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.
Natural History, Brandon Kilbourne
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A research biologist most recently at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Brandon Kilbourne illuminates the intersections between science and poetry in poems that demonstrate the wonder, curiosity, and precision required by both disciplines.
Natural History opens by confronting the hidden histories within the study of biology and its links to colonialism, including the revelation that European scientists used slave ships to transport specimens from Africa and the Americas back to Europe. Across the collection, Kilbourne describes how these histories of exploitation are still reflected in dioramas of elephants, rhinoceroses, and African people displayed in natural history museums. Other poems narrate the intricate work of studying fossils, and a longer sequence recounts an expedition above the Arctic Circle to recover evidence of how a fish’s fins gave rise to the diversity of limbs found among amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Natural History is a rare and fascinating debut, and Kilbourne’s exquisite eye brings the role of the working biologist to life.
Brandon Kilbourne has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Chicago and over twenty years of experience as a research biologist at natural history museums. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Obsidian, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
How About Now, Kate Baer
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Renowned poet Kate Baer returns with a bold and compassionate collection that confronts the march of time in a shifting world.
With her trademark candor and curiosity, Baer explores what it means to grow older, to release children into the wildness of their own lives, and to reclaim the ever-evolving self. Raw, luminous, and urgent, this collection channels Baer’s own journey to middle age into poems that are profoundly intimate yet resound universally, identifying the beauty, resilience, and fragility that arrive in every stage of life.
How About Now is a striking declaration of ongoing transformation and self-discovery. From the poet who has captured the heartbeat of the modern woman, this collection reaffirms Kate Baer’s place among the most vital voices of our era.
Kate Baer is the three-time New York Times bestselling author of What Kind of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, and And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post, and the New York Times.
Shade is a place, MaKshya Tolbert
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Shade is a place meanders east–west along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, seeking “a Black sense of place” at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall’s architectural history, and the speaker’s ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one’s attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems (“tree walks” and “shade walks”) and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one’s inner life—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.
MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere—a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.”
Water to Water: Gaza Renga. Marilyn Hacker, Deema K. Shehabi
Publisher: Interlink Books
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
In 2009, prompted by the Israeli siege of Gaza, poets Marilyn Hacker and Deema Shehabi started a correspondence. It took the form of responding to each other’s poems. They resumed their poetic dialogue by email after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.
Their project involved an alternate call and response between them in the tradition of the Japanese renga form, each poet picking up a word, phrase, or image from the poem preceding. The result is a fascinating poetic conversation. The two poetic voices are beautifully meshed together, so that it actually reads as one long poem.
The poetry is very rich in imagery, and these images stay with you, as do feelings the poems generate, for example, of unrest, of being in exile. Television and social media show you the pictures in the streets, this poetry takes you into the homes and minds of people. You can read it very much between the lines, and therefore it seems to speak to people about their own experiences.
Water to Water: Gaza Renga is a dignified celebration of humanity in and among atrocities. Although triggered by events in Gaza, it weaves in other conflicts past and present.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of twenty-one books of poems, including three collaborative books, and twenty-two collections of translations from the French. Over the course of her career, she has received numerous honors, including the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Argana International Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, editor of the Kenyon Review, and editor of the French literary journal Siècle 21. She lives between Paris and New York.
Deema K. Shehabi is a Palestinian American poet and editor. She is the author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon and the co-editor (with Beau Beausoleil) of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, for which she received NCBR’s recognition award. She is also the winner of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2018 and a recipient of Best of the Net nomination in 2021 as well as several Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and her work has been translated into Arabic, French, and Farsi.
Corrective Lenses: for Reading Ethno-botan-ese and Other Incendiary Language, Kathleen Burnham
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Corrective Lenses: for Reading Ethno-botan-ese and Other Incendiary Language is Burnham’ s attempt to call bullshit on the gaslighting that is both self-imposed and put upon not just women but everyone and everything that is historically and currently denied voice and agency— mostly that put upon the traditional other with a capital O. Somewhere between geek-ing out over cult favorite/obscure films— and their enigmatic directors— and using Freudian analytics to self-diagnose an unhealthy relationship with male-dominated religion/culture, Burnham begs for poets to put legs on their penned prayers, for art to become hardware for witchcraft, the works of faith that is alive, irrespective of religion or creed.
Kathleen Burnham currently lives on Sicangu Lakota tribal land in Mission, South Dakota. She is grateful to be teaching English and foundational studies for Sinte Gleska Univesrity. She received her MFA in creative writing from Arcadia University and is currently pursuing doctoral studies in Indigenous foodways, ecology, and activism. Kate, her partner, Pat, and their son, Bob, share their home with Claude-Jackson, Blu¨ , Erland, Ted, Tootles, and Mergatroid— their dog and five cats.
The Jersey Slide, Danny Shot
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
In The Jersey Slide, veteran poet and proud Hoboken resident Danny Shot revels in the quotidian richness of his experience as a first-generation American and child of German Jewish refugees. Recounting tall tales and inside jokes, local histories, and family sagas, the poems in this collection sidle up to you like the loquacious barfly at your local dive, revealing unexpected drama, pathos, and humor in landscapes and faces you thought you knew. Written with pugnacious language and intimate humor, The Jersey Slide celebrates the unvarnished, working-class beauty of a diverse and scrappy community.
Danny Shot is the author of Works, also published by CavanKerry Press. Danny Shot was a longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot, an arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ.
word time, devorah major
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Hearing Osage Indian artist Duane BigEagle pose the question “How old is your language?” set devorah major thinking about language and what language was “hers.” The result is word time, a collection of poems organized around grammatical categories. The book creates connections, not through the traditional meanings of the parts of speech that become phrases, sentences, lines, poems, but through the relationship between infinite time and the finite human endeavors of healing, and of assault. It interrogates the birth and rebirth of humankind, and specifically of humans born of Africa and the African diaspora, a subset and superset of that humanity, grounded in the planet, galaxy, and universe where humanity was born.
Juxtaposing the archetypal with the specific, word time ranges in scope from Yoruba fertility myths to the racist justification of slavery in Florida’s social studies curriculum, traveling through space and time as it contemplates the horrors of ecological destruction and the perpetual capacity of humanity to survive, heal and move forward in a universe that is constantly transforming. It takes a circular view of our species from its origins to the fact of its inevitable future demise, telling the story of humans then, as spirit and myth, now, as war and oppression, and in the future, as memory.
devorah major was born and raised in California, granddaughter of immigrants, documented and undocumented, and served as San Francisco’s Third Poet Laureate (2002–2006). Her poetry has carried her to many countries, where she has performed with and without musicians. Her previous books include with open arms, Califia’s Daughter, and where river meets ocean. Winner of the Regina Coppola International Literary Award Italy, 2022, major is a member of Daughters of Yam, a poetry and jazz performance duo. She has performed as poet and actress with First Voice productions of Song of the City in 2022 and Soul of the City in 2023 and 2024, and currently lives in Oakland, CA.
Unburying the Bones, Victoria Buitron
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: November 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Unburying the Bones is a book of poetry that serves as an ode to those with grief lingering in their bodies, latent or bubbling—but always present—either in the firm of their ribcage or the soft of their thighs. The poems bring to the fore pain made corporeal, the roots of misogyny, femicide, and the depths of matrilineality. It is an exploration of intimacy while reflecting on the lengths society has gone to subdue women. The writer reclaims sex as pleasure, her body as home, and her fear into drive.
Victoria Buitron is a writer who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. She is currently the competitions editor for Harbor Review. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres (Woodhall Press, 2022), was the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner. In 2023, she received the Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives federal funding. She has been the series editor for the Connecticut Literary Anthology since 2023. Craigardan, Tin House, GrubStreet, Sundress Publications, VONA, and more organizations have championed her work through grants or writing residencies. Unburying the Bones is her debut poetry collection.
In the House, Still Light, Klaus Merz, Marc Vincenz (Tr.)
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Klaus Merz, a consummate master of the short form, captures the wonders and travails of aging in the alpine countryside reflected in these Taoist influenced poems and prose poems, which have been sculpted by the aging artist with every single word dutifully and carefully considered. Questions of mortality and the afterlife are considered and reflect in the forests, along the creeks and rivers, the mountains and in the blue sky stretching above.
Klaus Merz was born in 1945 in Aarau and lives in Unterkulm, Switzerland. He has won many literary awards, including the Hermann Hesse Prize for Literature, the Swiss Schiller Foundation Poetry Prize and the Friedrich Holderlin Prize in 2012. He has published over 35 works of poetry and fiction. His latest novel is The Argentinian and his recent collections of verse are Out of the Dust, Unexpected Development, Helios Hauls and firm.
Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, journalist, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation; his translation of Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue: Selected Poems, won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature.
Hunger, Danielle Jones
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Hunger is a fierce and intimate portrait of survival, inheritance, and the ache of becoming. In her debut collection, Danielle Jones moves across generations and continents-from wartime Italy to the Deep South-with poems that thread together the visceral details of history, family, and the body. Whether foraging in “abandoned gardens” or slicing “a potato so thin you can see the sun / of her skin shining through,” these poems explore the everyday rituals of care and cruelty, the silences we carry, and the secrets buried in kitchens, attics, and the body itself. -Diannely Antigua, author of Good Monster
Danielle Jones is a poet, artist, and educator. She holds an MFA from UMass Boston. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Consequence Magazine, Memorious, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artist Award, a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, and a Brother Thomas Foundation Fellowship. She teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, where she directs the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival and manages YAS Press.
One Trail of Longing, Another of String, Carla Panciera
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
In One Trail of Longing, the Other of String, Carla Panciera communes with hawks, cows, owls, and loved ones, reflects on girlhood, motherhood, daughterhood, friendships, and the loss of parents, and wrestles with what bearing one’s past has on the present and on the future.
Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm in Westerly, RI. She has published two previous collections of poetry: Cider Press Award Winner, One of the Cimalores and Bordighera Press Poetry Award Winning, No Day, No Dusk, No Love. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, RHINO, Cream City Review, and the Los Angeles Review. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, the Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. She is also the author Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023) A recently retired high school English teacher, Carla lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Stardust Lives in Us, Daniela Gioseffi
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
“In Daniela Gioseffi’s poetry we’re inspired to understand and embrace the natural world. Gioseffi’s sympathy and empathy are everywhere in her poems and books, as in this new collection with her never-ending love for nature and the intricate and mysterious science of which it, and we, are composed . . . Imbued with respect for biological truths in an unfathomable universe-the poet reminds us we are made of the very dust of exploding stars. But, there’s humor, too, in poems like Big Hearted, Witty and Wide-Eyed. After all despair is realized, the glories of the natural world can save us with inspiration to collective community, where lives influence each other, and we all breathe the same atmosphere. In quoting the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, Daniela Gioseffi reminds us we’re one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” —Philip Appleman
Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of 18 books of poetry and prose, She edits Eco-Poetry.org, which receives 6 thousand global visitors monthly. She’s published in The Nation, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, Rain Taxi Review, Chelsea Literary Review and in many magazines and anthologies. Her first of six books of poetry was Eggs in the Lake (BOA Editions, 1979). Poems therein won a NY State Council for the Arts Grant Award. Her latest books of poetry are Waging Beauty (PWP, 2016) and Blood Autumn: Autunno di Sangue (VIA Folios/ Bordighera Press, 2007) the year in which she won The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
Let It Be Extravagant, Michelle Reale
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Let it be Extravagant limn the line between memory and desire, time and timelessness, and the real and imagined world. Generationally and ancestrally informed, Reale’s poems create microworlds where experience is hard won, tussling with wide-eyed innocence, while tradition both stabilizes and confounds in a rapidly changing world. The ascendant language in these poems is one of seeing the value of where we come from, while relishing the thrill of the quotidian life in all of its vagaries.
Michelle Reale is the author of several poetry and flash collections, including Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019) and Blood Memory (Idea Press), and In the Year of Hurricane Agnes (Alien Buddha Press). She is the Founding and Managing Editor for both OVUNQUE SIAMO: New Italian-American Writing and The Red Fern Review. She teaches poetry in the MFA program at Arcadia University.
If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, Maria Giura
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Maria Giura’s If We Still Lived Where I Was Born, the narrator unlocks the meaning she’s made of her childhood and heritage, spirituality and lost loves and draws the reader in to retrieve their own. The collection begins in the apartment above her parents’ Brooklyn pastry shoppe where she imagines them still fighting, still making us, still together, then shifts to adulthood where she learns to stay still long enough to listen for the story, and then returns to childhood where her mother and aunts teach their kids to spread out their blankets and live. Moving between New York and Italy, between family and “stranger,” these poems show longing and vulnerability, but also the thrill of being young and part of something larger than oneself, of making peace, and pursuing the path you were meant to. They brim with the people and places that have taught her the most and ring with pathos and celebration, from her immigrant father waiting for her on the corner . . . bread in his hand to the sister who pulled the music out of her, helped her make her own song. Beginning with a journey to a literal birth place and extending outward to many figurative places of self-discovery, this collection explores what lasts when all else passes away.
Maria Giura is also the author of Celibate: A Memoir, which won a 1st place Independent Press Award, and What My Father Taught Me. An Academy of American Poets winner, Giura has been published in several journals including New York Quarterly, Prime Number, I-70, Liguorian, Presence, Midstory, PLR, Italian Americana and Voices in Italian Americana. She received her PhD in English from Binghamton University and teaches writing workshops for Casa Belvedere Cultural Foundation.
The Return from Calvary, Mary Ann Samyn
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
What good is suffering? Why does it happen? How do we go on? In her much-anticipated seventh collection, Mary Ann Samyn brings her eye for beauty, however fleeting, and her signature wit to bear on these questions. “The Book of Grief trails off, or I lose my place,” she writes, looking up, out, in, away—, by turns haunted or reassured by dreams and memories, kept company by nature. “Will there ever be comfort again in this life?” Mary Ann asks, “God so loved the world, we are told. / I walk the neighborhood where I left off being a child. / There is nothing doing, save a light breeze.”
Mary Ann Samyn has published six books of poetry, including Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance (42 Miles Press) and My Life in Heaven. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Colorado Review, FIELD, Laurel Review, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University and can be found on Substack where she writes Cake & Poetry (https://maryannsamyn.substack.com). She lives in West Virginia and in her home state of Michigan.
Maryville, Joelle Taylor
Publisher: Clemson University Press
Publication Date: November 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
With a vividly sketched cast of characters, award-winning poet Joelle Taylor uses the Maryville butch bar as a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition in a collection as filmic as it is familiar. A hybrid chronicle, magic trick, television series, prayer and insurrection, Maryville conjures ghosts back to their bodies, a community to their feet. The four butches introduced in Cunto & Othered Poems return transplanted into the Maryville bar in 1957 as teenagers. They bring with them stories of incarceration, escape, and resilience – a quality that will mark their friendship for the next 50 years. Through the Maryville’s darkened windows, we watch the Gay Liberation Front stagger to its feet, a nascent women’s liberation movement bite off its bindings, squat culture’s wild spread across the city, the fight against Clause 28, the Brixton Riots, the Sex Wars and much more. Inside, the Maryville has its own rituals, its own revolutions to consider. More than anything the Maryville is a safe space to be dangerous. Women find themselves in each other’s faces while outside Boy-Boy’s howl their infinite carols.
Joelle Taylor is the author of 5 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted both for theatre, and into a television screenplay, and was featured on the Radio Three documentary Butch. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre and tours her work nationally and internationally from Queen Elizabeth Hall to Sydney Opera House, from Australia to Brazil. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, the Ondaatje Prize, and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her most recent radio programme A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcast at the end of last year on BBC Radio Four. In 2023 and 2024 she toured the UK as a part of Blue Now, directed by Neil Bartlett and featuring Russell Tovey, Travis Alabanza and Jay Bernard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a former Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Outstanding Contribution and named in the 2025 Pride Power list.
Paces the Cage, Sean D. Henry-Smith
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, Paces the Cage, lifts off from their previous book by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds, stage directions, lighting cues and an environmentally musical language helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative experience by this adventurous and endlessly exciting poet. The spontaneous shifts in tone, style and subject matter offer a mirror to personal and historical narratives of oppression, adversity, the act of speaking and what it means to be truly heard by your community of fellow creators.
S*an D. Henry-Smith (born 1992) is a poet and photographer. Their first poetry collection, Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. They are also the author of two chapbooks.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/4 and 11/10 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.
“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.”