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.
Ars Poeticas, Juliana Spahr
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht’s question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song’s possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.
Juliana Spahr is a writer and scholar of literature. Her most recent book of poetry is That Winter the Wolf Came (2015).
savings time, Roya Marsh
Publisher: MCD
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in Roya Marsh’s second collection, savings time,wear their raw feeling and revolutionary forcefulness on their sleeves. Alternating between confrontation and celebration, Marsh trains her unsparing eye on the twinned subjects of Black rage and Black healing with practiced, musical intention.
In poems flitting between breathless prose and measured lyricism, Marsh contemplates the contradictions and challenges of Black life in America, tackling everything from police brutality and urban gentrification to queer identity, presidential elections, and pop culture, all while calling for a world where self-care, especially for Black women, is not just encouraged but mandated. “no one told the Black girl,” she writes, “‘see you later’ was a prayer / begging us survive our own erasure.”
As unforgettable on the page as when recited in Marsh’s legendary spoken-word performances, the poems in savings time are focused on both revolution and self-love, at once holding society accountable for its exploitation of Black life and honoring the joy of persisting nonetheless.
Roya Marsh is a native of the Bronx, New York, and a nationally recognized poet, performer, educator, and activist. She is the author of the poetry collection dayliGht, which was nominated for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. A former poet in residence at Urban Word NYC, Marsh’s work has been featured on NBC, BET, and Def Jam’s All Def Digital, and has been published in Poetry, The Village Voice, Nylon, and HuffPost, and in the collection The BreakBeat Poets Volume 2: Black Girl Magic.
Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard’s third collection, emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract “the ore / from boredom,” as memory—personal, familial, social, historical—and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential.
The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book’s dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. By way of satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing “through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in skeptical company.”
Oli Hazzard is the author of two books of poems, Between Two Windows and Blotter; a book of literary criticism, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras; and a novel, Lorem Ipsum. He lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of St. Andrews.
This Report is Strictly Confidential, Elizabeth Ruth
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: February 7, 2025
Format: Paperback
Part exposé , part memoir, all heart— critically-acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Ruth’ s poetry debut is an act of love and commemoration, inspired by real life events that have left a lasting imprint on generations of family. Presented in four linked sections, this debut poetry collection from award winning writer Elizabeth Ruth offers readers rare glimpses into private worlds, revealing the life of the author’ s aunt who lived for decades in a notorious government-run residential hospital, exploring the experience of critical illness, and addressing the biological father Elizabeth Ruth has never met. With fresh, inventive use of language, biting irony and an unflinching gaze upon the human condition, these intimate poems give voice to the things that can’ t be said. This Report Is Strictly Confidential is an act of literary alchemy that carries all kinds of secrets out of the shadows and into the light, thereby transforming ugliness into beauty.
Elizabeth Ruth is the author of the novels Semi-Detached, Matadora, Smoke, and Ten Good Seconds of Silence. Her work has been recognized by the Writers’ Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, the City of Toronto Book Award, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and One Book One Community. CBC named her “ One of the Ten Canadian Women Writers You Must Read.” She holds a BA in English Literature, an MA in Counselling Psychology, and an MFA in Creative Writing. Elizabeth Ruth teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. This Report Is Strictly Confidential is her debut poetry collection.
Libre, Skye Jackson
Publisher: Regalo Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Freedom reverberates in Skye Jackson’s breathtaking debut, Libre, with evocative poems that are heart-wrenching, haunting, sensual, and tender. This collection explores the experiences of a young Black woman in New Orleans as she navigates the pull of familial and romantic relationships, celebrating the joys of Blackness, art, and friendship. Libre also includes Jackson’s award-winning poem “can we touch your hair?” which was hand selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project.
An acolyte of Sade and Stevie Nicks, Jackson muses on microaggressions, interracial relationships, and the endless intricacies of Black women’s hair as she rails against loss, random violence, and the dark expectations that society often places upon people of color. She roams each room of the heart, open and unafraid of what she might find behind every door. Through it all, this debut shines as the poetry refracts and reflects like a mirror leaving nothing unseen.
Skye Jackson is an award-winning writer and editor from New Orleans, LA, whose poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Green Mountains Review, and was hand selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Award. She currently teaches at Xavier University.
All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy, Bridget Bell, MD Patterson
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Maternal mental illness is an ongoing health crisis and deserves awareness, not only in the medical world but in the poetry world, too. Bridget Bell’s All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy offers support to current mothers, mothers-to-be, family members of people suffering from perinatal mental illnesses, OB-GYNs, nurses, and any other healthcare providers. Bell uses various poetic forms to shed light on the challenges that come with motherhood, including the physical and emotional challenges of childbirth while celebrating the beauty of women’s strength and resilience. Written with deep care and fearlessness, Bell’s debut collection is both an educational tool and a powerful component of recovery in that shares others’ similar stories.
Bridget Bell teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College in Durham, North Carolina. All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy is her debut poetry collection.
S is For, William Archila
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
S is For is an investigation by poet William Archila of the Central American migrant crisis haunted by the past of the civil war in El Salvador, the meanings of family spirits, and trees disappearing to urban sprawl—always wielding the voice of the immigrant, the refugee, and the ever-present exile as a weapon against invisibility and displacement. Inventive and compassionate, Archila’s poems navigate the meanings of family spirits, weeds and wildflowers, and the irreverence to lay down roots with our dead. The collection expresses the importance of an inner voice from the perspective of exile—people with no country, no language, ghosts split between present and past, between home and foreign. In a variety of forms—quasi-sonnet, sestina, ekphrastic, syllabic, lyric, memorial—the poems create a bridge between flaws and fractures, between the northern region of Central America and the beloved north which is the US. S is for: every letter never uttered, but evoked.
William Archila is the author of The Art of Exile which was awarded the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’ s Archaeology which received the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize. He was also awarded the 2023 Jack Hazard fellowship. He has been published in Poetry Magazine, The American Poetry Review, AGNl, Copper Nickle, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, and Indiana Review.
Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems, Julie Kane
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Capturing the breadth of Julie Kane’s poetics across nearly four decades—formalist and neo-confessional, steeped in both Boston Irish-American and New Orleans cultures—Naked Ladies displays the full range and achievement of her work. Gathered here in one volume are selections from Kane’s five previous collections, including her long-out-of-print first book and her subsequent winners of the National Poetry Series and Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Readers will also find a generous selection of new and previously uncollected work. The title of this milestone collection acknowledges Kane’s place in the tradition of women confessional poets, evokes the nickname of a common Louisiana flower, and nods to the honesty and frankness that characterize her poems’ speakers.
A past Louisiana poet laureate and Fulbright scholar, Julie Kane is professor emerita at Northwestern State University, currently teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University.
Turned Earth, Brad Richard
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Turned Earth, the fifth collection of poems by Brad Richard, offers a portrait of the artist as a grieving son who is also a husband, teacher, gardener, and attentive witness to our precarious world. Navigating life after his mother’s death, the speaker uses memory and imagination to understand, as one poem’s title declares, “How I Came to This.” Tender and trenchant, elegiac yet often livened by humor, Richard’s poems affirm the sustaining power of hope and love.
Brad Richard is a poet based in New Orleans who has received honors from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and Poets & Writers. He is the author of four other books of poems, including Parasite Kingdom, winner of the Tenth Gate Prize. In 2015, he was named Louisiana Artist of the Year.
An Arm Fixed to a Wing, Olivia Clare Friedman
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Olivia Clare Friedman’s An Arm Fixed to a Wing seeks out the spiritual elements that haunt the everyday, the divine wing fastened to an earthly arm. Elegies and poems of nostalgia appear alongside pieces celebrating the speaker’s present moment, with the underlying knowledge that such moments slip past too easily. Several poems explore the theme of motherhood—the excitement and novelty, the routine and translucent sleeplessness. At the book’s center sits a sequence of narrative pieces, titled “Camera Poems,” exploring experiences of isolation, hopefulness, and self-awareness.
While the poems in An Arm Fixed to a Wing acknowledge that loss is a constant, their tone is frequently wistful, evoking the desire to recover feelings of attentiveness and wonder toward one’s surroundings, both the mundane and the extraordinary.
Olivia Clare Friedman is the author of a novel, Here Lies, a short story collection, Disasters in the First World, and a book of poems, The 26-Hour Day. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Six White Horses, Sarah Gordon
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sarah Gordon’s Six White Horses is a bold collection of poems concerned with meaning–of such liminal matters as time, family, home, and loss. For Gordon, there are no easy answers; her broadly allusive poetry searches for spiritual mooring through the power of language and a keenly observant eye. Gordon’s penetrating gaze rarely provides readers with facile uplift, but summons us to look more closely, to see from more than one point of view, and to appreciate the stunning and often bewildering complexity of life.
Sarah Gordon is the author of widely published poems and two previous collections of poetry: Distances and The Lost Thing as well as Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination and A Literary Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia. Gordon is professor emerita of English at Georgia College & State University where she chaired five O’Connor symposia and was named Distinguished Professor. She is a recipient of The Governor’s Award in the Humanities and lives in Athens, Georgia.
Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness: New & Selected Poems, Cathryn Hankla
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Cathryn Hankla’s Return to a Certain Region of Consciousness gathers recent poems with those culled from eleven previous volumes to reveal a mature poet and her journey through more than four decades of subjects, places, selves, and the challenging art of poetry. From moon shots to pandemic ambiguities, like a color wheel of approaches to poetry’s mystery and meaning, this book’s prose poems, strict syllabics, metrics, and nonce forms of the poet’s making pull into a coherent whole, unified not by consistency but by the poet’s perceptive imagination. A painter who began as a photographer and filmmaker, Hankla is at home in long poems or haiku, employing close observation, associative collaging, and spinning stories into talismans. This collection samples projects such as Galaxies and Last Exposures: A Sequence, as well as volumes of prose poems published twenty years apart and the several books between, telescoping backward to Hankla’s earliest works, Afterimages, praised by William Stafford, and Phenomena, her prizewinning launch from University of Missouri Press. The poet’s preoccupations include travels, history, domestic life, childhood, family tragedy, love relationships, art, and environmental and personal losses, while the complicated cultural backdrop of Appalachia together with its topography, flora, and fauna forms a through line, a fault line, and a heartline. Hankla remains a steadfast witness and guardian of the region that has shaped her. As Henry Taylor wrote, Hankla’s poems drift from a recognizable world “through something like a beaded curtain” to evoke “several of the other worlds that are in this one.”
Cathryn Hankla is the author of multiple works in several genres and a visual artist who grew up in Southwest Virginia. Recent publications include Immortal Stuff: Prose Poems, Not Xanadu: Poems, and Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. Hollins University professor emerita of English & Creative Writing, Hankla lives in Roanoke, Virginia.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/4 and 2/10 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.