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.
Mycocosmic, Lesley Wheeler
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Mycocosmic offers intricately woven spell poems—prayers, hexes, charms, and invocations—that call for transformation. A parent’s death gives Wheeler the freedom to reveal difficult truths about family violence and her sexuality; a midlife mental health crisis transforms her sense of self. Incantatory language channeled through a wide variety of forms—including free verse, litany, sonnets, the bref double, the golden shovel, and the villanelle—empowers these shifts.
Beneath these poems runs a book-length essay in verse, “Underpoem [Fire Fungus],” sending tendrils across the footer of each page. This poetic mycelium nourishes metamorphosis and highlights its urgency. As Merlyn Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life, “Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” Poetry is rooted in real and imagined communities and conversations. Mycocosmic demonstrates how interdependence binds us together.
Lesley Wheeler is the author of five previous poetry collections, including The State She’s In and Heterotopia. Her other books include the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds and the novel Unbecoming. Her work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop, and her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Poets & Writers, Guernica, Massachusetts Review, Ecotone, and other magazines. She is the poetry editor of Shenandoah.
A Bouquet of Glass, Carol Krause
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
What are you left with when glass shatters? Emerging from a mind with a propensity for the otherworldly and an unsuitability for the worldly, A Bouquet of Glass gathers the fragments of different realities into a vivid, piercing collection. These poems are the extra-ordinary stories of a poet living with a naturally psychoactive mind and a life-altering disability. From heightened altered states to spacious musings and playful concoctions, they are disarmingly human notes of love and loss. At once elegy and wild romp, they invite different pieces of a life to exist together uneasily, gracefully, precariously. You may wish to curl up with this book on one side of the glass, but only once a whirling storm has rushed through.
Carol Krause is a poet whose uncontainable mind often disrupts her plans. Sometimes this results in joy. Carol’s poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Arc Poetry, and PRISM international, among other publications. A lover of the underworld, Carol feels most alive crawling through caves. A Bouquet of Glass is her first poetry collection. She lives in Toronto.
Trees Dream of Water: Selected and New Poems, Leo Romero
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: February 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Leo Romero stands as a foundational figure in Latino letters. With six books of poetry and a book of short fiction to his name, Romero’s contribution to the literary canon is profound and enduring.
Bringing together for the first time his new and selected poems, Trees Dream of Water reflects Romero’s journey from youth to maturity as a person and a poet, and his deep connection to New Mexico and its culture. Traversed by memory, myth, and observation of the natural world, these poems explore family, community belonging and conflict, life as an artist, and the cycles of life and death. This lyrical anthology includes accompanying essays to illuminate Romero’s life and work for longtime admirers and new readers alike.
Born in 1950 in Chacón, New Mexico, Leo Romero is considered a foundational figure of Latino letters. Since 1988, Romero has been a bookseller in Santa Fe, New Mexico, having had five different bookstores in five different locations. His current bookstore is Books of Interest. Romero has published six books of poetry and one book of short fiction, and he has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, was a Pushcart Prize winner, and a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation resident.
The Singing River, Benjamin Morris
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: February 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
Drifting along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, The Singing River asks what can be saved in a place of shifting landscapes and ancient memory. Benjamin Morris’ debut collection meditates on the forces of nature that shape our notions of family and identity. Formally diverse and elegantly crafted, these poems bear witness to a region where the soil often finds blood and water mixed, tinged with hope that some of us may still emerge cleansed after going under.
A native of Mississippi, Benjamin Morris is the author of Coronary (Fitzgerald Letterpress, 2011), Hattiesburg, Mississippi: A History of the Hub City (Arcadia/History Press, 2014), and Ecotone (Antenna, 2017). The recipient of academic and creative fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and Tulane University, his writing appears regularly in the United States and Europe. He lives in New Orleans.
Old Rags and Iron: New and Selected Poems, R. F. McEwen
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Old Rags and Iron is a collection of narrative poems about the life experiences of working-class people with whom the author, R. F. McEwen, is not only acquainted but whose lives he has shared. McEwen supplemented his income as a teacher while working as a professional logger and tree trimmer, and he writes with great love and respect for blue-collar families.
Set primarily in the back-of-the-yard neighborhood of South Side Chicago, where McEwen grew up, as well as Pine Ridge, South Dakota, western Nebraska, Ireland, and elsewhere, the poems celebrate many voices and stories. Utilizing tree-trimming as a central metaphor, these poems of blank verse fictions reverberate like truth.
R. F. McEwen was born in Chicago, Illinois. Since 1962 he has been a professional logger and tree trimmer, and he has taught English in Chadron, Nebraska, since 1972. McEwen is the author of several books, most recently The Big Sandy, Bill’s Boys and Other Poems, and And There’s Been Talk . . .
Locomotive Cathedral, Brandel France de Bravo
Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
With wit and vulnerability, Brandel France de Bravo explores resilience in the face of climate change and a global pandemic, race, and the concept of a self, all while celebrating the power of breath as “baptism on repeat.” Whether her inspiration is twelfth-century Buddhist mind-training slogans or the one-footed crow who visits her daily, France de Bravo mines the tension between the human desire for permanence and control, and life’s fluid, ungraspable nature. Poem by poem, essay by essay, she builds a temple to the perpetual motion of transformation, the wondrous churn of change and exchange that defines companionship, marriage, and ceding our place on Earth: “not dying, but molting.”
Brandel France de Bravo is the author of the poetry collections Provenance and Mother, Loose and the editor of Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2024, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Diode, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
When We Only Have the Earth, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Tr.)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where “the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me.” This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequent use of wordplay and often unusual word choice.
Waberi, a nomad at heart, takes us on a whirlwind tour across North America, Africa, and Europe, daring us to love the earth “beyond all rational thought” and to “turn into earth, both literally and figuratively,” as we “turn from vanity, fears, and other pointless rustling.” These lyrical, playful, and moving poems urge us to look for the truth and beauty hidden in our daily lives, singing of Waberi’s own enduring love for our endangered planet and also, more forcefully, exhorting us to join him in the collective fight to save our planet from destruction.
Abdourahman A. Waberi is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He was born in what is now known as the Republic of Djibouti and is a major voice in African postcolonial studies. Waberi is the author of the novel In the United States of Africa (Bison Books, 2009) and has received a multitude of awards and honors, including a PEN France prize and, most recently, a medal from the French Academy. He is an associate professor of French at George Washington University.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and essayist. She is the recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is the author or translator of fifteen books, including her poetry collection Piano in the Dark and her translation of Samira Negrouche’s poetry collection Solio.
Barley Child, Greg Rappleye
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.
Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.
Greg Rappleye is the author of A Path Between Houses, Figured Dark, and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, and is a former Bread Loaf Fellow in Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry,the Southern Review,the North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English department at Hope College in Michigan.
To Let the Sun, John Allen Taylor
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
John Allen Taylor’s debut poetry collection, To Let the Sun, opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: “take a walk with me…I hope you’ll come / though I am going anyway.” These poems unflinchingly peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the painful difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child’s flight from himself, and the uncertain path home–to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: “I am not lost…I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we’re needed by.”
John Allen Taylor lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of Unmonstrous, and his work has appeared in Booth, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He directs the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and coordinates the Writing Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Still on Earth, David Romtvedt
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: March 3, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
With Still on Earth, David Romtvedt addresses the sometimes disconcerting, sometimes thrilling, and, if we accept the writer’s premise, always wacky crossings experienced by figures identified as the person, the poet, and the angel. All three intersect and collide with the society and culture within which they exist, prompting speculation that uncertainty could be preferable to knowing. Romtvedt’s delightfully plainspoken and immediate poems probe the mysterious purpose of our stay on earth with humor, candor, and grace.
A poem, the father in the book argues, is worth next to nothing. And while the son disagrees, having experienced transformation through language, he also recognizes that the poem cannot buy the groceries and pay the rent. Or perhaps it can and it’s just tricky. After having devoted years to writing, the poet remains uncertain and speculates that uncertainty is not so bad and is preferable to knowing.
Between the person and the poet, Still on Earth presents the angel who seems to have the same father that the person and the poet had. The two fathers are too close for comfort. For the angel, we must imagine a being with no experience of the physical suddenly confronted with the demands of the body, a being both naïve and worldly—otherworldly. The angel has been here before. In Romtvedt’s reckoning, we all have. It’s just hard to remember.
David Romtvedt’s recent books of poetry include No Way: An American “Tao Te Ching,” a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and Dilemmas of the Angels. A winner of the National Poetry Series, Romtvedt has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wyoming Arts Council. For seven years, he served as Wyoming’s poet laureate.
Becoming the Harvest, Pauline Le Bel
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: February 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
Becoming the Harvest invites the reader to contemplate the fierce transformative initiations of ageing and death. Le Bel takes readers through a poignant poetic journey inspired by her intimate experience with the deaths of her loved ones, as well as her acceptance, and often delight, in her own ageing body. Her end of life education began fifteen years ago when she cared for an older sister diagnosed with a terminal illness. It was a soulful time, an unexpected threshold into the beauty and sorrows of living and dying. She sweetened and sharpened her views on ageing and death, finding hope and nuance amid the stark reality. With an unflinching and at times playful eye, Le Bel challenges our cultural stories about the end of life, rejecting the merciless stereotype of the Grim Reaper, and poking gentle fun at our common euphemisms for the end. These are poems to welcome the end years, to claim them, touch them, lightly and deeply. To see ageing and death not as the enemy but as a call to live life more fully, to love more thoughtfully.
Pauline Le Bel has worked professionally as an actor, singer, writer in theatre, film and radio, and is the author of four books, most recently, Whale in The Door, a critically acclaimed history of Howe Sound, published by Caitlin Press. She is the founder and creative director of Knowing Our Place, a reconciliation initiative on Bowen Island. In her Way to Go! workshops, she calls upon her poetry to open hearts and minds for thoughtful conversation on the end of life.
Girlhood x A Haunting, Jessica Rae Bergamino
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Publication Date: February 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Jessica Rae Bergamino’s Girlhood x A Haunting, the reader carries Nancy Drew’s magnifying glass through an lyrically experimental and visually evocative collection that uncovers the traumas lurking in girlhood.
Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of UNMANNED (Noemi Press, 2018) as well as chapbooks from dancing girl press and Sundress Publications. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/25 and 3/3 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.
Read three poems by poet Adele Ross, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Heavy Water”.
Book Excerpt: The Self-Combed Woman by Laynie Browne
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2025, “The Self-Combed Woman” from Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: To Let Go by Deirdre Garr Johns
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2025, “To Let Go” from Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns, along with a few words from the poet.