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.
It’s Important I Remember, Cortney Lamar Charleston
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
“History doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.” In his sweeping third collection, Charleston brings a poet’s ear for echo and rhythm to bear on American history and life after 2016. For Charleston, these rhymes cut two ways: the long tradition of American racism and fascism, and the steady pulse of Black persistence. The collection’s titular invocation frames each poem, at times an oratory to rally a crowd, in other moments a private prayer whispered as the speaker gathers himself to face another day. Charleston insists that should we cede memory of our national biography—whether to repression or indifference—we will witness the country’s dissolution into something unrecognizable to many, yet all too familiar to its most marginalized people. But with each reiteration and riff, he also invokes a tenuous hope—that if we summon an American history of Black resistance, we might still make a more perfect union.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Pushcart Prize–winning poet and the author of Telepathologies and Doppelgangbanger. He has been awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Ithaca, David Lehman
Publisher: Criterion Books
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Ithaca consists of sixty sonnets divided into two equal parts, “Ithaca” and “Gifts Reserved for Age.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Ithaca is the island home to which the hero returns after twenty years of war and perilous adventures. In Lehman’s “Ithaca” sequence, two phrases are strategically repeated, with variations: “Happy the man who . . .” and “What did he believe in?”
In “Gifts Reserved for Age,” the restless traveler continues to recollect and make sense of his life. Ultimate questions are raised: Does God exist? Can art redeem reality and not just contrive ways to escape from it? What are the compensatory “gifts” that accompany growing old?
Lehman, who has resided for many years in Ithaca, New York, does inventive things with the sonnet as a form and the sonnet sequence as the organizing principle of a unified book. Rich in allusion, not only to Homer’s epic but to a shelf of important writers and thinkers, Ithaca is a witty and erudite book for grown-up readers who look to poetry for inspiration, profundity, and intellectual stimulation.
David Lehman was educated at Columbia and Cambridge universities. The Morning Line is the most recent of his poetry collections; his prose books include One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, Sinatra’s Century, and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. In 1988 he launched The Best American Poetry and was general editor of the annual anthology series for the next thirty-eight years. Lehman has also edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and a number of anthologies devoted to prose poems, erotic verse, and poetic form. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2010. He divides his time between New York City and Ithaca, New York.
With No Hat, Tim Seibles
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Paperback
Celebrating his 70th year, Tim Seibles presents With No Hat, a new collection with a long history. Energized and original, With No Hat also offers a retrospective of Seibles’ life and career—including his signature sassy villanelles; pop up cameos of cartoon characters; meditations on aging, death, identity, and at-one-ment with all beings; and leading the parade—the main character: the poem itself—lithe and mischievous—not only bareheaded, but in the full glory of his birthday suit. Yeats says, “I made my song a coat…but there’s more enterprise in walking naked.” With No Hat enterprises—strides, sprints, gavottes, and tiptoes through a life work of forging imagination into unforgettable tableaus, spanning self and other, and embracing and assessing, with Seibles’ empathic but cold eye, our culture and our lives in mortal crisis.
Tim Seibles was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. His poems engage many aspects of life, from the romantic to the sociopolitical to the mystical. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow. His eight books include Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. One Turn Around the Sun, an extensive examination of his immediate family was published in 2017.
City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
This collection follows the story of Sonia and her two friends as they come of age in Guayaquil, Ecuador. It shines a light on their vulnerabilities as well as their attempts to make their own ways into the world.
In City of Eves, Silvia Bonilla evokes the lives and longing of three young women who suspect the wider world is a ship on the verge of departure—and who are determined not to be stranded on shore.
Sonia and her two best friends grow up on the urban coast of Ecuador, sharing cigarettes, school uniforms, and a determination to overcome their circumstances even if the price to pay is exile. Full of fantasies and curiosity, the friends navigate hunger at home, absent parents, and religious pressures as they help each other through the pleasures and traumas of adolescence. As their desire for something greater changes from dreams into actions, they pursue escape routes that hover between choice and compulsion: forced marriages, early widowhood, and a death-haunted migration to the United States. Even in the throes of escape, the constraints of their reality always lie waiting.
Subtle and unsparing, Bonilla’s lyrical poems capture the wild inner horizons and vivid embodiment of youth as it shades into the reflective poignance of maturity marked by disappointment, compromise, and loss. Despite this, it is memories of deep friendship, bonded through shared understanding and aspiration, that lingers. Looking back on her life, Sonia recalls the courage and vitality of girls determined to shape their own futures: “We lifted Coca-Cola bottles to the / opened granadilla of our mouths.”
Silvia Bonilla holds an MFA from the New School. She is the author of the chapbook An Animal Startled by the Mechanisms of Life.
Her Womanhood of Mine, Haley Smith Hutchinson
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Paperback
Haley Hutchinson’s, Her Womanhood of Mine, is a chronicle of a girlhood painted by the tastes, pains, and folds of the body. It is a love letter to place, a yearning for the past, and an eventual understanding of the raw grittiness of existence. These poems sing with the blue messiness of coming into one’ s self, the growing and waning of relationships, and the appreciation for simplicity. Rich with experiences both familiar and nuanced, Her Womanhood of Mine invites us to sit with ourselves, to notice, to muddle, to bloom.
Haley Hutchinson is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. Originally from the Mendocino Coast of California, Haley’s creative work focuses on the relationship between body and place, and the raw grittiness of our own existence. Her work has been featured in Gather, Berkeley Poetry Review, the Mendocino Women Poets Anthology and elsewhere. She is the author of Her Womanhood of Mine (Green Writers Press, 2026). Haley received a BA in Creative Writing and Psychology from Middlebury College and is a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Write Bloody Publishing and offers freelance editing and book publicity services.
I Am Your Lifeguard: New and Selected Poems, Charlie Smith
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Drawing on nine previous collections and including nearly fifty new poems, Charlie Smith’s I Am Your Lifeguard marks the return of one of our most honest and unorthodox poets. The poems in this collection expose jagged truths: some are love letters; some focus our attention on beauty we may have otherwise missed, stepped over or cast aside; some tell us secrets we may want to carry in a locket; some are x-ray readings of our hearts; some are laugh-out-loud funny; some are quiet revelations. Each one is a prism through which Smith refracts and reflects the experience of consciousness, such as “No Nonsense,” in which he writes that “I came / away from myself / unstuck / and a sort of translucent orderliness / like a small herd of gazelles / entered my mind.” The cascade of imagery, observation, and revelation that characterizes Smith’s work imbues the collection with an expansive, radical compassion. It “remind[s] us . . . we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief” (David Kirby, New York Times Book Review).
Charlie Smith is the author of nine previous poetry collections, eight novels, and a book of novellas. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, among other honors. He lives in New York City.
The Bronze Arms, Richie Hofmann
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Recognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues he saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.
Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.
A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
Richie Hofmann is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous books, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Yale Review.
blush / river / fox, Anna Nygren
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Paperback
The startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. Willful misspellings and created constructions open language up to play, with phrases existing somewhere between English and Swedish to de-pathologize speech and thought. This fairy-tale treatise on otherness interweaves Nygren’s own inimitable illustrations to visualize the idea that writing can be closer to a drawing of words than speaking. “We know yet nothing,” they write. “We whisper it in the night / We are the pride glittering.”
Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book’s three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker’s orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.
Wholly unique, a being all its own, blush / river / fox paws on the door of our eye, our heart, our ear: “LET ME IN / the Fox whispers.”
Anna Nygren is an autistic, queer, and neuroqueer writer, artist, and translator. They are the author of five previous works written in Swedish, including their play-experimental translation of Hannah Emerson’s chapbook You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode. Nygren lives in Gothenburg, Sweden, with their cat, Zlatan.
Steeplechase, Angela Ball
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Format: Paperback
Steeplechase explores multiple landscapes, including Mississippi and its many church steeples; countries known and unknown; cities and inhabitants both aspirational and lost. Its voice is humorous, bewildered, disillusioned, hopeful. The book’s temporal setting is the two years of extra life granted a partner after catastrophic illness and surgery: love’s last compelling season.
Angela Ball’s poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Oxford American, The Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, North American Review, The New Yorker, Field, Colorado Review, The New Republic, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Talking Pillow. The recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Boy.
Steady Daylight, Joseph Bathanti
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 11, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Steady Daylight, the latest volume of poetry from Joseph Bathanti, returns to the place he grew up, the now-vanished neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. The speaker traipses fearlessly between real and imagined realms, in the face of often conflicted sensibilities, secrets, and silence. While the physical touchstones of the “old” East Liberty have evanesced, Bathanti invents a world ample enough for the dead and the living through incantatory language thrumming with hope and photographic integrity. Ultimately, Steady Daylight is an elegy and a praise song, a heartbreakingly beautiful requiem.
Joseph Bathanti, author of more than twenty books, is the former North Carolina poet laureate (2012–14); recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor; and an inductee of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Addiction Apocalypse, Remi Recchia
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Lambda Award-winning poet Remi Recchia’s second full-length poetry collection chronicles the speaker’s journey with alcoholism, gender identity, and faith. Weaving between drunkenness and grace, loss and desire, the book asks us what a man looks like and what he’ll do when the lights go down. While Addiction Apocalypse is located in many places—including sports stadiums, bars, beaches, IHOP, France, and the Mid- and Southwest regions at large—at its basic, like all good poetry, it is located in the trembling, beating human heart.
Remi Recchia is a Lambda Special Prize-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. An eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Best of the Net 2025, among others. He is the author of two collections of poetry and four poetry chapbooks, and he is the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies. Remi has received support from institutions such as Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation. He holds an MFA in poetry and a Ph.D. in English. Remi is currently pursuing an M.Div. at Yale University.
Holy the Body, Donovan McAbee
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Holy the Body wrestles with ghosts and shadows, discovers Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun in Nashville, Tennessee and Jesus’s tears in a trick of light. At once dark and humorous, these poems confront the religiosity of the US and explore the experience of faithful doubt, as God himself “goes under the knife.” The poems in this manuscript take the reader through the brutalities of the author losing his mother to melanoma and of resuscitating his own father, with “the cracking of sternum beneath my hands.” The collection chisels out a hard-earned language for the sacred, one which proclaims that the beauty we find in the midst of uncertainties is itself a solace that, as one of the final poems in the manuscript affirms, “is more than enough.”
Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Sun, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, and a variety of other places. He grew up in Inman, South Carolina, a small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Donovan lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children.
Berceuse Parish, Burnside Soleil
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through discovered letters, poems, clippings, and ephemera, the story follows Gus Babineaux as he pieces together the lives of a family rooted in Acadiana, Sicily, and the Philippines. The fragments trace complex generational relationships while exploring the poet’s sister Maggie, his friends Jeremy and Nel, and an extended cast bound by memory and place. French phrases, biblical echoes, and childhood slang weave together into a distinct Louisiana dialect shaped by loss, longing, and resilience. More than a collection of narrative poems, Berceuse Parish serves as a community record: part elegy, part songbook, part myth, and ultimately a love letter to a disappearing Louisiana.
Burnside Soleil grew up in a houseboat on the bayou, but these days is a pilgrim in New Orleans. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere.
The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey, Alex Mouw
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Unbelieving Yelp of Prey confronts religious devotion as something you grasp and something that seizes you. Rooted in the landscape of West Michigan, these poems seek traces of the divine with keen attention to the natural world, science, and personal history. Yet amid ordinary lives and crises of faith, revelation descends unexpectedly, talons extended in frightful welcome. This book offers readers the taste of belief, its texture, and the way its convicted sight both distorts and illuminates. By turns meditative, ecstatic, and snarky, Alex Mouw’s poems capture the sermons and lamentations, the preachers and seekers, the politics and piety of midwestern evangelical Christianity.
Alex Mouw is an assistant professor of English at Samford University. His poetry and scholarship appear in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and other venues.
Everything Is Water, Chelsea Krieg
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Everything Is Water is an open letter to caregivers as the speaker grapples with her partner’s life-threatening illness, pregnancy and new motherhood, and marriage. Growing up on the Virginia coast, the speaker knows the water’s danger and allure—asks, what is beneath, what has control in so much open and unknown space? The speaker continues to feel this unease in everything as she navigates fear, identity, and loss. Everything is water. Everything is the surface tension created by the unknown. The collection often returns to the water and those inhabiting it, but it also looks to winged creatures, those on land, and those who are in between elements as they wrestle with their own survival. Water is an element that sustains and devours. When danger comes, we wonder when it will end. We ask how we can live with loss. Is it easier to run away? To let go? Everything Is Water leaves the reader suspended, treading water alongside the speaker as she seeks to answer these questions.
Chelsea Krieg was raised in southeastern Virginia. She received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work may be found in Fairy Tale Review, Writing the Land: Virginia Anthology, Terrain.org, Gulf Coast, New South, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol. IX: Virginia, and elsewhere. She was runner-up in Hub City’s New Southern Voices 2023 Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New South 2021 Poetry Prize. Chelsea lives in Durham, NC and teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University, where she also codirects the MFA Program.
American Experiment: A Poem, Aaron Baker
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In American Experiment, Aaron Baker embarks on a harrowing odyssey through the depths of the American subconscious. Guided by the spirit of Walt Whitman (a character of somewhat suspect motives in this iteration), Baker’s Dantean journey leads him through an ever more perilous underworld of American histories, myths, and mythmakers. Chronicling the pair’s transcontinental passage from west to east (a kind of reverse Manifest Destiny), Baker offers a radical reimagining of Whitman’s legacy, American poetry, and the role of the poet while inviting us to confront echoes of the nation’s past and the enduring complexities of its present. With formal innovations that mirror the fluidity of Whitman’s verse, Baker adds qualities of verbal subtlety and formal nimbleness perhaps more typical of Whitman’s then mostly unknown contemporary, Emily Dickinson. American Experiment offers both narrative sweep and lyrical intensity, engaging deeply with literary history while relentlessly pushing the boundaries of poetic technique and form. This journey through hell is also a sustained meditation on the soul of America.
Aaron Baker is the author of two award-winning collections of poems: Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin), which won both the Katherine Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and Posthumous Noon (Gunpowder Press), winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. He teaches in the creative writing program at Loyola University Chicago.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/10 and 2/16 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.