, Leo Boix takes us on a spellbinding voyage through time and imagination, from the Argentina of his birth – ‘the end of the world, the antipode’ – to a new life in England.
Unearthing an old grief, the poet embarks on a glittering, encyclopaedic exploration of the Latin America he left behind: a journey through personal memory into a continent’s past, haunted by the Europeans who once fixed their telescopes on its shores. Helping us ‘see faces history can’t reach’, Southernmost reveals truths hidden in plain sight: the devastation of indigenous peoples and their lands; dissidents disappeared by the junta; a mother’s concealed cancer diagnosis; the clarifying sexuality of a boy whose father can’t bear to acknowledge it.
Restlessly intelligent, tender in their evocation of gay intimacy, migration, and the natural world, this virtuosic net of sonnets captures a glimpse of our world’s interconnecting threads.
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives in the UK. He is a recent fellow of The Complete Works, a national mentoring programme aimed at poets from minority backgrounds, which included poets such as Kayo Chingonyi, Sarah Howe and Warsan Shire, among others. His poems have been included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2021 (Eyewear Publishing) and Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye), and have appeared in POETRY, PN Review, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Boix is co-director of Invisible Presence, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new Latinx writers in the UK. He is a board member of Magma Poetry, co-editor of its Resistencia issue showcasing the best Latinx writing, and an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre in London. He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize 2018 and the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019.
The Dead Tree Garden, Lisa M. Dougherty
Publisher: Nine Mile
Publication Date: November 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Dead Tree Garden presents a profoundly evocative poetic landscape in which themes of memory, motherhood, and mortality are intricately interwoven. Lisa M. Dougherty employs a voice that is at once tender and uncompromising, cultivating a body of work rooted in grief and resilience. Each poem functions as a contemplative exploration of the subtle devastations and unexpected beauty embedded within quotidian experience. Her imagery, marked by its tactile immediacy and emotional rawness, offers readers a fragmented yet cohesive mosaic of lived experience—one that is simultaneously intimate and broadly relatable.
Lisa M. Dougherty is the author of Small as Hope in the Helicopter Rain, and coauthor of The Answer is Not Here. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Alongside we Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Double Kiss: Stories, Poems, and Essays on the Art of Billiards, and Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania. Her poem “Kildeer” was short-listed for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Erie, PA with her husband and their two daughters.
Stolen Flower, Irma Pineda, Wendy Call (Tr)
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked in her cornfield. The courts ruled that Ascencio died of natural causes. When journalists investigated, they discovered numerous village girls, as young as twelve, who also had been raped by soldiers. The reports sparked outrage throughout Latin America over gender-based violence, oppression of Indigenous communities, and military impunity.
Stolen Flower is Irma Pineda’s powerful sequence of poems memorializing these events and their ramifications. The poems, which appear here in the original Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), Spanish, and English, are a chorus of fictionalized voices: Ascencio herself, the land, and the community grapple with the terror. It is a lament and a call to action, refashioning the testimonio into a tribute to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and their lands, cultures, and languages.
Irma Pineda is an Isthmus Zapotec poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She has two previous collections of poetry in Wendy Call’s English translation: In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Wendy Call is a writer, editor, translator, and educator. She is the author of No Word for Welcome and coeditor of Telling True Stories and the annual Best Literary Translations. She lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land.
Lazarus Species, Devon Walker-Figueroa
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: November 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. “You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity,” she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a “Lazarus species”—creatures thought vanished, even while they live.
Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla’s space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like “The Euthanasia Coaster,” a “Desert Theater,” and “Paradise Lust.”
Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.
Devon Walker-Figueroa grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon Coast Range, and received her education from Chemeketa Community College, Cornell University, Bennington College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and New York University, where she was the Jill Davis Fellow in fiction. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Zyzzyva, and her debut collection of poems, Philomath, was selected by Sally Keith for the National Poetry Series, won the Levis Reading Prize, and was the first collection of poems to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Walker-Figueroa has worked as a professional ballet and modern dancer, research assistant, classical harpist, bartender, literary editor, and creative writing instructor and is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Signal Flow, William Fuller
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: November 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
“With its uncanny ability to switch between the ecstatic and the vaguely administrative, Signal Flow is a clear statement of what’s possible in the twenty-first century—non-totalizing, democratic in its equivalence of anticipation, expectation and unpredictability, and optimistic in its assessment of the power for renewal. There is constant invention, given understandings uprooted from syntactical soil and replaced with a range of textual strategies. With no homogeneous surface, a vast reading space rises as from an undecidable pool or in the window of a Magic 8 Ball, a frequently intoxicating vortex of misdirection, one alembic catching the distillate from another. And the wonderful use Fuller makes of ‘natural’ subjects (insects, birds, bushes, recesses, clouds, trees), yoking them to the politics of co-existence, is itself direct democracy, an anarchy full of the verve and vivacity of one (M. Fuller) who knows how to do things. A politics of which being a part is not only livable but endlessly rewarding.”—Larry Price
William Fuller grew up in Barrington, Illinois, and received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 1983. His most recent books of poetry include Playtime (2015) and Daybreak (2020). He lives in Winnetka, Illinois.
Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction, Julia B. Levine
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: November 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
This remarkable collection by an acclaimed poet follows the experiences of a woman whose infant grandson has been diagnosed with cancer. The poet traces the spiritual trial, the battle between hope and despair, that almost consumes her and the child’s parents, while in the background, she observes early signs of environmental collapse. Through deftly crafted language that delves unflinchingly into the heart of suffering, Levine helps us to confront the most difficult questions related to our urge for survival and our desire for meaning. Great passages of understanding and insight lift us out of ourselves, disclosing core truths of the terrible and beautiful world in which we live and dream. Winner of the Wolfson Press Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Julia B. Levine’s recent poetry awards include the 2015 Northern California Book Award for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU 2014), a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Terrain Poetry Prize, the 2023 Oran Robert Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, as well as a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers in the context of climate change. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and Prairie Schooner. She earned a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. Her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU 2021), won a Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/18 and 11/24 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.