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.
We (the People of the United States), Joshua Bennett
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: March 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
We (The People of The United States) is a book-length poem made to the measure of the modern world. Composed of 55 sections, it features a breathtaking range of characters and concerns: The Beach Boys, Gwendolyn Brooks, the invention of the typewriter, Zora Neale Hurston, Sun Ra, life on Mars, Robert Frost, experimental physics, The Jackson 5. Throughout the collection, Bennett summons Virgil’s Georgics as a lens through which to not only tell the story of his family, but a much larger one about the “form of the American mind,” our relationship to the natural world, and the pursuit of a dignified, abundant life. Published the year of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is a collection that is right on time. One that calls us, as Langston Hughes once did, toward a future America that is not yet here, “and yet must be.”
Dr. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a professor of literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.
Local Heroes, David Tucker
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Publication Date: March 17, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
“David Tucker celebrates the incandescence of the every day, and raises the ordinary to art— a telephone as quiet as an heirloom, the stillness tended like wheat— even as he mourns the quickness of time passing. There are gems on every page, in every line, in poems full of pathos and humor and longing. And always, the last words linger, still shimmering with a reverence for life amidst all the losses.” —Amy Nutt, Pulitzer Prize winning author
This is David Tucker’s third collection of poems. His first book, Late for Work, won the Bakeless Poetry Prize, selected by Philip Levine, and was published by Houghton Mifflin. He also won a national chapbook contest held by Slapering Hol Press, for Days When Nothing Happens. He was awarded a Witter Bynner Fellowship by the Library of Congress, selected by Donald Hall. He studied under Robert Hayden at the University of Michigan. Tucker’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, North American Review, Lascaux Review, Narrative, Southern Humanities.
All of Us Hidden, Joanna Streetly
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2026
Format: Paperback
Six years ago, Joanna’s Streetly’s two stepsons and their boat disappeared into the ocean on an eerily calm night, barely 200 feet from Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, BC. All of Us Hidden begins with poems that inhabit Tla-o-qui-aht traditional territory, the remote summer whaling islet where Streetly lived for several years with her former partner and stepsons. In the aftermath of the boys’ disappearance, she returns to the island to document how both she and the island might have changed. Streetly’ s poetry ripples out beyond location and loss, into a broader investigation of time’ s capricious shaping and re-shaping of children, parents, Earth and the self.
Joanna Streetly is the author of five books. Her work is published in The Best Canadian Essays 2017 (Tightrope Books, 2017) and Best Canadian Poetry 2024 (Biblioasis, 2024). She is the winner of the 2023 FBCW Literary Contest Poetry Award, has been short-listed for the Van Isle Collective Prize, and The Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul award for outstanding travel writing as well as long-listed for the Canada Writes Creative Non-fiction Prize. She has lived in the unceded territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht for over thirty years and was the inaugural Tofino Poet Laureate from 2018 to 2020.
Rush of Wingspan, Eleonore Schönmaier
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: March 17, 2026
Format: Paperback
He’s an organist / and she’s a northern // nurse: she mends / the broken / bones of gold // miners / when their sky / falls in. Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems. Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier’s boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazil Say performs his Black Earth. Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, waterthrushes, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier’s focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.
Eleonore Schönmaier is the internationally translated, award-winning author of Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete, Dust Blown Side of the Journey, and Wavelengths of Your Song. She divides her time between Nova Scotia and coastal Europe.
Empties, Neil Surkan
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: March 17, 2026
Format: Paperback
Yes it is both river and sea / yes they mingle together here / yes one empties for the other / yes it tastes like tears In a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan’s third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in? Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan’s speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone’s ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities – empty bottles, broken pots and cups – summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope. These are poems that teach endurance “in the face of all that won’t / be saved” while still finding much in the world “to cherish / as it brinks.” In direness, there is also awe: one mustn’t forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.
Neil Surkan is the author of two other books of poetry, Unbecoming and On High, as well as the chapbooks Die Workbook, Ruin, Their Queer Tenderness, and Super, Natural. He is the poet laureate of Nanaimo, BC.
An Inventory of Almost Everything, Elizabeth Marie Young
Publisher: Subpress
Publication Date: March 20, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Young’s much-anticipated second poetry collection, the list form allows for the poetic embrace of a bewildering world that cannot be comprehended but can be endlessly explored as a catalogue of terrors, treasures and marvels. The poems in An Inventory of Almost Everything move back and forth, like the list form itself, between mundane reality and extravagant fantasy. They engage the form’s trajectory from Babylonian Star Catalogues to Buzzfeed’s “24 Tumblr Posts That Are Just Kind Of Weirdly Pure”. Here, the built-in rigidity of the form serves as a counterpoint to explorations of what is uncontainable and incomprehensible – consciousness, eroticism, spirituality. The list’s incantatory force is harnessed to examine and resist the “powers” that attempt to contain and control contemporary bodies and minds: religion, science, technology, politics and the pervasive discourse of self-optimization.
Elizabeth Marie Young is a Boston-based poet and educator. She spent a decade as a professor of ancient Greek and Roman languages and literature and has published widely on the poetry and culture of ancient Rome. Her first book of poems, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize, won the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books. She is also the author of Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome, a book about the ancient Roman understanding of lyric translation and literary creativity. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and the Squire Foundation. Her poems have recently appeared in journals including The Chicago Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Sugar House Review.
Razor Zigzag, Daniel Bouchard
Publisher: Subpress
Publication Date: March 20, 2026
Format: Paperback
Daniel Bouchard’s Razor Zigzag contains the Pleiades and the presidents, history and space. His writing traces the emotive impact of a walk home from the springs of historical discovery, asking not why we were never told things about ourselves throughout history’s recurrent nightmares, rather why do we often fail to seek that knowledge. We are trapped in a culture of our own making, our complicity with the banal and the bloodshed. Learning from Robert Duncan and Muriel Rukeyser, Razor Zigzag adds the aspect of irreverence to the faces of ongoing disaster. In this astounding collection, Bouchard charts a territory of forgotten narratives: from the lost works of early American poets, to the faded memory of the state’s victims, to the publishing ethics of outer space. This is the manifesto of a new community library: a wolf spider in the mailbox; there are bats in drive-in’s projector light; national politics as a slop of self-enrichment and corruption, and the rise of America’s secret police. This poetry lays out a curriculum for self-examination, calling for new notions of heritage, reclaimed from the right-wing, and charted through books, film, and music. The mole on the sidewalk and the June bug at the screen invite you to come along.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/17 and 3/23 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.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.
“Trying to conjure a word sound that doesn’t exist in English creates a scaffolding for poetic reconstruction of the extractive colonial violence that rendered the phooti karpas cotton extinct.” Read three poems by Sophia Naz, our six biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Sun Sonata.”