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.
Burning Oracle, Sandra Simonds
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Burning Oracle is a visionary, book-length poem told from the fractures of a world on fire where myth, memory, and contemporary life collide. Cassandra—seer, mother, survivor—wanders through forests of digital noise and historical trauma, her voice both ancient and urgently new. At the heart of the poem is a pilgrimage to the grave of poet Paul Celan where she traces personal loss within the wider context of inherited trauma—particularly the Holocaust—and seeks meaning in the act of remembering. As floods rise and fires rage, the personal and historical ignite a mythic voice. Through the commonplace of stained dresses, shattered screens, and supermarket aisles, Cassandra encounters figures like Goya, Reynard the fox, and Celan himself, weaving their stories into an intertextual, image-rich landscape. Burning Oracle is a feminist reckoning, a personal mythography, and a testament to the power of poetry to animate the archive of history, memory, and everyday life.
Sandra Simonds is professor of English [SS2] and Humanities at Thomas University and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022). Her poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction have been published in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Fire Series, Kelly Hoffer
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Fire is both destructive and regenerative; at times vengeful, at others cleansing. The first mention of fire in Genesis comes after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. In Greek mythology, Prometheus steals fire from the gods for humankind. Fire becomes metaphorically layered—as knowledge, as desire, as anger. The book entertains the many strands of this fiery lineage as it undertakes a poetic investigation into grief and sex, loneliness and restlessness within intimacy, and language’s ability to make, unmake, and remake things. Hoffer engages in questions of gender, anger, and nationality—how women are made subject to expectations of care and fidelity. How Americans are called into conflicts that defy sense, that defy humanist values. The voice is angry as she struggles with the limitations of her agency and further frustrated that “speaking directly” does not seem to furnish progress or power. The book, then, tries to speak otherwise—it moves sonically, associatively, obsessively.
Kelly Hoffer is a poet and book artist. Her debut collection of poetry, Undershore, was the winner of the Lightscatter Press Prize. Her chapbook, the photo I don’t write about, was a Tilted House Netsuke Micro Series selection. Her poetry was recognized as a finalist for the National Poetry Series in both 2020 and 2021. She is Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Michigan.
A Holy Dread, R. A. Villanueva
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A Holy Dread emerges from essential questions and fierce hopes about why we create, who we hold dear, and how we might brave “every small / catastrophe laced with joy.” Inspired by his experiences as a Filipino American writer, educator, son, and father, Villanueva’s revelatory new book expands on his celebrated debut, Reliquaria, with grace and intensity.
Through explorations of faith and myth, experiments with praise songs, sonnet sequences, devotionals, and lyric fragments, Villanueva’s poems dare to reach for “all-trembling miracles” even as things fall apart around us.
R. A. Villanueva is the author of A Holy Dread, winner of the 2024 Alice James Award, and Reliquaria, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). His work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets and NPR, and appears widely in international publications such as Poetry London and The Poetry Review. His honors include commendations from the Forward Prizes and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Born in New Jersey, he currently lives in Brooklyn, NYC.
Atria, D. S. Waldman
Publisher: Liveright
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In this rich, prismatic collection, D.S. Waldman guides readers through the halls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, into encounters with Georges Braque and Frida Kahlo, and back through the landscapes of coastal California and his own rural Kentucky childhood. Along the way, formally experimental poems open into intimate explorations of fraternal loss and grief, love and romantic partnership, disability and the fragile human form, and the peculiar shapes memory takes. In one section—part essay, part crown of sonnets—the poet addresses the childhood accident that forever debilitated his hand, widening his aperture to the world and transforming his perception. Ultimately, through that experience and others, Waldman asks how—or whether—one can ever truly relate to another, or to the world.
Exploring presence and absence, proximity and distance, this “gorgeous, speculative” (David Baker, author of Whale Fall) debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry.
DS Waldman’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and ZYZZYVA, among other publications. A 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Brooklyn Poets and Poets House. He lives in Brooklyn.
Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, Yusef Komunyakaa, Laren McClung
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. The result is a work that is at once a document of the poets’ inner and outer worlds and also a single and singular vision of what it is to live now and to look back on the epic scale of human history and artistic expression that stretches over millennia.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, The Emperor of Water Clocks, Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, The Chameleon Couch, Warhorses, Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. His plays, performance art, and librettos have been performed internationally. He teaches at New York University.
Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain, and the editor of Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has held fellowships and residencies from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She teaches writing at New York University.
Nighthawks, Lisa Martin
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Nighthawks, Lisa Martin traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale. These poems parse aspects of human embodiment—emotion, relationship, mortality—and reflect on how to live through moments of intense personal and political upheaval. Long verses about the remnants of marriage and divorce, and a sonnet cycle about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, sit alongside lyrical explorations of midlife loneliness, mothering, and grief. Philosophical ruminations on form and language are also present, asking what good is a poem, a verse, in a world so full of things one might hold an aversion to? “What if I write a line, follow it in, what if / the line tears what I didn’t mean to open?” Martin’s experimental collection engages in exquisite emotional truth-telling, asking how we can hold and tend the world with more attunement and care.
Lisa Martin is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, One Crow Sorrow and Believing is Not the Same as Being Saved, and a co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss. Her work has received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry, an Independent Publishers (IPPY) award, and a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism. She was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize in 2018. Her most recent works are Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education: Practice, Pedagogy, and Research, a blend of memoir and scholarly review, and A Story Can Be Told About Pain, her first novel. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory.
Pettygod, Andrew E. Colarusso
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: February 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Andrew E. Colarusso’s newest is a sharp-edged erotic, politically unflinching poetry collection where syntax is shattered to reveal deeper ancestral reckoning. Like Kamau Brathwaite, Colarusso understands the page as a score to conjure rebellion, bend grammar, break form, and tune the line to the frequency of diaspora, confessional grief, and spiritual survival. His language pulses with both prophecy and protest, as seen in poems like ‘The Pussy Detective,’ which blends pulp poetics, satire and sovereignty, and refuses the sanitized gaze of empire while regarding the vernacular as sacred terrain. In ‘Who Hath Known the Mind of God,’ the writer reckons despair and the brutal intimacy of city life as it unfolds into a fever dream of love and despair. Across his work, interiority becomes a site of disruption, therefore, Pettygod be a living archive for the haunted and the holy. Colarusso scribes like fire, raising sacred spaces from ash, where fracture and ruin form the raw scaffolding of a resilient desire to be free.”—Mahogany L. Browne
Andrew E. Colarusso is author of Hívado (Flood Editions, 2022), among other works. He was born and raised in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he runs Taylor & Company Books.
Identifying the Pathogen, Jennifer Militello
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Composed as a lab notebook recording various surgeries, autopsies, and experiments, Identifying the Pathogen tells the story of a scientist on an obsessive quest to document an ailment that resists classification. The book considers the body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, woven through with the story of Anna Morandi Manzolini—an eighteenth-century Italian anatomist and artist who struggled to support a husband suffering from depression—as well as several essays detailing accounts of a ruptured appendix, a splintered cello, and an ill-fated rock climbing excursion.
Jennifer Militello is the poet laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the memoir Knock Wood and five collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Pact. Militello’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, and Poetry Wales. Her poem “Mansplaining” is recited by high school students across the nation each year as part of the Poetry Out Loud national arts education program. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently a faculty member in the MFA program at New England College.
Konbit, Sony Ton-Aime
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Konbit is a Haitian Creole word, a way of living, for which there is no direct translation in the English language. It captures the communal life in Haiti and is used for every event where neighbors are called upon to help each other. These poems revolve around the Bois-Caïman ceremony (the first konbit) when enslaved people in Saint-Domingue vowed to fight for their independence. The ceremony is both real and a stand-in for climate change. Like our society, everything around enslaved people in Saint-Domingue was created to uphold the status quo. Imagining an alternative would have been seen as futile. Yet, they did. This collection is an attempt to do the same, to imagine a future beyond colonialism, imperialism, and climate catastrophe. With poems influenced by and in conversation with Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Shara McCallum, and Adrian Matejka, Sony Ton-Aime aims to provide a new language to articulate our common past, present, and future.
Sony Ton-Aime is a Haitian poet, essayist, translator, and the executive director of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures. Previously, he served as the Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. He is the author of the chapbook LaWomann, the Haitian Creole translation of Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour’s Story, co-author of the Haitian Creole course on Duolingo, and co-founding editor of ID13. His work has appeared in Artful Dodge, Consequence Forum, Poets.org, Idaho Review, Hunger Mountain Review, and Cleveland Review of Books, among others.
Cameo Blue, Carolyn Guinzio
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Cameo Blue is a spiritual topography, recording the traces of people in their environments, natural and otherwise, and the portents, memories, and signs they use to navigate their path or understand the precipices they face. Lush with color, weather, and imagery, some poems are driven by breathless conjecture, or propelled by the acute observation that often comes with shock, when time stands still and a camera flash reveals the gap between external and internal, hope and fear, past and future. Other poems cross physical and emotional space more quietly, with a narrative voice like the intimate whisper of a secret podcast. The collection is its own immersive environment for the reader to fall into, with poems that take on a talismanic quality, laden with haunted characters, resonant objects, and occult signs.
Carolyn Guinzio is the author of seven previous collections, including A Vertigo Book. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and other journals. Her other books include Spoke & Dark and Ozark Crows, a collection of visual poems. A Chicago native, she has lived just outside Fayetteville, Arkansas, since 2002.
Killing Orpheus, Forester McClatchey
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
A book that holds death in one hand and wonder in the other, Killing Orpheus explores the horror of mortality, the brutality of history, and the gentle miracles of love. Using received forms, especially the sonnet, this collection cycles through various speakers, including an aging Penelope, Frankenstein’s monster, Isaac beneath Abraham’s blade, and an elephant in Hannibal’s army. Here are sprays of flowers and hungry alligators, lethal snakes, and a baby’s first breath. Here are poems that reckon with death, but for the sake of life. Here is a poetic consciousness that shows us we must dare to make “a truce with loss” in order to go “spinning into love’s bizarre abyss.”
Forester McClatchey is a poet and critic from Atlanta, Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Florida, and his work appears in 32 Poems, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Subtropics, and Gulf Coast, among others. He teaches at Atlanta Classical Academy.
The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles, Janée Baugher
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles presents an imaginative narrative of the painter’s creative life, rife with both losses and pleasures. Janée J. Baugher employs the footnote form to write a book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry in which the character of Andrew Wyeth chronicles his internal musings. The sixty-three Wyeth paintings that influenced these poems (dated 1938 through 2008) are the ones in which Baugher delighted in how the quotidian is made tender, like a white sheet drying outside on the line or sunflowers’ shadows against a house.
Studying the work of this particular artist was a decades-long meditative practice of deep looking, a method by which the author detaches from her ego. Wyeth’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors became portals through which she could imagine worlds beyond her immediate awareness and in which she could explore linguistic possibilities.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only craft book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as the full-length poetry collections, The Body’s Physics and Coördinates of Yes. In 2008, she held a two-year post as a Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Speaker in which she lectured across Washington State on writers and visual artists of the Lost Generation. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and set to music at University of Cincinnati–Conservatory of Music, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Interlochen Center for the Arts, Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Educated at Boston University and Eastern Washington University, Baugher has been a featured poet at the Library of Congress and on Seattle Channel TV. Recently, she was a judge for the Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow Ekphrastic Poetry Film Prize (Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City). She’s a longtime assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and lives in Seattle, where the Office of Arts & Culture awarded her a 2024-25 CityArtist grant.
The History Of Breathing, Alison Grimaldi Donahue
Publisher: Diaphanes
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Etruscan language knew no blank spaces, no breaks between words. Its texture resembled an uninterrupted flow of speech—more singing than speaking, more form than content. Only in the dictum of the pause and the meaningful fragmentation of the breath does language become comprehensible rhythmic expression. In a world full of slogans and catchphrases, Allison Grimaldi Donahue defends the poetological demand of sound over content. The History of Breathing weaves linguistics and poetry, verse and song, meaning and sound into a dense narrative about breathing, rhythm, and the gaps in language that allow words to take on meaning in the first place.
In the tradition of such poets as Charles Olsen, Alice Notley, and Sappho, Grimaldi Donahue’s poetry connects the history of breath and language with narratives about the discovery and loss of our own voice.
Allison Grimaldi Donahue works in text and performance, exploring modes in which language and text can move between individual and collective experience. She is the author of Body to Mineral and On Endings and translator of Blown Away by vito m. bonito and Self-portrait by Carla Lonzi. She lives in Bologna.
Is Is Enough, Lauren Camp
Publisher: TRP: The University Press of SHSU
Publication Date: February 18, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Is Is Enough marks an endless amount of transformation by looking most closely at the ambiguous effects of Alzheimer’s Disease on a father and his daughter, the strength of their bond, disintegrating memories, and unexpected futures. These are poems of awareness, astonishment, absence and candid revelation.
Is Is Enough begins in heritage and harmony then breaks apart into the strange world and tautly stretched emotions that accompany dementia. The collection flickers through and locates in distorted realities, loss, and gentling. By haunting the past, the author reweaves and reorients against a continual vanishing. Ordinary situations begin to seem like joy in reverse, a treatise on the honesty of the present.
Lauren Camp is the author of eight previous collections, including In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), which grew out of her experience as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. She served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022-25 and founded the New Mexico Epic Poem Project. Honors include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and Black Earth Institute, a Dorset Prize, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic.
Do Words Dream Themselves Into Silence Told In Riddles?, Shanta Lee Honeycutt
Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Publication Date: February, 2026
Format: Paperback
Do Words Dream Themselves Into Silence Told In Riddles? is a hybrid poetry and prose collection that builds off of its chapbook predecessor, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It…The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The…. (Harbor Editions, 2024), by creating a universe of the bizarre, and uncategorizable. Within its pages, readers experience the sisters of an obscure convent and a faceless visitor who demands that the narrator follow the instructions from a childhood friend who says, You have to say yes. You have to be ready when he comes. This collection has a full range reflected in its inspirations that include films like Persona (1966) and Braid (2018); Shirley Jackson’s gift for the subtle uncanny; realities stitched from dreams; and art across different movements, especially the surrealists.
Shanta Lee Honeycutt is an award-winning visual artist, writer across genres, author, and public intellectual who often says she is a “…practitioner of entanglement” for all of the ways she brings things together in her work. Winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Grant for Poetic Achievement, Abel Meeropol Social Justice Writing Award, and a 2024-25 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow (New England), her work has been widely featured in Harper’s Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, ITERANT Literary Magazine, Palette Poetry, Prism, Ms. Magazine, and DAME Magazine, alongside of her former radio segment she created, produced, and reported for Vermont Public.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/17 and 2/23 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.