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.
Antediluvian, Kameryn Alexa Carter
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Antediluvian engages with themes of the ecstatic, desire, mental illness, and spirituality. Written in part during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book’s speaker calls on an intertextual constellation of artists as they attempt to wade through agoraphobia, parse out their relationship with God, and navigate falling in love. Overall, the landscape of the collection is a deep dive into the speaker’s psyche, and what it means to push past the confines of one’s oppressive interior.
Kameryn Alexa Carter is a poet and founding coeditor of Emergent Literary, a journal for the work of black and brown artists. She was a visiting teaching artist at the Poetry Foundation and is a Pushcart Prize winner. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Phoebe Journal, Torch Literary Arts, Bat City Review, The Best American Poetry 2023, and elsewhere. She is the author of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh.
Worth Burning, Mickie Kennedy
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
A searing portrait of survival, Worth Burning traces a boy’s journey from a turbulent Southern childhood—marked by parental abuse, death, and hidden queerness—through the AIDS crisis, a marriage of convenience, and finally, towards a rugged self-acceptance haunted by the past.
Worth Burning crackles with the heat of a burn barrel. With a novelist’s attention to character and narrative trajectory, Mickie Kennedy glides through four decades beginning with the random hit-and-run that kills the young speaker’s father. The mother’s mourning curdles, grief becomes addiction, and addiction becomes abuse—emotional, physical, and sexual—as mother and son persist, locked in a monstrously confused togetherness further complicated by the speaker’s hidden gayness, in a small Southern town.
Through searing confession and stark image-making, Kennedy excavates the contours of a life that persistently bends, against all odds, toward a ramshackle wholeness. Suffused with efficient, image-rich narrative poems, Kennedy’s debut is at once sweeping and intimate, like a love note passed in secret.
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his husband and two children. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, The Sun and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from George Mason University. A small business owner, Kennedy has accumulated one of the world’ s largest horror comic book collections (though he’ s too afraid to read them after dark). Follow him on social media @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.
Nocturama, Will Brewer
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
Spanning Appalachia to California, Will Brewer’s new poems attempt to make sense of some of life’s darkest turns: a father’s bout with leukemia, the slog of mental illness, a friend’s early death, and the rise of environmental catastrophes in the West.
Yet despite these difficult moments, strands of light emerge: the smell of an orange on a plane, the starburst of a car hitting a power line, a citrus tree in California sun. Mysterious hair loss prompts dermatologist visits and reveals “how dignified it felt / to be looked at like that, to be read, / a record of past exposures / becoming a map to possible futures.” It is the type of knowing in which “knowing nothing for sure feels like a special kind of freedom.” Over time, a seemingly endless night gives way and an aubade opens to a new possibility: love.
The second book of poems from this rising and lauded author, Nocturama offers a presence of mind and spirit that notices the mysterious, even in the wake of disaster.
Will Brewer’s first book of poems, I Know Your Kind, was a winner of the National Poetry Series. His debut novel, The Red Arrow, was published by Knopf in 2022 and received the Silver Medal for First Fiction from the California Book Awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Nation, and The Sewanee Review. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he’s now a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He lives in Oakland.
The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos, Manuel Iris
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.
By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story.
Written in simple, sharp language, the book employs surprising imagery and a novel structure to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, while examining the intricacies of the human condition—from the life of Saint Anthony to the violent acts of narcos across Central America and the U.S.-Mexico border. With formal sophistication and philosophical depth, this work enriches the tradition of poetry about both migration and art, contributing to the literary heritage of Mexico and the United States over the past several decades.
Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, including The Disguises of Fire [Los disfraces del fuego].
Maybe the Body, Asa Drake
Publisher: Tin House
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her stunning debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, Asa Drake witnesses firsthand the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. She reaches for the lush landscapes—real and recounted—of the Philippines and the American South as she traces the lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance. As one poem reminds us, “it’s so hard to write about love without writing about the country we live in.” These thirty-eight poems, threaded together with a six-part braided sequence, bind a multigenerational conversation between grandmothers, mothers, and aunts through a range of forms, from pantoums to prose poems. With its vivid imagery and an unforgettable lyrical perspective, Maybe the Body reconsiders the natural transactions of work, intimacy, and the poem itself.
Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have been published with The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and The Georgia Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
Overburden, Jolene Brink
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
On the surface of a mine, overburden is the excess landscape—soil, stone, roots—excavated and pushed aside to get to the valuable material below. But what accumulates when we displace and disrupt? Inside the language of extraction, what can we undercover in that overlooked excess?
Jolene Brink’s Overburden excavates these questions. Across four sweeping sections, the collection probes what we disturb in our relentless digging, whether naming the stars, mining the past, or giving birth in an uncertain century. The excess of overburden becomes a luminous site of wonder, grief, and reckoning.
When such a dig is done, overburden is used to fill the seam left behind, an attempt to reclaim the land without fully acknowledging what was taken. Brink’s poems inhabit this uneasy process of restoration—intimate, global, planetary. They speak from clear-cuts and gravel pits, pandemic nurseries and glacial seams, gathering the personal and the historical into a layered archive of presence and loss.
With precision and tenderness, Brink documents and elegizes the aftermath of extraction, the compulsion to put something back. Overburden is a record of those attempts, a powerful meditation on inheritance, labor, motherhood, and the reverberations of human impact on both land and self.
Jolene Brink was born and raised in Northern Minnesota. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Orion, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, where her first poetry chapbook, Peregrine, won the Merriam-Frontier Award. She currently works for the University of Minnesota.
Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness, Mats Söderlund, Olivia Olsen (Tr.), Forrest Gander (Tr.)
Publisher: Restless Books
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a sweeping but intimate blend of ecopoetry, mythology, and political verse, Eskatos & the Stretched Necks of Stillness communes with Sweden’s primeval woodlands during an age of transformation. These collected poems lead the reader down overgrown paths, beyond the flickering of leaves and lichen, to meet the dead: a troop of scattering spirits that Söderlund sets out to praise, and to mourn. Shining of rain and gnawing of sorrow, cast from stone, frost, surgical nails, and charcoal ash, Söderlund’s hypnotic ode forms a fragile tether to a world and past that threatens to slip through our fingers, and which no generation who seeks to survive can disclaim.
Mats Söderlund was awarded the Swedish Writers’ Union’s prestigious Catapult Award for best literary debut in 1992, and has since received numerous literary awards and scholarships. He describes himself as “a forester from the north” with deep roots in Nordic folklore and the Northern narrative tradition. He has released eleven collections of poetry, as well as works of fiction and nonfiction. Söderlund holds a Bachelor of Science in Social Work and served as Chairman of the Swedish Writers’ Union between 2005 and 2012.
Olivia Olsen is a writer, translator, and teacher based in Sweden. She holds a BA in literary translation and an MFA in literary arts from Brown University, where she taught fiction to undergraduates. Her translation from the Swedish of poetry collection Homullus Absconditus by Magnus William-Olsson was published by O’Clock Press in 2015, and her latest writing can be found in Black Warrior Review.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert in Barstow, California, and grew up in Virginia. He spent significant years in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), Eureka Springs, and Providence. With the late poet C. D. Wright, he has a son, the artist Brecht Wright Gander. Forrest holds degrees in both geology and English literature. He lives now in Northern California with his wife, the artist Ashwini Bhat.
Soulmate as a Verb, Kelsey L. Smoot
Publisher: DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e)
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
The simple yet fraught experience of embodiment lies at the thrumming heart of Kelsey L. Smoot’s SOULMATE AS A VERB. Bodies make love possible, they enable tender connection and transmit electric joy, all while leaving one vulnerable to discord and abuse, heartbreak and grief. Like a body, Smoot’s daring poetry metabolizes cruelty, seeking the tender knowledge and kinships that allow for buoyant survival. The subjectivity of a Black, trans self becomes a prism, shining a variegated intellect on everything from suburbia to Palestine, top surgery to police violence. By utilizing forms such as kwansaba, calligram, Craigslist personals, and golden shovels, SOULMATE AS A VERB revels in structures that locate poet and poem in a lineage of innovative and contemporary Black, queer verse. Kelsey L. Smoot dazzles.
Kelsey L. Smoot (they/he/Kelz) is a gender theorist, an elective Southerner, a writer, and a poet. Their autoethnographic style has become the lens through which they understand and reflect on their experience navigating the US sociopolitical landscape. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Spring Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest. He is a Tin House Workshop alum, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a Best New Poets nominee. Proudly, Kelz is the author of two chapbooks: we was bois together and Muse.
Nine Persimmons, Kerry James Evans
Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung—Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between wandering and witness, as they cross from ballfields and shipyards into the charged realms of myth and ritual. Evans’s gift lies in how the ordinary gathers its own divinity: persimmon seeds split to forecast winter, a grandmother’s weed-eater gospel, Camaro burnouts paired with tarot, psalms rising as pelicans wheel into sudden sky. In this light Nine Persimmons reveals how the most unassuming corners of existence sometimes hold the deepest truths.
Kerry James Evans is an associate professor of English at Georgia College and State University, where he coordinates the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. He is the author of the poetry collection Bangalore. A recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is the coeditor and managing editor of Peach.
I Have a Home, There Is a We: Voice of a Stranger in a Strange Land, Mohammed Khelef Ghassani, Meg Arenberg (Tr.)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
I Have a Home, There Is a We, whose original Swahili edition was in 2015 the first book of poetry to win the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, brings the acclaimed verse of prolific Zanzibari poet, journalist, and cultural changemaker Mohammed Khelef Ghassani to English-language readers for the first time. The book explores the poet’s life as a migrant in Germany: linguistic and cultural alienation, nostalgia, and longing for his homeland on the island of Pemba. These poems form a catalog of sorrow and love addressed to the family he left behind, to the children whose roots “he tore forcefully from the ground” in hopes of offering them a better life, and above all to the country he calls home, using the deeply resonant Swahili term “kwetu”—our place—named over and over again as Zanzibar.
Utilizing the structured verse forms of traditional Swahili prosody, the collection is modern, unique, and innovative, speaking to a global diasporic experience even as it draws deeply on an idiom specific to the poet’s tiny island home. A ripple of political defiance suffuses the poems as Ghassani positions himself against layered forms of oppression and marginalization both at home and abroad in this synthesis of love song, lamentation, and freedom declaration.
Mohammed Khelef Ghassani was born in 1977 on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar. He studied translation at the Open University of Tanzania, where he received a master’s degree in 2014. He now works as a reporter and editor of the broadcasting company Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany. He is the author of seven previous collections of poetry in Swahili.
Meg Arenberg is a scholar and translator with specializations in Anglophone African, Indian Ocean, and Swahili literatures. Her work has won recognition from the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Literary Translators Association.
All that Refuses to Die, Michael Imossan
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.
All that Refuses to Die is a collection that brims with stories and memories that evoke as well as provoke. As he moves through historical places, the poet compares the past with the present and finds that nothing has really changed.
Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet of Ibibio origin. He is curator of the poetry column for Nigerian NewsDirect, poetry editor for the Chestnut Review, and the author of the award-winning chapbook For the Love of Country and Memory. Imossan’s second chapbook, The Smell of Absence, was selected for inclusion in Kumi Na Moja: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set. He is a recipient of a PEN International writers’ grant.
Kwame Dawes is a professor of literary arts at Brown University and the director and series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund.
Catastrophilia, Julie Roorda
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in this collection explore how narratives of cataclysm, past and future, tap into “catastrophilia,” a term the poet coined to describe a love for, or fascination with apocalyptic catastrophe. Is this a kind of self-destructive madness, or are there spiritual or metaphysical insights to be discovered there? Inspired by mythology, archaeology, and esoteric literature, these poems give voice to mystics, heretics, alchemists and gods, figures both mythical and historical, from Hermes to Anubis, Plato to Carl Jung, to Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno and John Dee. They employ the magical philosophies of the Renaissance, pondering the cyclical nature of time, the creative hinge of memory and imagination. They are replete with weird creatures and shape-shifters, trance mediums and ghosts who share hidden wisdom.
Julie Roorda is the author of three previous volumes of poetry, Eleventh Toe (2001), Courage Underground (2006), and Floating Bodies (2010), all published by Guernica Editions, as well as two novels, and two collections of short stories, most recently How to Tell if Your Frog is Dead (Guernica, 2019). Her work has appeared in several journals, including TNQ and The Malahat Review, and has been featured on the popular website Poetry Daily. She lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.
The Plural of Water, Bruce Bond
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 25, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Bruce Bond’s new book of poetry, The Plural of Water, offers a trilogy of sequences that explore the relation of the unconscious—our denials, affinities, passions, and self-divisions—to our ability to perceive and negotiate the crises of our contemporary moment. Through a series of lyrics, both personal and historical, the book’s sections constitute parts of an integrated whole that seeks a deeper understanding of the psychological roots of ethics: traumatic fracture, ecological holism, and the ineffable, multiple, communal dimensions of personhood, drawn to and from the dark of all we love, dread, and labor to transform.
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-seven books, including the recent prizewinning poetry collections Vault and The Dove of the Morning News. He teaches part-time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart, Kate Gaskin
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart chronicles a mother’s harrowing journey through infant loss and a disastrous hospital birth, while also exploring the joyful complexities of raising a neurodivergent child. Using image and sound derived from the beauty of the natural world, Kate Gaskin’s poems sift through grief while tapping into the sublime state that underlies loss and love.
Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She directs Adroit Journal’s summer mentorship program and is an assistant editor for TRP: The University Press of SHSU.
A Season, Michael Joseph Walsh
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A Season is a visionary meditation born out of a spiritual crisis. As the poems attempt to remake a life within the ghostly limbo into which they’ve fallen—between self and world, sound and echo, the uncanny and the sublime—they work to reweave an intimacy between the past and the present, the “self” and its others, and between the world that remains and a world that’s been irrevocably lost. Full of strange ecstasies and waking dreams, A Season is a self-portrait as blank space, a self-portrait as continual becoming—“a house of mirrors in which every face is perpetually on its way.”
Michael Joseph Walsh is the author of Innocence, which was selected by Shane McCrae as the winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series. He is the editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Fence, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.
Resurrection Pie, John Wall Barger
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A resurrection pie is defined as any dish made from yesterday’s leftovers—a meal that, in essence, rises from the dead. In this spirit, John Wall Barger’s new collection of poetry calls forth the past and its dead, describing a bardo-like psychic terrain in a language of fable and trauma. The poems move fast and strange: a man arrives at his ex-lover’s island of secrets; a mourner coughs up red flower petals; a man walks backward across Philadelphia as bodies rise out of the ground; a boy watches his dead sister’s flea circus through a magnifying glass.
In language by turns vivid and destabilizing, Barger writes the odd, the marvelous, and the wounded with unguarded clarity. Resurrection Pie is a work of serious play: absurd, intimate, melancholic. Dispatches from inside the fever dream.
John Wall Barger is the author of six previous collections of poems and one collection of essays. He lives in Vermont and lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College.
Domestica, Samuel Piccone
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Samuel Piccone’s Domestica firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escape from it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where “every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence.” If “silence is the earth’s way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve,” Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest recesses of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable, these poems insist that “the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven’t / brought ourselves to ask.” To startle us into paying attention to the world.
Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He serves as poetry editor at Raleigh Review and is a lecturer at Iowa State University.
The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
In The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards measures the emotional atmosphere of a mind navigating bipolar disorder, complex PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism while forging intimacy and creative resilience in a rapidly declining world.
Both as someone who has struggled with mental health and as a feminist approaching middle age, Edwards interrogates parenthood and marriage: What forms of nurturing survive when traditional roles and certainties do not? Can bringing children into a collapsing world still be an act of hope? When your partner does not want children, where should you divert your surfeit of love? The poet grieves, “I am chanting the name of a daughter / my husband doesn’t want / enough, the child I’ve spent years / not being sure I deserved.”
This fiercely honest and intimate collection offers a vision of adulthood shaped by the capacity to inhabit an embattled inner world. With clarity and dark wit, Edwards probes the uneasy border between solitude and connection, asserting the relationship between caring for oneself and caring for the wider world.
Stevie Edwards is assistant professor of English at Clemson University and poetry editor of The South Carolina Review. She is the author of Quiet Armor, Sadness Workshop, Humanly, and Good Grief.
Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
At the core of Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs’s debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poet’s father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?
In poems that continually veer from play to reverence, from body horror to bodily delight, encounters with bed bugs and cuttlefish appear side by side with retro gaming and phantom light. A brother living with delusions turns toward the sky. The poet also peers skyward in search of connection—across family lines, across the body’s borders, across galaxies. Outer space becomes a metaphorical terrain where queer desire and spiritual longing collide. Just as Agent Mulder’s iconic X-Files poster declares “I WANT TO BELIEVE,” so do these poems ache to trust in something more—extraterrestrial life, divine presence, intimacy.
Jacobs’s electrifying collection offers readers a singular voice attuned to the strangeness of living now—where science fiction and memory, tenderness and dissociation, belief and doubt pulse in tangled orbit. With wit, vision, and formal inventiveness, Rogue Astronaut charts a course through the mysterious and the intimate, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting across distance, time, and the alien terrain of self.
Mitchell Jacobs is a poet and translator from Minnesota. His poems have appeared in TheIowa Review, Ploughshares, and TheSouthern Review, among other journals. He is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where he serves as managing editor of Ricochet Editions.
Paper Pistol, Raphael Jenkins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
Following in the footsteps of poets like Hanif Abdurraqib, John Murillo, and Robert Hayden, Raphael Jenkins’s Paper Pistol considers tenderness, heteronormativity, male friendship, grief, and the various violences implemented by and against Black men. Channeling a multitude of speakers, this collection explores Black fatherhood and “the totems we bequeath” to our young, whom the “hunter . . . see[s as] a field of bucks instead of a / field of boys. What marred your vision & made us look so killable?” With humor and vivid imagery, Paper Pistol ultimately champions familial care and poetry as the ultimate weaponry, even in the wake of generational violence. “If a pistol were made of paper,” the poet dreams. “If a piece / of paper were capable of killing. If a peace. If peace / were possible.”
Raphael Jenkins is a chef and writer and former Periplus Fellow. A Detroit native, he currently resides in Kentucky with his partner and their son. Paper Pistol is his first book.
The Afterlife of Sweetness, Jaia Hamid Bashir
Publisher: Mad Creek Books
Publication Date: February 27, 2026
Format: Paperback
Jaia Hamid Bashir’s The Afterlife of Sweetness searches for beauty in waste and for mercy in defiance of a Muslim American girlhood. Haunted by lost lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and fractured selves, these poems trace the erotic contours of belief and the hungers that shape our becoming. They move among abandoned mining towns, gas stations, Qur’anic caves, suburbia, the American West, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art— braiding myth with memory and eros with rot to dissect what remains after the beloved has vanished. Dogs, oysters, deer, goats, and maggots appear as traveling companions; neon signs hum beside Lorca, Celan, and the Mahabharata. Throughout, Bashir exhorts us to confront sites of both the profane and the sacred and asks: How do we endure love, dissipation, and time? Recalling the work of Kaveh Akbar, Frank Stanford, and Rumi, and Jorie Graham, The Afterlife of Sweetness is both pilgrimage and detour, never veering from its insistence that holiness is not elsewhere but here.
Jaia Hamid Bashir was born to South Asian immigrant artists. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine,The American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received numerous prize recognitions. She is the author of the chapbook Desire/Halves. The Afterlife of Sweetness is her debut full-length collection.
The Hungering Years, Summer Farah
Publisher: Host Publications
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
Utterly magnetic, Summer Farah’s debut poetry collection The Hungering Years is a rush of breathless song, voicing confessions so often left unsung amidst personal and collective crisis. “I am afraid of asking the right questions,” Farah admits. But through intimate conversations with fellow Arab-American writer and literary ancestor Etel Adnan, this work finds the courage to ask: What is art? An escape? A reflection? Another unhealthy attachment? Though the answers are elusive, what steps into the light is a collective of friends whose genuine care and companionship anchor these poems through their spiraling search.
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. Her chapbook I could die today and live again (Game Over Books) was featured in Electric Lit’s “Favorite Poetry Collections of 2024”. In 2023, Summer served as columnist at Palette Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, the Pushcart Prize, a Hugo Award, and is anthologized in Heaven Looks Like Us, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi. She has received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts through the Microgrant for Palestinian Writers, attended the Winter ‘22 Tin House Workshop, was a 22-23 NBCC Emerging Critic Fellow, and is a Poetry Northwest Critic at Large. Summer is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle. The Hungering Years is her debut poetry collection. She is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.
Bosk, Patrick Barron
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: February 28, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Bosk is a meditative collection of brief, luminous poems that explore the quiet, complex lives of woody plants. With a botanist’s eye and a poet’s heart, these verses examine how close observation—often at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston—both distorts and deepens our understanding of the nonhuman world. Each poem is framed by the initials of the plant’s Latin name, inviting the reader into a layered experience where language, thought, and organic form intertwine. Written during walks and still moments—sometimes while the author’s children, Piero and Giacomo, napped nearby—Bosk reveals the strange and beautiful intimacy that can arise when we look closely at what we usually pass by.
Writer and translator Patrick Barron grew up in the Pacific Northwest, moving from Great Falls, Montana to Anchorage, Alaska, and then Eugene, Oregon. He spent significant years in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ferrara, Italy, and San Francisco, and holds degrees in English and Cultural Geography. He now lives in Boston where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. His books include Spooring (poetry); Selected Essays and Dialogues: Adventures into the Errant Familiar, by Gianni Celati; Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale; Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto; The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto; and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Rome Prize; the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship; the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award; and a Fulbright Scholarship.
P.E.A.C.E., Chariot Wish
Publisher: Changes
Publication Date: March 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
From the rubble of Uber Eats, Beyond Meat, and collapsing cities, Chariot Wish’s debut P.E.A.C.E. incants a radiant, visionary, and irreverent poetics of queer devotion. A lapidary for the end of one world, Wish’s ecstatic, embodied poems are pierced with holes, drenched in fluids, and alive with longing—for sex, for love, for a new world order. Channeling interlocutors like Simone Weil, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Robert Glück, Wish blends Christian mysticism with a punk lineage of queer transgression, mending an urgent through-way between sacred and profane. What emerges is a text that is worshipful in the way only prayer and erotica can be. In P.E.A.C.E. the poem becomes a site of raw contact, where language touches flesh and readers encounter a world worth desiring, even in its ruin.
Chariot Wish is a poet living in New York. They are associate editor at Wonder Books and online editor of Amygdala Journal.
Gestuary, Sylvie Kandé, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Tr.)
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: February 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Sylvie Kandé’s Gestuary offers a collection of gestures—of death and life, of tenderness and brutality—that fractures the flow of time. Senegalese riflemen from World War I are juxtaposed with migrants at borders who sew their lips shut in protest over immigration policies. In dream-like sequences, the dead refuse to stay underground and “push against the fence / that swings between our realm and theirs.” Inspired by unexpected sources, including jazz, sculpture, the legacy of the slave trade, proverbs, and elements of Diola culture, Kandé’s poems are rich in musicality and sophisticated syntax, rendered into a lyrical and luminous English by Nancy Naomi Carlson.
Born in Paris to a French mother and a Senegalese father, Sylvie Kandé is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet and translator whose translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Tell Me, Deborah Leipziger
Publisher: Lily Poetry Review
Publication Date: March 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Deborah Leipziger’s latest book Tell Me forms a spiritually rich, ecologically attuned, and emotionally resonant collection rooted in themes of transformation, memory, and the sacred in everyday life. Whether drawing on paintings by women artists, religious rituals and recipes from the poet’s ancestors, or concerns about endangered species, each poem sings in a voice both tender and unflinching. Monarchs, hummingbirds, marzipan, and candied citron come to vivid visual life on the page, as do larger themes of migration, resilience, and transformation. Reading these poems reminds us of what it means to be aware of, vulnerable to, and transformed by the world around us. A real pleasure for both heart and mind.” —Donna Baier Stein, Publisher of Tiferet Journal and author of The Silver Baron’s Wife
Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and pioneer in the field of sustainability. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of several ground-breaking books on sustainability and human rights. Her collection of poems, Story & Bone, was published in 2023 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems and The Nature of Our Times. Her poems have been published in ten countries in magazines such as Revista Cardenal, Inkwell, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Salamander.
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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.