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.
Out of the Blank, Elaine Equi
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
From acclaimed poet Elaine Equi comes her latest provocatively playful collection. “Thoughtful, witty, curious” (The New York Times), Equi’s subversive voice delicately refracts human experiences from the colors of weather to the strange ways we make sense of our bodies, from the emptiness of family homes to the flow of time itself.
Known for her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work, Elaine Equi is the author of over ten collections of poetry. Her books include Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State Poetry Award; Sentences and Rain; and The Intangibles. In 2023, she was the guest editor of the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry.
An Arbitrary Lightbulb, Ian Duhig
Publisher: Picador UK
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
An Arbitrary Lightbulb is Ian Duhig’s most personal collection to date. It takes its title from the most common type of household bulb – yet one whose name is virtually unknown, like many people these poems celebrate.
Duhig finds in the arbitrary an image for the randomness of inspiration and of life, haunted here by deaths of family and friends, his own a closer companion now. He laments the lost but also responds to the glories of our existence, especially among the overlooked, with humour, technical variety and contagious pleasure.
Starting out from ‘contrary Leeds’, his home for half a century, Duhig’s poems roam widely through history, art-forms, loves and injustices, fired by the desire to share it all with his readers: knowledge, joy, anger and wonder.
Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer and he is still actively involved with minority and marginalised groups on artistic projects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize four times. He lives in Leeds with his wife Jane.
New and Collected Hell, Shane McCrae
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Shane McCrae, one of the most prophetic and powerful poetic voices of our time, has created a twenty-first-century epic in New and Collected Hell. As David Woo wrote in Poetry, “McCrae’s poems allude to literary precursors like Dante, Milton, and the Bible, but the voice is unabashedly of our time . . . By seeking to heal the rift in his own identity, McCrae has listened intently to the literary echoes emanating from the English language and transmuted them through his own dynamic voice.” Here, he gathers new and previous work as a culmination of his long-standing poetic project: a new and unforgettable journey through Hell. McCrae’s work is indelible, and this collection brings his searing vision to new depths.
Shane McCrae is the author of several books of poetry, including In the Language of My Captor, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Book of Potions, Lauren K. Watel
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.
By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
Lauren K. Watel is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and translator. Book of Potions, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, is her first book. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. Her work has also won awards from Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation and Mississippi Review. Her prose poem honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was set to music by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and the piece premiered at the Dallas Symphony. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, she lives in Decatur, Georgia.
The Bella Vista, Emma Ruth Rundle
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Hardcover
With The Bella Vista, Emma Ruth Rundle turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, “the tenderness and brutality of romantic love.”
Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follow a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution; culminating, eventually, with a sort of peace.
The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once—to music, mistakes, and womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.
Emma Ruth Rundle is an internationally recognized musician and a multi-disciplinary artist: a painter, director, and poet. She has released 6 full-length solo albums and collaborated with other artists such as Dylan Carlson of Earth, Chelsea Wolfe, Thou, and others. Her music has been described as a hybrid of folk, ambient noise, and metal; as well as “patiently haunting” (New York Times), “swelling with gothic drama” (Pitchfork), and “starkly beautiful” (The Guardian). She was the first female curator of the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands and has performed extensively all over the western world. She has had two solo exhibitions of her artwork (On Dark Horses at Ars Memoria, Chicago 2018; Dowsing Voice at Lethal Amounts, Los Angeles 2022) and has published poetry in The Heartworm Reader and in Sad Happens, an anthology by Brandon Stosuy.
Autopsy (of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob): (poems of rage, love, sex, and sadness), Avan Jogia
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Avan Jogia grew up as a teen idol. He stumbled into the spotlight during the birth of the internet, the early days of Instagram and Twitter, before everyone online was a star. He spent his time in that spotlight writing, observing the cult of celebrity, the hilarity, the absurdity, and sometimes sinister side of being idolized before you’ve even had the chance to decide for yourself who you are.
Now, in his most revealing and honest work to date, he has assembled a book of poems as an act of self-dissection. Part boozy lovesick rage and part personal reflection on the nature of fame, Autopsy(of an Ex-Teen Heartthrob) is a sharp, tantalizing collection of poems examining Avan’s relationship with ego, idolatry, love as an act of worship, rage as an act of prayer, and sadness as confession.
Through vivid imagery (and sometimes startling honesty) Avan cuts himself open and observes the false gods he has worshipped, the ways he has sinned, and exhumes a version of himself that looks like someone we all know: a person searching for the means to cure pain, mend the wounds of insecurity, and satiate cravings for love.
Avan Jogia is an artist whose work spans film, writing, and music. He is also the author of Mixed Feelings.
The Sweating Sickness, Rebecca Lehmann
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Sweating Sickness takes as its jumping point the mid-pandemic death by Rebecca Lehmann’s abusive ex. Many poems in the collection exist in this pandemic/suicide limbo, including the title poem of the collection, which considers Covid-19 in light of past pandemics (including the Spanish Flu, and the 16th century sweating sickness plague), while also considering the complex grief that follows the suicide of a violent person. Other poems are overtly political, like “Abortion Poem,” which is about the realities of living in a red-state post-Roe. Many of the poems in this book allude to fairytale, fable and myth, including Hansel and Gretel, and Orpheus and Eurydice, but there is a general “enchanted forest” vibe running through many of these poems, and that dovetails with a sort of eco-fabulist motif that runs throughout the book. Topics of the book as a whole include reproductive rights, motherhood, fairytales, domestic violence, suicide, the woods as a cite of magic and wonder, rivers, and, well, all of those things sort of jumbled together.?I would describe the style as maximalist/sweeping/all-encompassing/at-times Whitmanian but if Whitman was a jaded middle-aged woman.
Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections The Sweating Sickness, Ringer winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and Between the Crackups. Her writing has been featured in The American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, NPR’s The Slowdown and other venues. She lives in South Bend, Indiana where she teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College.
Dust, L. A. Warman
Publisher: Inpatient Press
Publication Date: February 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Two anonymous lovers traverse the vast and lonely desert which has blighted most of the continent. In their possession is the gift of the Vapors, a mystical substance which allows them to transcend death. Yet as they explore the desert realm and each other, they cannot help but wonder if their entwined destiny resides somewhere beyond transcendence.
L.A. Warman is a poet, performer, and teacher currently based in New York City. Warman is the author of Whore Foods, an erotic novella which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2020. She is the founder of Warman School, a non-accredited and body based learning center. The Warman School has taught over 1000 students online and in person. She teaches topics such as erotics, death, depression, and god. Pitchfork named her piece “ADMSDP” one of the top 100 songs of 2020. She has had performance and installation work in shows at MOCA Cleveland, ICA Philadelphia, Time-Based Art Festival, Poetry Project, and Open Engagement. Warman has presented performative poetics research at Brown University, Hamilton College, Reed College, Hampshire College, and others.
Python Love, Shannon Arntfield
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 13, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Python Love weaves together experiences of childhood abuse, birth trauma, and recovery from the perspective of a medical doctor who is also a mother. In her debut collection, Shannon Arntfield delves into the many ways in which the body recalls what has been done to it. Long, breathtaking sequences set within medical facilities during labour and delivery are juxtaposed with spare, lyrical reflections on ideas of memory, natural spaces, implicit love, and the relationships between parents and children. Full of precise observations, careful renderings, and visceral originality, Python Love is focused on how the body and mind are inextricably linked, how the past can overwhelm and inform the present, and how recovery is tied to love and connection.
Shannon Arntfield is a second career trauma-informed therapist and poet who turned to writing and psychological care in response to her lived experience as a child-mother-daughter and obstetrician-gynecologist. Her writing explores the bodymind continuum, the transformative power of vulnerability, and the challenges and rewards of renegotiating trauma. Her debut chapbook is Fallen Horseman and individual poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM International, The Antigonish Review, The Examined Life, and Snapdragon Journal. From 2004 to 2022, she trained and worked as an ob/gyn, caring for women across their reproductive lifetime. In this role, she became sensitized to the impact and prevalence of trauma—both in the lives of women and their families, and among caring professionals. In 2020, she chose to re-train in counseling to serve the needs of people affected by trauma. She lives in London, Ontario, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron.
When Whales Went Back to the Water, Lisa Baird
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 13, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Steely, tender, and sensual, Lisa Baird’s When Whales Went Back to the Water creates a reverent container for a broken world. These poems are hymns to living in wonder through loss, joy, motherhood’s sleepless nights, domestic violence, and isolation. Offering a courageous account of queer intimate partner violence, including the impacts of femme erasure in queer communities, this book is also grounded in the tastes and textures of a new parent’s everyday and is keenly interested in our capacities during personal and global catastrophe. Haunted by hawks, coyotes, frogs, and forests, the collection also speaks to the power of the beyond-human sphere in the translation and transformation of pain and sorrow. Reaching through stories of survivorship to touch on personal and collective pain with tension, nuance and care, Baird’s poems remind us that grief is inextricably intertwined with love and joy.
Lisa Baird (she/her) is a queer poet, essayist, parent, and community acupuncturist living in Thadinadonnih (“the place where they built”) on the lands of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton people, and current treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, also known as Guelph, Ontario. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Room Magazine Poetry Contest and longlisted for the 2020 and 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Baseline Press published her chapbook, Persephone’s Crickets, in 2024. Baird’s first poetry collection, Winter’s Cold Girls, was shortlisted for the 2020 Relit Award. Find her at www.lisabaird.ca and on Instagram @eramosageese.
I Would Define the Sun, Stephanie Niu
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Publication Date: February 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Stephanie Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, awarded the 2024 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection of poems that declare the impossibility of defining something as immense as the sun while striving toward that impossible act. In an era of planetary collapse, filled with bushfires, bleached coral, and burnout, Niu explores what love can do even through estrangement, even through being together at the end of the world. Recycling and folding language through duplexes, sestinas, and echoing couplets, this collection moves across great distances to include Christmas Island, Chinese-American immigration, and the precarity and abundance of the sea through formal and lyric poetry. Expansive in scope, Niu refits the world into a size “made for [her] hands, [her] human tongue,” propelling readers into continuous motion as she searches for home.
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance (winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, and Ecotone Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for research on Christmas Island’s labor history, through which she led youth poetry workshops and published the zine Our Island, Our Future. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Cosmic Tantrum, Sarah Lyn Rogers
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: February 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sarah Lyn Rogers’s debut full-length collection is a tragicomic exploration of codependent and transactional relationships: economies of shame, gifts as debts, businesses run like families, and families run like businesses. What transgressions and abuses do we believe are acceptable fees for safety or love, and who upholds these myths? The poems in Cosmic Tantrum examine how our most intimate relationships shape the way we move through the wider world—and what happens when we reject the stories we’ve inherited about our worth.
Sarah Lyn Rogers is the author of the chapbooks Autocorrect Suggests “Tithe” and Inevitable What. She wrote the Catapult column Internet as Intimacy and has edited award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Dream of the Bird Tattoo: Poems and Sueñitos, Juan J. Morales
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: February 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this brilliantly rendered collection—the author’s fourth—Juan J. Morales explores love and grief after the death of his father. Morales weaves his father’s personality, his childhood in Puerto Rico, and his service in the US military with his own interest in life after death. In these poems he guides the reader through ghost hunts, conversations with mediums, a series of dreams in which he and his father work through his father’s crossing over together, and his ultimate acceptance of this monumental loss. Dream of the Bird Tattoo beautifully showcases how our loved ones continue to live on in our memories and actions.
Juan J. Morales is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College. He is the author of three other books of poetry, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times: Poems (UNM Press). He lives in Pueblo, Colorado.
A Real Man Would Have a Gun, Stacey Waite
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: February 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Stacey Waite’s newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?
Stacey Waite is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing as well as several previous collections of poems, including Butch Geography and the lake has no saint.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/11 and 2/17 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”
Dancing With the Dead: On Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
“Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook, Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance.”
Read three poems by poet Wendell Hawken, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “First Hurt”.
Book Excerpt: Slow Chalk by Elaine Equi
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Slow Chalk” from Out of the Blank by Elaine Equi, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: Caro M. by Angela Siew
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Caro M.” from Coming Home by Angela Siew, along with a few words from the poet.
Read four poems by poet Natalie Marino, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue.
A Conversation with Kate Colby
Poet Kate Colby discusses her latest chapbook, ThingKing, her creative writing practices, and her penchant for poetry chapbooks with PCR Editor Aiden Hunt in this interview piece.