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.
Pause the Document, Mónica de la Torre
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
As the world shuts down, Mónica de la Torre’s poems become gregarious sites of encounter—homages to connections lost and new bonds forged. Shuttling between lyrical and experimental modes, the poems in Pause the Document challenge linear notions of time by looping the temporalities of dreams, art, the natural world, emotion, and odd encounters under extraordinary circumstances. Richer and more playful than straightforward records, these poems are portals into the intangible dimensions of daily life.
Mónica de la Torre was born and raised in Mexico City and is based in New York City. She is the author of six books of poetry, of which the most recent, Repetition Nineteen (2020), centers on experimental translation. Other collections include The Happy End/All Welcome (2017)—a riff on a riff on Kafka’s Amerika—and Public Domain (2009). Recent art writing focuses on Cecilia Vicuña’s Palabrarmas series, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Photostats, and Ulises Carrión’s bookworks. She also has co-edited several anthologies, most recently, Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (2020). She is the recipient of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts C.D. Wright Award for Poetry and a 2022 Creative Capital grant and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.
Still Water Carving Light, Peggy Shumaker
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Peggy Shumaker delicately captures the fragility of the human body, the profound bonds between loved ones, and the unpredictable journey of life itself. As seasons shift and bodies age, these poems gracefully explore the ebb and flow of pain and healing. Intimate snapshots of everyday life depict the quiet resilience of those left behind, inviting readers who have experienced loss to connect deeply with their own emotions. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth and deeper understanding.
Peggy Shumaker is the daughter of two deserts—the Sonoran desert where she grew up and the subarctic desert of interior Alaska where she lives now. Shumaker was honored by the Rasmuson Foundation as its Distinguished Artist. She served as Alaska State Writer Laureate. She received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Shumaker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Cairn, her new and selected volume. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at PLU. She serves on the Advisory Board for Storyknife, and on the board of the Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation. Shumaker is editor of the Boreal Books series (an imprint of Red Hen Press), editor of the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, poetry editor of Persimmon Tree, and contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review. She currently lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Four Days in Algeria, Clarence Major
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Clarence Major’s Four Days in Algeria is a poetic feast of travel, taking us to Paris, Florence, Ghana, Algeria, and many other places. We also experience the seasons in fresh ways. Delicious food, too, is laid before us. There are quiet moments, as on a houseboat, where the poet is writing poetry. Major gives us adventurous encounters with ordinary life rendered through poems of dazzling agility and fearless bluntness. These are also poems of unfettered Augustan honesty. They radiate with lyrical purity. Allegorical and spontaneous, they are full of holiday energy as the poet passionately affirms life, whether as he travels or simply in quiet moments of reflection.
Among Clarence Major’s previous sixteen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals. A Fulbright scholar, among Major’s other awards are a Western States Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.
Dog and Moon, Kelly Shepherd
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
Woven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, Dog and Moon inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it to create a sort of Indra’s Net, with couplets echoing and reflecting across his poems. They are a series of juxtapositions: nature writing placed in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging.
Kelly Shepherd is a poetry editor for the Trumpeter. His second poetry collection, Insomnia Bird, won the 2019 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Originally from Smithers, British Columbia, he lives and teaches on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton.
Leaves Borrowed From Human Flesh, Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, the centrality of the self is displaced by the raw power of place and the female body’s attempt to search for meaning within the vast spatial topography that confronts it. Poems which take their inspiration from landscapes in South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, beckon the reader to experience natural beauty and climatic collapse through a language that is subtly but unashamedly political, spanning love, mortality, violence, and abuse, but always returning to the word as a source of power and regeneration. Ultimately, this is a collection about language’s ability to remain buoyant-through-change, and about poetry’s unquenchable thirst for otherness – an intense desire that, no longer satisfied with traditional models of representation, must remake itself by inhabiting the page as both canvas and visual field.
Abigail Ardelle Zammit is a Maltese writer and the author of two poetry collections, Voices from the Land of Trees (Middlesbrough: Smokestack, 2007) and Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (London: Sentinel, 2015), which won second prize in the SPM Poetry Competition. Her poetry and reviews have been published in a variety of international journals including Matter, Tupelo Quarterly, Boulevard, Gutter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Myslexia, Poetry International, The SHOp, Iota, Aesthetica, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and The Ekphrastic Review. She has co-authored two Maltese-English poetry pamphlets and written a Seamus Heaney guidebook for post-secondary students. Her most recent manuscripts have been shortlisted for the Cinnamon Press Literature Award 2022, the Tupelo Press Open Reading Period 2022, the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Prize and the 2023 Snowbound Chapbook Award. Abigail’s passion for on-site research has allowed her to take part in artistic residencies around four continents.
Chaotic Good, Isabelle Baafi
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
This fresh, dynamic debut poetry book from award-winning poet Isabelle Baafi explores the transformative journey of redefining one’s identity following trauma and upheaval. This conversational collection simmers with energy and immediacy as it interrogates how much our identity is determined by the circumstances into which we are born. The book’s five sections travel backwards and forwards in time: asking urgent questions of self-knowledge and change during a marital breakdown, revisiting the formation of a moral compass during childhood, navigating the pitfalls of powerlessness and conformity during adolescence, charting the rise and fall of a passionate marriage, and seeking revitalization in the wake of divorce. Visceral scenes from childhood and adolescence are set against deeply resonant moments of love blossoming and love dying to explore desire, power, and self-perception in unexpected ways. This exquisite and moving collection marks the emergence of a distinctive poetic voice.
Isabelle Baafi’s writing has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut Ripe (2020), won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London, a Ledbury Poetry Critic, an Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and an editor at Magma.
Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Can words hold a note? Can language foam like a mouth? In their hybrid volume Arrangements, Esther Kondo Heller creates textual & visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document. What arrangements exist between a mother and child? In listening to Black queer life in Berlin, Mombasa, and London the action of arranging becomes a means of sounding out a collective utterance of Black survival with joy amid grief, colonialism, medical racism, and loss. A revelatory debut volume, Arrangements collectively thinks with, amongst others, the works of Audre Lorde, May Ayim, Fred Moten, Raja Lubinetzki, NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Marvin Gaye, Taylor Johnson, and Octavia Rucker Gabrielle.
Esther Kondo Heller is a poet, literary critic, and experimental filmmaker. They are a Barbican Young Poet 18/19, an Obsidian Foundation fellow, and a Ledbury Critic. They have an M.F.A. in Poetry from Cornell University 23′ and are currently, a first-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where they are working on transnational Black poetics and translating the poetry of Black German poet Raja Lubinetzki.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life. The second half of the collection is one long poem, a letter addressed to a lost lover who will never get to read the speaker’s secret thoughts. Haunted by loss—of parents, of children, of the self—the speaker reaches an inevitable epiphany: “[A]nd sometimes it’s hard to know / on which side of the river I stand.” Stylistically, these poems destabilize our notions and expectations of genre and lyricism.
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours is more than just an exercise in poetic virtuosity; it is an excavation into the complexities of what it means to be a human being in our contemporary world.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.
Natalia Treviño is a translator of Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours. A poet and writer of fiction and nonfiction, Treviño is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Vista College and holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. Born in Mexico City, Treviño has lived in San Antonio, Texas, for most of her life.
Young Woman with a Cane, Reginald Gibbons
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Young Woman with a Cane explores the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of feeling, experience, and thought. This new collection by Reginald Gibbons ranges from nature and ecological crises to human conflicts of migration, self-determination, ancient war, and the corruption of political mores. In language intensified by strong rhythms, figures, and bounteous vocabulary, the book presents short lyrics alongside satires, laments, and witness, with subjects moving from elk in the Dakotas to underlings supporting knavish power, from celebrating words as a kind of phonetic music to brief narratives of interaction and consciousness. Above all, Gibbons’s poems fluently and inventively articulate both directness and nuance.
The long prose poem that gives the book its title and other pieces evoke the historical depths, echoes, and precedents of present-day life. Gradually the book provides energetic metaphorical and notional riffs on violence, on wars both past and recent and ongoing, as it satirizes the corrupted politics of our age. Yet it also presents tender, sometimes melancholic treatments of everyday life. With a panoply of poetic forms, marked throughout by a lively pleasure in the language and the lines, Gibbons conjures an extensive range of story and experience, feeling and thought.
Reginald Gibbons is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Creatures of a Day, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also published volumes of fiction, essays, and translations. A native of Texas, he now lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is the Frances Hooper Professor Emeritus in the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University.
Pink Dust, Ron Padgett
Publisher: NYRB Poets
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
Admired by such luminaries as punk rock godfather Richard Hell and indie film director Jim Jarmusch, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett is one of our best known and most acclaimed poets. For the last six decades, Padgett’s poetry—“wonderful, generous, funny” (John Ashbery)—has moved and delighted generations of readers with its inventiveness, its gentle humor, and above all, its ability to instill wonder for the world.
These same qualities Padgett brings to his latest book of poems, Pink Dust, a poignant reflection on old age that shimmers with all the insouciance of youth.
Ron Padgett is a poet and translator whose Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2014 Los Angeles Times Prize for the best poetry book. Padgett has translated the poetry of Pierre Reverdy, Valery Larbaud, and Blaise Cendrars. For NYRB Poets, he translated Apollinaire’s Zone. He lives in Vermont and New York City.
Black California Gold, Wendy M. Thompson
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
For numerous migrants who ventured westward in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities, the glitter of California often proved to be mere fool’s gold—promising easy riches but frequently resulting in dispossession and displacement. Poet Wendy M. Thompson is descended from two of these migrant waves—post-1965 Chinese immigrants and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration—whose presence has permanently transformed the region.
In this arresting debut poetry collection, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Traveling down both familiar highways and obscure side streets, her poems map a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance.
Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Black California Gold depicts a setting that is less a melting pot than a smelting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures that threaten to break them down entirely. Yet, it also celebrates the Black residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.
Wendy M. Thompson is an Oakland native whose creative work has most recently appeared in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Juked, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She is an associate professor of African American studies at San José State University.
New Playlist, David Trinidad
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
David Trinidad’s playlist is a variety of poetic forms: odes, found poems, haiku, prose poems, list poems, collages, one-liners, sonnets, and more. With his trademark wit and inventiveness, Trinidad “plays” with these forms as if they were toys. He creates a Wikipedia cento in which each line illustrates how little is known of sixty-five ancient Greek poets. He gives us an itinerary of “Things to Do” in ten 1970’s disaster films. He catalogs Sylvia Plath’s recipe cards and all of the references to beer in a book by Bernadette Mayer. His subjects are as “fun” as his forms: pop singer Dusty Springfield, Marcel Proust, Basho, Hollywood movies and actresses, old cartoons, a prom dress thief loose in a girls’ dorm. But play does not preclude seriousness with poems that address his physical scars, encounters with homophobia, and the wonders and wounds of childhood.
David Trinidad’s previous books include Sleeping with Basho, Digging to Wonderland Peyton and Place: A Haiku Soap Opera. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, and Divining Poets: Dickinson, an Emily Dickinson tarot deck. Trinidad lives in Los Angeles.
Solar Hits, Tate Swindell
Publisher: Lithic Press
Publication Date: March 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
These poems reflect Swindell’s long acquaintance with various ways of working with language. It’s all here: the jazz – the city – the mind – the longing – the high – the friend – the birds – the skin – the street – the show – the no where to go – the next election – the loss – the what-to-do – the Say-Hey – the marketing concept – the lava within – the imaginary dreamer – the human shout… this is Tate Swindell picking the lock of the heart with a question for the sun, which comes singing back to you.
The first full length collection of poems by San Francisco poet Tate Swindell, an archivist, poet photographer, and founder of Unrequited Records, which specializes in poetry records released on the vinyl format. The latest release was an album of rare Gregory Corso readings from the late 1970s that included previously unpublished poems. In addition to an album of rare Bob Kaufman recordings due out in 2020, he recently co-edited the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books (2019). Tate, and his brother Todd, worked extensively on the Harold Norse archives, which were donated to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. He is currently writing a memoir about his experiences as a pioneer in the San Francisco medical cannabis movement. His previous collections of writings include Palpitations, The Creation of Deadlines and Fotopomes.
What to Carry into the Future, Sue Landers
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: March 12, 2025
Format: Paperback
What to Carry Into the Future is an unconditional love letter to New York City. Emerging from the poet’s quest to ride every NYC subway line end to end, the collection charts the continuous aftermath of catastrophe—9/11, Sandy, COVID, etc.—alongside the city’s many pleasures—the Wonder Wheel, tulip trees, strangers on a train breaking out into song.
Susan (Sue) Landers is the author of Franklinstein (Roof Books, 2016), Covers (O Books, 2007), and 248 mgs., a panic picnic (O Books, 2003). She lives in Brooklyn.
The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself, Carrie Hunter
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: March 12, 2025
Format: Paperback
Poems based on reading and engaging with John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, writing around Ashbery’s Flow Chart as a way of reading it. It also engages with the ecopoetics of Marthe Reed.
Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and for 11 years, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She has published around 15 chapbooks and has three full-length books out The Incompossible, Orphan Machines, and most recently, Vibratory Milieu.
Tabako on the Windowsill, Hari Alluri
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: March 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
To build an entire book around portals and thresholds is to try to create living myth. Tabako on the Windowsill builds from comic books, television, paintings, folklore, music, and a unique imagination. These poems follow an immigrant point of view while maintaining home in a language that engages with blood and chosen family, with multiple lived and ancestral spaces in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Canada, and the U.S. Encountering the layered moment, Alluri is guided by a burning attention – to braids of displacement, loss, and joy, to multiple beginnings. These tensions provide the opportunity for an expansion from the personhood of perception, into a wider world of perspective, achieving through empathy the possibility of transformation.
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is an uninvited migrant poet of Philippine and South Indian descent living, writing, and working on unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and Ts’uubaa-asatx lands of Hul’q’umi’num-speaking peoples. Author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press), carving ashes (CiCAC/Thompson Rivers Press), and chapbooks Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press) and The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel Press), siya is a recipient of the Vera Manuel Award for Poetry and grants from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council of the Arts, and National Film Board of Canada, among other prizes, grants, fellowships and residencies.
Parallax, Julia Kolchinsky
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet’s birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.
Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky “clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her.”
Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine as when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.
True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmitt
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: March 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.
As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.
Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.
Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.
Willow Hammer, Patrick Donnelly
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Willow Hammer is a consummate lyric of the aftermath. In his fifth book, Patrick Donnelly has his face pressed against the eyepiece as he looks unsparingly at the past, generating a sequence of poems that fans out kaleidoscopically upon learning, twenty years afterward, that his stepfather assaulted his sister.
In response to this crime, Donnelly traces the consequences of ignorance, denial, bargaining, complicity, and finally revelation that reverberated through his and his loved ones’ lives for five decades. His discovery of this catalyzing violation not only recontextualizes the siblings’ shared history, but inflects the present as – finding analogues of his sister’s abuse in the classical canon – he remembers his escape from home into spiritual disciplines and the study of dead languages. Revisiting the evolution of his own sexuality, he remembers singing a Byrd Mass after a night at a gay bathhouse, characterizing the tenor and bass as “two wrestling saints,” “lowest of the four voices- / once I thought I saw them kiss each other’s faces.”
And that – recovering glimpses of his sister’s unknowable interiority, reckoning with a truth that is unbearable and inescapable-is this book’s difficult and endless work. In the wake of a particular kind of harm, Willow Hammer seems to suggest, justice may be a wishful concept – but that doesn’t preclude testimony and salvage. “Now” documents the poet’s arrival at this compromise: “I remember my / little sister that was, / little willow of glass / upon whom he laid / his hammer hands.” There is no revocation of the hands, but with tenderness, wit, and fury, Donnelly’s lyrics refuse to let their shadow obscure his sister’s recovery of her own agency.
Patrick Donnelly is the author of five books of poetry. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is program director of The Frost Place, a center for poetry and the arts at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Slate, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals. Donnelly’s translations with Stephen D. Miller of classical Japanese poetry were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and an Amy Clampitt Residency Award.
Silkworm’s Pansori, David Seung
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
The debut book of poems by David Seung, Silkworm’s Pansori is a collection of English-language sijo poems: a traditional Korean poetic form that is straightforward in its syntax but emotionally nuanced. Following this historical form closely, these are poems of elegance and subtlety, like painted still lifes imbued with heartbreaking subtlety and metaphor. Yet the poet can only get so far with this exercise before his own personal Korean history, a family legacy of war and torture, starts creeping in to shatter the otherwise poetic calm. Inserted toward the end of the book is the Korean Declaration of Independence; among the signers is the poet’s great-great-grandfather. Asking the reader to contextualize this document with the history of sijo and his own family saga, Seung gracefully addresses generations of anger and pain, and reflects on the intricacies of human existence.
David Seung is a Korean American stand-up comedian and writer. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University, where he now teaches.
Ultraviolet of the Genuine, Hannah Brooks-Motl
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
Hannah Brooks-Motl’s fourth collection of poems, Ultraviolet of the Genuine, is an expansive record of time and thought, weaving together philosophy, science, theology, dreams, grief, literary theory, criticism, history, and ideas of utopia—becoming a book that continuously surprises and is nearly impossible to categorize. Engaging with centuries of poetic tradition, Ultraviolet of the Genuine leaves room for the development of everything, abstract and alive, even giving ants the spotlight in one long poem. These poems propose a new metaphysics, weighing everyday moments wherein the elusive and ultraviolet radiate. Again, Brooks-Motl challenges the ways we read poetry, not by opting for either the head or the heart, but by choosing both.
Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Red Wilderness, Aaron Coleman
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In defiance of life’s intractable march forward, Red Wilderness by Aaron Coleman (Winner of the 2020 GLCA New Writers Award) unearths and deconstructs the past that haunts our country and ourselves. Coleman’s second collection interpolates American history with his own family’s legacy, reflecting on national identity, Blackness, taboo, faith, and remembrance while enacting a multigenerational chorus of poems that stretches back to the Civil War. In present day, Coleman “[tries] a new way home / past the pawn shop neon-green with memory” and inspects bird bones in “tall, forgotten weeds” while “hard rain” turns his ground into “a gulch” – another place where “the end got here before us.” In the next poem, transported between storms, Coleman channels his ancestor, a soldier of the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry at sea during a downpour in March 1864: “I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave / now. I’m alive and not alone.” In these restorative lyrics, an end is an entrypoint to memory and reimagination, to something unending – a spiritual freedom, collective strength, and boundless love threading separate years into one strand. Red Wilderness visualizes an intimate, living archive that maps myths and realities of blood, boundaries, geography, and genealogy, and Coleman brilliantly curates the sound of time’s river wending across ancient land. “Hold and let fall water,” he instructs us. “If I / listen for my body living I hear who I am.”
Aaron Coleman is a poet, translator, educator, and scholar of the African Diaspora. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His debut poetry collection, Threat Come Close, was the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and his chapbook, St. Trigger, won the Button Poetry Prize. He is also the translator of Afro-Cuban poet Nicola´s Guille´n’s 1967 collection, The Great Zoo, selected for the Phoenix Poet Series by University of Chicago Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Poetry Magazine. From Metro-Detroit, Coleman has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. He is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
Concerning the Angels, Rafael Alberti, John Murillo (Tr.)
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his first full-length translation, celebrated poet John Murillo (Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Four Quartets Prize) brings Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels (Sobre los ángeles) to an English-reading audience. Murillo’s foreword introduces Sobre los ángeles as “a monument- albeit a severely neglected monument-of early twentieth-century literature.” Despite having “penned a masterwork of social and psychic malaise as deserving as any of its place in the global canon,” Alberti has disappeared into relative obscurity among readers of English language poetry, and Murillo’s crucial intervention allows the Spanish poet’s voice to once again echo prophetically from this book’s opening poem, “Paradise Lost”: “throughout the centuries, / through the nothingness of the world, / I, without sleep, search for you.” Insofar as the speaker addresses a figure named Shadow, he also seems to imagine us, his future readers, who need these prescient lyrics written in the time leading up to Spain’s civil war and ensuing decades of fascist rule. Bringing his signature gifts to translating from the Spanish, Murillo has given new life to what many consider Alberti’s magnum opus and delivered our marching orders for the resistance the future will require. “It is time you gave me your hand / and scratched into me the little light that catches a hole as it closes / and killed for me this evil word I plan to plunge into the thawing earth.”
Considered one of the major Spanish poets of the 20th century, Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) was the author of over twenty volumes of poetry, including Marinero en Tierra, Cal y Canto, and La Amante. He also wrote several plays and the celebrated memoir, La Arboleda Perdida (The Lost Grove). His many honors include the Premio Cervantes, the America Award, and the Lenin Peace Prize among others. Sobre los ángeles (Concerning the Angels) is regarded by many as his magnum opus.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.
The Fire Passage, Lisa Wells
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Winner of the 2025 Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry selected by Pulitzer Prize recipient Diane Seuss, The Fire Passage is a lyric descent in the epic tradition, traveling unto realms unmoored by extreme weather and mysterious illness before resurfacing to the light of a world remade. Recording her experience of a health crisis amid continuous natural disaster, poet Lisa Wells recontextualizes biblically scaled plagues as the entropic catastrophes of our late-stage capitalist society. “I was sick, plainly. / I had my symptoms.” Confronted with the disbelief and “skeptical pity” of medical professionals, Wells brilliantly illuminates the psychological exile of illness where patients, “turned out by the body,” find themselves on “malignancy’s forced pilgrimage.” The passage she travels is a gauntlet of flame, a path guarded by gatekeepers who acted “as if the wound were in [her] mind.” (“And it was. But it was elsewhere, too.”) This book serves as the answer to a query posed by bad-faith actors and the insightful dream-self alike: “so the wound is a window?” These pages convey grim comfort and radical optimism at once, reminding, “Friend, we die, but do not die alone.” They insist on an affirmative practice of responding to rhetorical questions, building solidarity among the weary who call out, ensuring that they – that we – are not alone with silence. “It comes for all? // It comes for all.” Despite its frank acknowledgment of fire’s lethal nature, the fortifying poetics of this book never preclude the possibility of resurrection or lose their focus on rebuilding a better world from the ashes of this one. “Do not shrink from That Which / razed the scab, will / fertilize the disturbance,” Wells commands us. She entreats us to measure up to a corrective future. “Already its great wave breaks / against the mangroves. // Let us go / and greet it.”
Lisa Wells is a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. Her debut collection, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her most recent book, Believers (FSG) was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her work has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, The New York Times, and Orion, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with Joshua Marie Wilkinson and their son. Together they serve as editors for the Kuhl House Poets Series at the University of Iowa Press.
One More World Like This World, Carlie Hoffman
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Following When There Was Light (Winner of the 2023 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry), Carlie Hoffman’s third collection of poetry, One More World like This World, is a lyrical study of contemporary life – its lines echo amidst the imbalanced interdependence of globalization, in the wake of third-wave feminism, and from the active collapse of our American empire. Hoffman’s poems brilliantly survey both how women have been flattened, misunderstood, and displaced throughout time and across disciplines, and how women have made themselves at home in their minds and within their specific histories.
Approaching adaptation as a coping mechanism against perpetual exile, Hoffman recasts female archetypes as contemporary women, drawing a throughline between the narrative past and present circumstances. Persephone follows her captor “deeper inside the replica of girlhood,” and Eurydice in New Jersey “knew where she was going” as she made her way to death across “the parking lot and graveyard’s / fertile grass.” Rather than simply retelling a familiar tale, Hoffman’s poems illuminate mythology as a discourse with time and recognize solidarity between women as a conversation that continues beyond the grave.
The timeless wisdom of this collection is how it unveils the constant and concurrent tragedies taking place everywhere around us while salvaging the irreducible pleasure of living from the wrecks of perception. Despite it all, we want to live. Perhaps, Hoffman seems to say, we were expelled from the garden not once but again and again, and, each time we exit, we go out searching for one more world like this world. “The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying from the tree,” she writes in the collection’s final poem “Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World.” Or, to revisit the stage set in “Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College of New Jersey,” “Outside the classroom window, snow falls, unencumbered / by a wind from nowhere the night Eurydice chooses to stay.”
Carlie Hoffman is the author of the poetry collections One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025); When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023), winner of the National Jewish Book Award; and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the Northern California Publishers & Authors Gold Award in Poetry as well as a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. Hoffman is the translator from the German of both Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Blütenlese (World Poetry Books, 2026) and White Shadows: Anneliese Hager and the Camera-less Photograph (Atelier Éditions, 2025), as well as the poems of Rose Ausländer. Hoffman’s other honors include a 92NY “Discovery” / Boston Review prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal.
Monster Mash, Susan Browne
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Susan Browne (Winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry judged by Edward Hirsch) has crafted her fourth collection of poetry into an incendiary inventory of life’s urgency and vitality in this late-stage capitalist moment. In “Air Quality Index: 500,” while Browne “[wonders] what the government [is] doing during this era of cannibalism,” “a bald eagle [flies] by with its head on fire.” Monster Mash explores the surreal lyricism of this phenomenon – when what sounds like hyperbolic symbolism is actually just the news. Even if the national bird aflame makes a fitting metaphor for the state of our body politic, it also transcribes a true emergency in the poet’s direct sight – wilderness and civilization smoldering alike in the California wildfires. Amid the existential scale of climate and economic crises, Browne’s poems deftly illuminate how we must also navigate the daily necessities of our individual lives: tending to aging parents, grieving those who pass before us, “[waking] to the river of air conditioner noise,” “cleaning the litter box / or driving around the locked-down town, / looking for a house [you] can’t afford or a job that doesn’t exist.” In the words of Dorianne Laux, “Browne’s poems are songs to the suffering earth, to love in the face of the pitiless moon, merciless angels, [and] to the past and the future.” After all, Browne reminds us, not all of our wandering is aimless. The speaker at the wheel “wants to show you what’s still possible / out by the river, the egret & geese, / the fast-moving current, that autumn is here / & there, there, there / are dark pools of coolness under the leaves.”
Susan Browne is the author of three previous poetry collections: Buddha’s Dogs, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize; Zephyr, winner of Steel Toe Books Editor’s Choice award; and Just Living, winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize. Other awards include The James Dickey Poetry Prize, The Los Angeles Poetry Festival Prize, and a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Northern California.
After the Operation, Elizabeth T. Gray
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s After the Operation reports from the No Man’s Land she wandered following eight hours of surgery to remove a brain tumor. What does the mind feel like after something has been taken out of your skull? “An uninhabited coast,” or “all shatter and thoroughfare?” These spare poems interweave medical documents, journal entries, and memories, assembling a polyvocal chorus to document the surgery itself and the recuperation process. The decentralized perspective of After the Operation allows the reader to see the procedure holistically – medically, from the doctor’s perspective; subjectively, from the author’s; and vicariously, from her caretakers’, family’s, and friends’ – while approximating the disassociation the patient feels as she navigates unexpected cognitive and emotional side effects. Sometimes bleak but always gorgeous, After the Operation does us a great service in illuminating and articulating the complexities of a serious medical event. This tangible chronicle of Gray’s terror, isolation, bafflement, desolation, love, loss, relief and gratitude serves as a beacon for all of us who will one day, as Susan Sontag says, find ourselves dwelling in “the kingdom of the sick.” Gray makes valiant use of her citizenship there, asking, “When they come for you, when the unfamiliar roar comes, and a sudden opening, and light pours in, when what had kept you safe, what had always been, is breached, pried open, and light pours in, what do you want to have been writing then?” After the Operation is her triumphant answer.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Previous collections of poetry include Salient (New Directions, 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022), her translations of Iran’s major modern woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1937-1962), was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The Green Sea of Heaven, a 30th anniversary edition of her translations of Iran’s major medieval mystic poet, Háfiz (d. 1389), appeared from Monkfish Publishing in 2024. She currently serves on the Boards of Kimbilio for Black Fiction, the Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. She was a founder and managing partner/CEO of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique corporate consulting firms. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives in New York City.
Reality Checkmate, Daniel Ruiz
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A dynamic and philosophical debut collection, Daniel Ruiz’s Reality Checkmate choreographs the endless wrestling match between lyrical sensibility and ontological principles taking place on the mind’s stage. These poems exquisitely demonstrate that phenomena in the material world are rarely as simple as they seem and yet must continually confront the universe’s countermove – the constraints of life itself, the knowledge that all we truly have is the present moment and the face value of our perceptions. He succinctly summarizes the history of art as cultural capital – “all of us are / eternally punished with proving / literature is about literature // after all” – while revealing the redundancies and blind spots of intellectualism – “Meanwhile, a lost sheep / finds grass to eat // anywhere it wants, / and does not mind, / like Lorca, letting its hair // grow long.” While Reality Checkmate delights in the cerebral mode, its celebration of relativity as well as the lush materiality of language yields equal imagery and musicality, upholding sensory experience and human relationships as existentially significant in the absence of absolute truths. In Ruiz’s astonishing first book, dawn is not morning – or rather, not merely morning. “Madrugada” rejects a navel-gazing discourse on sentimentality and the passage of days, commanding that “you for whom meaning / is the meaning of beauty, be gone.” We could spend our whole lives ideating a metaphysics of time and waste the wonder of sunlight right in front of us. “Meanwhile, / the clouds are proud of all of us. It’s 12:01. / A man dragged by a poodle says / Good morning. Everyone in the orchestra / stands up at once.”
Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican and Cuban poet and translator, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and Florida State University, and a two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series. In 2016, he was a Fulbright Scholar to Chile. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where he edits poetry and translations for the Denver Quarterly.
No Small Thing, Gabriel Fried
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Like an itinerant evangelist, poet Gabriel Fried transforms every space he enters with a sacred kind of attention. If “the big-top makes a chapel of the fetid / lot between the ballpark and the river, / where the air sticks like a rancid jam,” Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thing returns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms. The richly saturated subjects of No Small Thing range from pastoral youth, ancestral tenements, and remembered ghettos to the revival tent, child preachers, and the word-encrusted performances of the grown but still enchanted poet. Fried’s work captures the earthy and illusory magic of poetry, as if performing a “negative-numbered, phantasmagoric” self-portraiture with only “a fogged-up looking glass.”
Gabriel Fried is the author of three collections of poetry: No Small Thing, The Children Are Reading, and Making the New Lamb Take. He is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books and Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri.
A Magnificent Loneliness, Allison Benis White
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, A Magnificent Loneliness is a dialogue with ghosts. White, whose previous work won the Rilke Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss. These poems relate to artwork, the history of artistic practice, and inherited lore to broker an oblique and piecewise conversation concerning pain too vast to articulate all at once. “I don’t know how to love the world but to love / her leaving.” These lyrical iterations represent White’s attempts to comprehend the individual suffering of being alive, and to metabolize the grief of women’s epidemic disappearance, literal and spiritual, through sickness and despair. Through those efforts, she illuminates a magnificent loneliness – the privilege of being alive to our anguish, of missing someone dearly because someone dear existed – and a reason for not yet departing that struggle. “How to leave / the world but to turn to leave her- / but to turn my head back / to see her.”
Allison Benis White is the author of The Wendys, Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Crayon, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI & XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
Dissonance, Kristin Dykstra
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: March 17, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Dissonance, translator Kristin Dykstra’s first book of original poetry, the author leads us to inner worlds shaped partly by the New England countryside, tracking shifts in the region’s nature, infrastructure, and people, while sharing observations on borders and climate catastrophe that reverberate globally. Dykstra condenses signs of urban expansion, economic division, and battles over democracy into an innovative meditation. With a dynamic approach to form, musicality, and scope, Dissonance explores ways of experiencing regional landscapes and imagined communities in the twenty-first century.
Through her extended sequence of prose poems, photographs, and lyric fragments, Dykstra merges clips from documents and dialogues with observations drawn from two local libraries and her daily walks down a dirt road through Vermont’s foothills. As she moves down this public road, which lies within the nation’s federally designated hundred-mile border zone, she finds a daily convergence of tensions. Dissonance asks how poetry can unsettle impressions of a place, and how that process, in turn, disturbs impressions of self, of others, and of time itself.
Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar living in Hinesburg, VT. Dykstra has translated numerous books, including works by Cuban writers Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Marcelo Morales, Rito Ramón Aroche, Ángel Escobar, and Omar Pérez. Among her honors are the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literary Translation. Her writing has been published in the Chicago Review, Guernica, Hopkins Review, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, Rumpus, Astra, and elsewhere. Dissonance is her first original poetry collection.
Moon Mirrored Indivisible, Farid Matuk
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: March 17, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A previously undocumented child of Syrian and Peruvian parents, an inheritor of lineages marked by colonial and gendered violence, and a survivor of childhood sexual assault, Farid Matuk approaches the musical capacities of verse not as mere excitation or decoration, but as forms that reclaim pleasure and presence. Entering the sonic constellations of Moon Mirrored Indivisible, the reader finds relief from nesting layers of containment that systems of power impose on our bodies and imaginations. In this hall of historical mirrors, fictions of identity are refracted, reflected, and multiplied into a vast field of possibilities. Matuk’s meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric “I” and others, including poets, the speaker’s partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange intimacy. Each of the book’s four sections of poems builds on the other to ask how we might form a collective—a people—not founded in orthodoxies of originality but in the mutual work of mirroring one another.
Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Is a Nice Neighborhood, My Daughter La Chola, and The Real Horse. With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the 2023 Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists.
Mud in Our Mouths, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s Mud in Our Mouths illuminates how we are all enmeshed in a web of violence and love. As the speaker of the collection drives cross-country to visit her family of origin in Tennessee, she reckons with the tensions between her current and past selves and the many ways violence—interpersonal, societal, and environmental—has shaped her life. She struggles to find meaning, questioning the ethics of locating faith in a natural world she is unintentionally destroying, and grapples with her complicity in systems of power and oppression as a white Southern woman. Ultimately, she rejects the idea of genetic family as a place of solace; instead, she cleaves to the liberation and joy of connections forged outside those strictures, where intimacy is freely chosen rather than preordained.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett is the author of Look Alive, which was awarded the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize, as well as numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar. Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as assistant poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter.
Diorama, Sandra Marchetti
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: March 17, 2025
Format: Paperback
Diorama is a full-length book of poems that details various forms of hunger from the perspective of a female speaker in turmoil. The collection also serves as a commonplace book which catalogues the author’s poetic influences. Diorama’s speaker undergoes a re-wilding process in her exploration of the natural world. The book is divided into three sections beginning in tribulation, acquiring knowledge in the wilderness, and ultimately finding a new awareness. The collection draws heavily from other poets’ work, especially the writing of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Octavio Paz, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Li-Young Lee. In addition, Diorama explores a woman’s relationship with food. The book provides an immersive, sonic experience for readers.
Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net/
To Wildness, Julia Thacker
Publisher: The Waywiser Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
To Wildness is winner of the 19th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was chosen by the internationally acclaimed poet, Paul Muldoon. As Joan Houlihan says in her enthusiastic endorsement, “Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (‘Let me touch them as they pass.’) A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!”
The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe (now The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Southern Humanities Review, and The New Republic. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as Poet-in-Residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount in Lenox. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.
Passport, Richard Jones
Publisher: Green Linden Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Passport, his 20th book, Richard Jones has moved increasingly from the lyric grounded in the everyday to a kind of magical realism where he sees in daily life transformations all around, as if a curtain has parted or he has touched the hem of some great mystery. “Reading is like magic,” says one of his characters. “Though desolate and broken, we can love the way the world flows together.” In Jones’s poems the search never ends; the answer itself resides in asking the right questions.
Richard Jones is the author of twenty books of poetry, including Avalon and The Minor Key, both from Green Linden Press. His new and selected poems, The Blessing, won the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry. Other titles include At Last We Enter Paradise, A Perfect Time, Apropos of Nothing, Stranger on Earth, and Paris. He is also the founder and editor of Poetry East, and over the last four and a half decades he has curated its exciting and diverse anthologies, including The Last Believer in Words, Bliss, Origins, Wider than the Sky, Cosmos, and London.
Cold Thief Place, Esther Lin
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life—three times on three different continents—and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it’s possible to truly know one’s parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a greencard marriage in order to live a “normal life.” One of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions.
This book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point-of-view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American—that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is also author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. Most recently, she was an artist-resident at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, MA, and Cité internationale, Paris. She was a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work has been featured in 2023’s Best of the Net, Best New Poets 2022, and she was winner of the 2018 Crab Orchard Review’s Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Currently, she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems, C. Dale Young
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
C. Dale Young, Winner of the 2017 Hanes Award in Poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers, brings together decades of work in Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems. These lyrics cut cleanly and exquisitely, performing a sacrifice at the altar of language. Remedying the inaccurate reports missionaries left in their “filthy journals,” “Memento” imagines instead the surgical precision Aztec priests must have used to “slice from the umbilicus up and through the diaphragm,” keeping the heart “while discarding the body, the feeble thing / tumbling down the steps of the pyramid.” As a tenured artist and veteran doctor, Young writes with a dual awareness of life’s fragility and the lyric’s endurance, presenting readers with new work that is entirely fresh even as it speaks to his broader legacy and dialogues with his preceding oeuvre. This book unfolds like the poet’s experience of time: “‘All my life.’ It sounds so odd to say that out loud. / But strange thing after strange thing transpired.” Representing the still-warm heart, what will one day be the only surviving memento of the outlasted body that bore them, these poems explore the author’s simultaneous embrace of mortality’s richness and resignation to death’s inevitable decay. Young surveys the perpetual ultimatum of his roles: as an oncologist, the patients (including his parents) he couldn’t save; as an artist, the self he intends to confront honestly as his body ages; and, as a mortal raised with stories of the Taino gods, the impossibility of building the perfect animal. When teaching bedside manner, how to break the news to a patient that their cancer will kill them, Young’s student “wants a guide, a checklist,” he says, “but nothing like that exists. It has never existed.” Building the Perfect Animal is a monument to that inconceivable instruction manual, honoring the ceaselessly unprecedented work and gift of being now alive.
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Affliction (Four Way Books, 2018), a novel in stories, and the poetry collections The Day Underneath the Day (Northwestern, 2001); The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; Torn (Four Way Books, 2011), named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by National Public Radio; The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; and Prometeo (Four Way Books, 2021). He is a previous recipient of the Grolier Prize, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing, and the 2017/2018 Hanes Award in Poetry given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers to honor a poet at mid-career. A fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, his poems and short fiction have appeared widely. He lives in San Francisco.
Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus, Jack Saebyok Jung
Publisher: Black Square Editions
Publication Date: March 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus is a five-part poetic journey that moves from intimate personal memory to expansive reflections on culture, war, politics, and myth. Each section—titled as if part of a magic incantation—illuminates a different realm of “illusion” or transformation. A sense of restless seeking pervades, as the speaker mines pop culture references, religious symbols, and political upheaval to highlight the tension between private longing and communal forces. Over time, the voice ascends from grounded, everyday scenes into cosmic terrain, exploring constellations and ancient archetypes. Throughout the collection, poems continuously dismantle and rebuild reality, culminating in a final resonance that challenges conventional boundaries of origin and belonging.
Jack Saebyok Jung studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), which received the Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2020. His poetry and translations have appeared in Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, BOMB Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Chicago Review, The Margins, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, and other publications. A recipient of the 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, his translation of Kim Hyesoon’s hybrid collection Thus Spoke Lady No is forthcoming from Ecco Press in early 2026. He currently teaches at Davidson College.
Larks, Han VanderHart
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Publication Date: March 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, existential and domestic, tender while full of sharp grief and documentation. Circling genealogies of silence and harm in a southern family, Larks centers on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. In a landscape inhabited as much by farm animals (cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens) as by the family, the lyric poem parses and articulates the self’s history—from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. A work of poetic memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry. The answer is a resounding yes.
Han VanderHart holds a PhD from Duke University and is the author of What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hands Like Birds (Ethel Press, 2019). They have published in the Kenyon Review, the American Poetry Review, and AGNI. VanderHart also hosts the Of Poetry Podcast and coedits River River Books.
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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.