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.
The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, Canisia Lubrin
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her signature epic vision, Canisia Lubrin distills a radiant elegy for her mother along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment, belonging as much to history as to today. Grief, tender and searing, is the channel through which the poet refracts the realm of contemporary life to reveal the blistering paradox of its private and public entanglements. This is poetry of haunting gravity and resonance, with meditations on love, time, and loss, at once meticulously far-seeing, interior, and inexpressible.
Canisia Lubrin’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Award for Poetry and Governor General’s Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry, and the Globe & Mail named her Poet of the Year. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, Iya Kiva, Amelia M. Glaser (Tr.), Yuliya Ilchuk (Tr.)
Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Born out of the pain and loss of a fragmented present, Iya Kiva’s poetry, collected in English translation in Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters, stitches memories of the past into Ukraine’s new reality. Since war broke out in her native Donetsk in 2014, she has become a prominent voice of Ukraine’s internally displaced citizens, finding new metaphors to express the ongoing uncertainties of this time. Kiva first began publishing in her native Russian but, since the Donbas war, she has shifted to writing in Ukrainian. Her poems also reflect her mixed Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish background and contribute to defining contemporary Ukraine—a culturally and linguistically diverse sovereign country. As Ukraine struggles for its existence, Kiva offers lyric poems that acknowledge the deep trauma of war while radiating love and hope.
Iya Kiva is an award-winning poet, translator, and journalist from Donetsk, now living in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Further from Heaven and The First Page of Winter.
Amelia M. Glaser is Associate Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and an award-winning translator. She is author of Jews and Ukrainians in Russia’s Literary Borderlands and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Quarterly, and Times Literary Supplement. Her translations have been featured on LitHub and on NPR’s “The World.”
Yuliya Ilchuk is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. She is the author of Nikolai Gogol. Her translations of Iya Kiva have been featured widely in the media, including on LitHub and on NPR’s “The World.”
black frag/ments, Lolita Stewart-White
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback
After her husband’s cancer diagnosis, Stewart-White finds herself haunted by the trauma Black Americans continue to face in medical settings. These poems, both brazen and tenderhearted, explore enduring love in the face of grief and hardship while drawing parallels to past injustices. Stewart-White expertly weaves ancestral and present voices together, resulting in an intergenerational archive that centers one family’s challenging journey in a broader context of how black people protest, repair, and revive.
Lolita Stewart-White is a poet, playwright, and filmmaker from Liberty City, Florida. She is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the Paris American Series Prize. Her poetry has been featured in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Boston Review, and the African American Review. Her poem “Healing” was featured in the anthology This is the Honey, curated by New York Times best-selling author Kwame Alexander. Stewart-White is an alumnus of Miami City Theatre’s Homegrown Program, a playwriting development program that nurtures emerging BIPOC playwrights. She is a Cave Canem Fellows Fund Project Grantee for her play-in-verse, Liberty City Vignettes currently in development. Stewart-White has received fellowships from the South Florida Cultural Consortium, the Miami Light Project, and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Her films have been exhibited at the Los Angeles Pan African Film Festival, the Seattle Black Film Festival, and the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). She lives in Miami, FL.
The Hell of That Star, Kim Hyesoon, Cindy Juyoung Ok (Tr)
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The astonishing poetry collection The Hell of That Star enlivens the horror of Korean life under U.S.-backed authoritarianism. Poems of blows and vomit, births and coffins alternate blithe confidence and trembling terror. When slapped seven times by a government censor, Kim responded with defiant poems. The death of language becomes a death of the writer; within death, Kim finds new life in fragmentation and reorientation. This singular volume provides a wild and rigorous study of the words of the nation-state and the self, as well as the deprivations, detainments, and surprises in between. In evading censorship, Kim’s poems question, twist, and transmute; language is a site where the personal and political meet to escape containment, emptiness, and domestication. The book includes essays by the author and translator.
Kim Hyesoon has published fourteen Korean poetry collections and been translated into several languages. A winner of the Midang, Griffin, and Cikada poetry prizes, she lives in Seoul where she was a creative writing professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.
Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets (2024).
Evacuations, Kevin Irie
Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
With Evacuations, Kevin Irie weaves a poetic documentary for readers, capturing the personal and political histories of the Japanese-Canadian internment in British Columbia during World War II. The collection offers a rich tapestry of historical voices, revealing the devastating effects of the internment and preserving the stories of a generation gradually slipping into silence. The poems oscillate between the lyric mode and techniques of erasure poetry to highlight the dehumanizing nature of public decrees and government notices. Irie presents a history of the Canadian state’s racist policies, creating a record of painful memories replete with archival resonances. This collection will be of particular interest to readers in British Columbia and Alberta, to individuals with Japanese heritage, and all those interested in knowing more about the history of internment in North America.
Kevin Irie is a Japanese-Canadian poet whose works have been translated into Spanish, French, and Japanese. In 2024, he won Grain Magazine’s poetry contest, took second prize in Prairie Fire’s poetry contest, third prize in The New Quarterly’s poetry contest, and had Honourable Mention in Grain’s 2024 Hybrid Contest for Experimental Writing. His book, Viewing Tom Thomson: A Minority Report, was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and the Toronto Book Award. The Tantramar Re-Vision was picked by the CBC as one of their Spring Poetry Books in 2021. He is in The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (2025) and Best Canadian Poetry 2026 (2025). He lives in Toronto.
Singing from the Deep End, Rebecca Hart Olander
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rebecca Hart Olander’s second poetry collection, Singing from the Deep End, chronicles coming of age in the ’70s and ’80s with a single mother, girlhood friends, the death of a dearest friend, and the poet’s own dive into motherhood. Rooted in the rocky coastline of Gloucester, Massachusetts, these poems thrum with music, mirrors, granite quarries, the Atlantic, potholder looms, feathered hair, and repurposed garments. Singing from the Deep End navigates how our ever-changing bodies can betray us and be betrayed, treading through layered griefs and surfacing into joy and reclamation. Anchored in the lives of women, this poetic mixtape is a love song to mothers, children, girlhood, and friendship.
Rebecca Hart Olander is the author of Dressing the Wounds, Uncertain Acrobats, and Singing from the Deep End. She has taught poetry at Amherst College, Smith College, Westfield State University, and through graduate and community writing programs. She is the editor and director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist press publishing first and second full-length books of poetry by women.
My Dear Cult Leader, Aly Acevedo
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
My Dear Cult Leader by Aly Acevedo is a winding, weighty collection–at once layered with scars and warm, velvet nights
The collection dissects cyclic violences through the figures of the ‘cult leader’ and his followers, interwoven with personal narratives of trauma and survival. Acevedo examines the lasting effects of sexual assault and toxic relationships on the body and mind. Dynamically sensory and emotionally raw, Acevedo’s work calls for female safety and solidarity, and strikes a remarkable balance between devastation and hope.
My Dear Cult Leader gives careful attention to the wounds of humanity—finding in them the way back to love and self-empowerment.
Aly Acevedo is a Puerto Rican and Vietnamese poet, educator and speaker based in the Kansas City area. Her debut collection, My Dear Cult Leader (Button Poetry, 2026), examines the long shadows of a toxic relationship and the aftermath of sexual assault, weaving personal history with persona poems that explore power, trauma and reclamation. Her writing has been featured in Frontier Poetry, TRASH MAG, Ink and Marrow, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere.
Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form, Kim Trainor
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
Blue thinks itself within me chronicles the poet Kim Trainor’s blockade to prevent logging of Vancouver Island old growth forests. The two-year blockade on logging roads and in tree-sits became the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history—this multi-genre work brings the reader to the front lines of the fight for human and non-human survival in a climate catastrophe.
Trainor asks what, if anything, ecopoetry can do in the face of intensifying extraction of ecological capital. Can poems incorporate non-human species, like the oldgrowth specklebelly lichen that thrives in Fairy Creek, into their very form? How can poetry resist the urge to “capture” the non-human object and instead approach nature with sympathetic care? How might a poem offer an opportunity, like sunlight penetrating a clearing in the forest, to think about nature, to approach, and to be approached by the non-human? How might poetry contribute to a co-making of the world with more-than-human-species?
Kim Trainor has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry in English, Global Poetry Anthology, and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. She lives in Vancouver.
The Rot, Evelyn Araluen
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2026
Format: Paperback
The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise – this book demands you ready yourself for a better world.
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she works as a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’ s 2022 Small Publisher’ s Adult Book of the Year.
Bloodstream, Sarah Carey
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2026
Format: Paperback
Sarah Carey’s second full-length poetry collection traces the arterial pathways of the poet’s past, mapping the vital currents that pulse between memory, perception, and identity. Anchored in place yet mindful of time’s fluidity, the poems in Bloodstream traverse Carey’s Southern roots in Florida and North Carolina, moving through Alaska and beyond as the poet cycles between past and present, faith and doubt, while exploring the power of language to illuminate such contrasts. The poems elegize lost loved ones, including pets, which serve as a lens through which to examine attachment, loss, and unconditional love. Carey’s verses serve as containers: rooms within rooms housing shape-shifting selves and lives in transition. Simultaneously, the poet reflects on broader natural ecosystems, including histories of specific flora and fauna, and her place within them. Whether investigating pigment structures, the nature of desire, or family heritage, Carey consistently contemplates language itself, asserting poetry’s essential role in witnessing life’s complexities. The work offers unexpected perspectives, from palm trees reflecting on evolution to encounters with Galapagos terrain, capturing both physical and existential landscapes. At its core lies an exploration of how perception shapes consciousness and memory. Carey explores color science, revisits childhood memories, reimagines her prenatal self, and reflects on childlessness and the personas she has embodied throughout her lifetime. Throughout Bloodstream, Carey resurrects ancestors while examining her physical and emotional inheritance, probing the power of words, the weight of silence, and the corporeal rhythms of memories coloring past, present, and future.
North Carolina native Sarah Carey grew up in Florida and holds an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her career spans journalism and veterinary medical communications at the University of Florida. Carey is the author of The Grief Committee Minutes and two chapbooks.
Collateral Damage, Virginia Aronson
Publisher: Clare Songbirds Publishing House
Publication Date: November 10, 2025
Format: Paperback
Insightful poems that distill the sometimes complicated lives of some well-known but troubled 20th century poets into easy-to-read, succinct biographical sketches. Reading these poems can shed light on the creative process and the personal sacrifices great writers make for their art.
Virginia Aronson is the author of many published books. New poetry collections include Collateral Damage (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Whiskey Island and Whiskey Straight Women (Cyberwit Press).
Among Sinners and Saints, Aileen Bassis
Publisher: Shanti Arts
Publication Date: January 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
Aileen Bassis’s poetry collection, Among Sinners and Saints, builds on her lifelong practice as a visual artist. Bassis draws the reader to share her humane and empathic gaze through evocative language and striking imagery. Her poems explore a multitude of connections—from Greek mythology to French cinema, the pain and joy of love and marriage, to the ever present realities of grief and hope. She raises questions for us all and seeks to find meaning in our shared humanity in this, our fraught and divided time.
Aileen Bassis is a visual artist and poet in New York City with a practice in book arts, printmaking, photography, and installation. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Other Side of the Mirror (Unlikely Books) and Advice for Travelers (Black Sunflowers Press). She has been awarded two poetry residencies to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, a fellowship in poetry from the Yaddo Foundation, and grants in literature from NYState Council on the Arts as well as the Queens Arts Fund. Her poems appear in four anthologies and many journals including The Pinch, Spillway, The Southampton Review, Canary, and Prelude.
On the Wings of Time, Crisula Stefanescu, Monella Kaplan (Tr)
Publisher: eMotion Editions
Publication Date: January 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
On the Wings of Time is a lyrical collection of poems by Crisula Stefanescu that explores memory, longing, love, and the quiet passage of time.
Written with emotional clarity and philosophical tenderness, these poems move between the intimate and the universal – moments of solitude, fleeting encounters, the weight of history, and the fragile beauty of human connection. The voice is contemplative yet accessible, rooted in European literary tradition while speaking to contemporary readers.
Originally written over several years and now presented in English, On the Wings of Time invites the reader into a reflective space where time is not linear but layered – a place where past and present coexist, and where emotion becomes a form of remembrance.This collection will resonate with readers of literary poetry, reflective prose, and anyone drawn to writing that lingers long after the final page.
Crisula Stefanescu is a poet and writer whose work explores memory, love, and the passage of time. Her poetry has been published in Europe and the United States, in both print and audio form. On the Wings of Time is a collection of poems written over several years.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/3 and 2/9 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.”