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.
Smother, Rachel Richardson
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: February 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson’s third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. The poet, raising young daughters and grieving the death of a mother friend, documents a string of record-breaking fires across the California landscape and the rage, sorrow, and detachment that follow amidst the pervasive smoke. Environmental and physical predation—on the earth and on the female body—weave through the book in layers.
But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices in grief and mothering, seek out guides and girlfriends, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. From lyric forms to moments of prose and documentary collage, these poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two other poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the cofounder of Left Margin LIT and a winner of the Hopwood Award, as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California.
For now I am sitting here growing transparent (Bilingual edition), Yau Ching, Chenxin Jiang (tr.)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: February 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Simultaneously erudite and earthy, her poetry is shaped by Hong Kong’s cultural position on the margins of mainland China and at the center of the Cantonese-speaking world. But her time spent in New York, London, Michigan, Taiwan, and elsewhere also informs her work, as do a breast cancer diagnosis in 2009, and her long-time work advocating for sexual minorities.
Yau’s oeuvre explores gender, aesthetics, colonialism, relationships, and illness with a wide range of emotions and registers, and frequently employs wordplay. This bilingual collection includes astute political poems, understated love poems, urban anti-eclogues, and prose poems.
Born in Hong Kong, award-winning poet, film/video artist, and scholar Yau Ching spent years teaching both in Hong Kong and Taipei, while also founding and programming several film and theatre festivals dedicated to telling the stories of sex workers and the queer community. She has authored more than thirteen books, and produced and directed more than ten films and videos. Her poems have been featured in such publications as World Literature Today, Asymptote, Catamaran, Transpacific Literary Project, and at the Center for the Art of Translation.
WASH, Ebony Stewart
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: February 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Stewart’s third collection is uncompromising and emotionally raw. Through trauma and recovery, black girlhood comes of age in WASH, journeying through moments of self-discovery, mental illness, love and heartbreak. Stewart reckons traditional definitions of womxnhood, exploring its complications, its communities, and its queerness.
With a distinct, lyrical poetic voice, WASH tells a story of queer, black womxnhood that perseveres. A collection that will bring you to tears and brighten your day, Ebony Stewart’s WASH cannot be missed!
Ebony Stewart is the author of BloodFresh, Home.Girl.Hood., and Love Letters to Balled Fists. Her work has been featured in Button Poetry, AfroPunk, For Harriet, Teen Vogue, The Texas Observer, & others. Ebony is a mental health advocate, consultant, and former sexual health educator who is the hood’s favorite mental health specialist. Ebony is one of the top touring poets in the country, and the 2017 Woman of the World Poetry Slam Champion. She has performed in 49 states, at over 200 colleges and universities across the country, and has featured internationally.
Birth Center in Corporate Woods, BJ Soloy
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: February 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in BJ Soloy’s Birth Center in Corporate Woods use long, contorting lines and elliptical connections to wade through the collisions of love, eros, loss, irony, pop culture, and late capitalism. From city to city and year to year, these poems trace landscapes personal, cultural, and physical as they—in turn—burn down before our eyes and then desperately, haltingly, try to return. At its galloping heart, BJ Soloy’s collection is an overheard intimate conversation. Sure, there are TVs and jukeboxes and increasingly frantic bickering jibes in the background—and the tour guide cinematographer is in a fugue state, dragging the reader from emergency room to hotel room, then behind the wheel of a limping Ford, then inside a dive bar, cradling an infant, writing a dirty letter, never quite falling asleep—but they eventually deliver us to a way station where honest elegy and Guy Fieri can not only coexist, but snuggle. Equal parts smartass deconstruction and living elegy, BJ Soloy’s latest collection is personal, risky, and ultimately very human.
BJ Soloy is the author of Our Pornography & other disaster songs (2019, Slope Editions), and the chapbook Selected Letters (2016, New Michigan Press). From St. Louis, MO, he’ s lived in Lawrence, KS, Chicago, Kansas City, and Missoula, MT. He’ s taught at a load of places, mostly community colleges, and just saw a coyote this morning. With his partner, son, and too many domesticated familiars, he now lives and dies in Des Moines, IA, home of the Whatever.
At the Park on the Edge of the Country, Austin Araujo
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
Publication Date: February 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
In At the Park on the Edge of the Country, Austin Araujo maps the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family—his own—in the rural American South, crystallizing memory and self-knowledge as collaborative, multivocal affairs. Human and nonhuman voices and the competing landscapes of childhood and adulthood propel these poems, offering an unyielding portrait of a family’s endless encounters with the shortcomings of citizenship. Speakers sleep like tostadas, mistake hikers crossing a small river in Arkansas for a migrant father, and hold onto silence through difficult conversations in the fields and in the city. Revelatory and striking, these poems reinvent origin myths to unmask the contradictory and expansive astonishments of Mexican American identity in the twenty-first century.
Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, his poems have appeared in Poetry,TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. At the Park on the Edge of the Country is his first book.
The Tears of Things, Catherine Hamrick
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: February 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Catherine Hamrick explores the therapeutic value of nature and poetry in The Tears of Things. She charts her movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South.
“Whatever life hands me-love, land, or loss-a way to acceptance means embracing earthly cycles, authentic connections to others, and the comforting puzzle of words,” says Catherine Hamrick. Processing depression and the loss of her parents, she explores the therapeutic value of nature and poetry in The Tears of Things. This collection charts her movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South. Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of The Aeneid‘s famous line sunt lacrimae rerum-“there are tears at the heart of things”-underpins Hamrick’s sensibility. Observing seasonal flourishes and decay reminds us that love, joy, longing, sorrow, and gratitude arise from life’s imperfection and brevity.
A content strategist, copywriter, and editor, Catherine Hamrick previously worked at Southern Living, Cooking Light, Southern Accents, Victoria, Better Homes and Gardens, and Meredith Books. She also taught writing and communication arts at several colleges and universities. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at catherinehamrick.com.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/18 and 2/24 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.