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 Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
To whom do we belong, and at what cost? Patrycja Humienik’s debut poetry collection, We Contain Landscapes, is haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging. Bringing music and rich sensory detail to the page, these poems attend to the inextricable link between our bodies and the land. Over six ruminative and lush sections, they survey place and memory, both intergenerationally and through emotional bonds with other immigrant daughters.
Weaving in letters, innovative forms, and meditations on devotion, sexuality, and self-deceit, We Contain Landscapes introduces a speaker who “will not turn away from the ache of this world.” For every reader who also harbors a voracious longing to encounter infinite landscapes and ways of being, this incisive collection dreams toward a more expansive idea of kinship—of becoming beloved to one another and ourselves.
Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and performance artist. She has developed writing + movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Arts+Literature Laboratory, Northwest Film Forum, in prisons, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at UW-Madison, she serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for the Community Anthologies project. Patrycja grew up in Evanston, Illinois, and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Variations in Blue, Adela Najarro
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in Variations in Blue cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.
Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard’s artwork. The 2024 Int’l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow. She currently resides off the coast near Santa Cruz, CA.
Wrong Winds, Ahmad Almallah
Publisher: Fonograf Editions
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Ahmad Almallah’s third collection considers the impossible task of being a Palestinian in the world today. When genocide is the question, can the answer be anything but wrong?
In Wrong Winds, written during the first months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Palestinian-American poet Ahmad Almallah converses with the screams echoing throughout the West. Traversing European cities, Almallah encounters the impossibility of being a Palestinian, left alone in a world full of sympathizers and enemies. Through a continuous unsettling of words and places, considering the broken voices of Western poetry (Eliot, Lorca, Celan among others), the poems in Wrong Winds discover the world again and form an impossible dialogue with the dead and dying.
Ahmad Almallah grew up in Bethlehem, Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia where he is an artist-in-residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book of poems, Bitter English, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press in 2019. His second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his sequence of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads Will Lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among others.
In the Bone-Cracking Cold, M. Bartley Seigel
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region’s mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like “Beach Glass” highlight Seigel’s lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel’s poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.
M. Bartley Seigel is a former poet laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His poetry frequently appears in literary journals such as Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, The Fourth River, and THRUSH. He lives with his family on the Keweenaw Peninsula, Ojibwe homelands and Treaty of 1842 territory, where he teaches at Michigan Technological University.
The Horizon Never Forgets, Steven T. Moore
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
James Baldwin, author and civil rights activist, stated that to be Black in America and relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. In this audacious debut poetry collection, The Horizon Never Forgets, Steven Moore offers us drops of honey in the tender moments we sometimes experience, especially a mother’s love. But also, drops of fire and rage when he writes about being Black, when the world ignores the pain and refuses to address the ongoing struggle to live while bearing the weight of racism. Readers feel the rage, the burn, the fury of the Black experience, and the urgency for change-but also the uplift and hope that still reside within love’s possibilities.
Steven Moore often says that his mother is the wellspring of his poetry. She read and recited poetry to him before his birth and through his growing-up years in locales as varied as Central America and Gurnee, Illinois. Moore received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from the University of Nebraska. The recipient of several teaching and scholarly awards, he is a university professor of English who often teaches poetry workshops and a class called Bon Appétit: Savoring Poetry & Good Cooking. While writing poetry, he immerses himself in jazz, the blues, and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Published widely in literary journals, he is also a bestselling children’s author and the author of two scholarly books examining Black rage.
Making a Living, Rosalie Moffett
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?” probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism—it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.
Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away—on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.
Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, which won the National Poetry Series Prize and was listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She lives in Evansville, Indiana, where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.
Scream / Queen, CD Eskilson
Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: March 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Scream / Queen, CD Eskilson’s debut poetry collection, examines queerness, mental illness, and transgender identity through the lens of thrillers and B movies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Michael Myers, and the Headless Horseman are just a few of the fright-film villains and monsters that populate this book.
Eskilson’s formally innovative poems document how a body—a nonbinary transgender body, a chronically ill body, a body carrying trauma—can be understood, accepted, and healed even in a violent sociopolitical climate. Drawing on the language and images of horror cinema, the poems’ speakers find strength and the means to survive both family legacy and the pain inflicted on them: “I want to behemoth, be the biggest / violence in the galaxy,” says one who thinks about Godzilla and dreams of “learning how to roar.”
Though an atmosphere of trans panic and state legislation against trans bodies pervades the book, Scream / Queen ultimately conjures a world of hope and tenderness through connection and care. It celebrates all the body’s possibilities: the glorious and the monstrous. As a werewolf in the book says, “I kiss the moon; it took so long / to get here.”
CD Eskilson is a trans-nonbinary poet and translator. They are a recipient of the C.D. Wright / Academy of American Poets Prize, and their work appears in Kenyon Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Offing, Passages North, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. They were once in a punk band.
Today’s Morning Vocabulary, Yoo Heekyung, Stine Su Yon An (Tr.)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: March 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
Yoo writes poems that invite readers to reflect upon daily sorrows, while also illuminating single moments full of strange and arresting images that suggest the passage of time—a hardened piece of bread, a train about to arrive, a crumpled piece of paper. This debut collection in English chronicles contemporary life in a minor key where loneliness and existential ghosts thread the pieces. But Yoo’s title also points to his fascination with language, and how each day offers chances to understand new vocabularies and new meanings—of words, of living.
Yoo Heekyung is an acclaimed younger South Korean poet, playwright, and essayist who also runs Wit N Cynical, a poetry bookstore and project space in Seoul. He is the author of several collections of poetry and prose that query subjects such as photography, poetry, stories, presence and absence, and clouds. Yoo is a recipient of the Hyundae Munhak Literary Award (2020) and the Gosan New Writer Award (2019).
Stine An is a poet and translator based in New York City. She received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and an NEA Translation Fellowship for her translations of Yoo Heekyung. Her work has appeared in Best Literary Translations 2024, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, Words Without Borders, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
Goat-Footed Gods, Kathleen Driskell
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: March 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
In her sixth collection Goat-Footed Gods, award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the infamous Goatman of Pope Lick, identified by The Washington Post as one of the deadliest cryptids in America. The Goatman or Pope Lick Monster, a legendary creature long rumored to roam the woods around Driskell’s Kentucky home, is alleged to have caused the deaths of at least five young people at Pope Lick Trestle, a railroad bridge with a ninety-foot drop at its center. The Goatman lyrics are braided with poems about Driskell’s child’s traumatic injury from a fall. Always at the heart of Driskell’s poetry is her insistence that the path to the sacred is found not through the doctrine of ancient gods, but in walking clear-eyed through the dark woods of our historical past and exploring the never-ending wonder of the natural world.
Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher, Kathleen Driskell is the author of five collections of poetry. Her poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, River Teeth, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Appalachian Review, and other literary magazines. She is chair of the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville.
Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems, Jonathan Aaron
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: March 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
A poem uses words to try to get at what can’t be put into words. The best poems remain just out of reach; something in or about them remains mysterious. A poem itself is an inquiry or a search, that is never finished, never fulfilled. As Wislawa Szymborska said, “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
Jonathan Aaron is the author of three previous books of poems, including Second Sight, Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. His poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Raritan, among others, and they have been included five times in Best American Poetry. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Angel Sharpening Its Beak, Michael McGriff
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: March 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Angel Sharpening its Beak, Michael McGriff’s fifth collection, searches for meaning at the intersection of surrealism, place, and poverty in rural America. From long sequences to dense enigmatic sketches, the poems gathered here honor the inner lives and daily encounters of those surviving, working, and seeking joy at the margins of contemporary life.
Michael McGriff is the author of five poetry collections, including Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. His other books include the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (coauthored with J.M. Tyree); an edition of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire; and a translation of Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola. He co-directs the creative writing program at the University of Idaho.
Perishable, Stelios Mormoris
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: March 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Perishable, Stelios Mormoris asks incisive questions about the nature of human connection: Where does memory live—in the body, in the mind, or elsewhere? What happens when the objects that surround us—a wedding ring, an empty purse, a harp—reveal necessary truths about ourselves and those we love? As the book unfolds, lush sensory details and unmatched lyricism are brought to bear on these lingering concerns in a style as neoclassical as it is contemporary. In poems that radiate with intelligence, Mormoris combines understated elegance with finely tuned music and evocative imagery.
Stelios Mormoris is a resident of Boston and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, who lived in Paris most of his life, working as an executive in the beauty industry. Stelios is currently chief executive officer of Scent Beauty, Inc. He has held positions on the boards of the French Cultural Center of Boston, ACT-UP, Historic New England, and the Fragrance Foundation.
Jalousie, Allyson Paty
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: March 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
The “I-centered,” first person, yet experimental poems in Jalousie explore the ways in which expression of the deeply personal experience is both dictated to and altered by rigid societal expectations. The speaker of these highly personal poems can’t help but view language as a historical artifact, the DNA of past worlds, as these poems delve into the complexities of sorting out one’s individual identity amid broader cultural contexts. Paty’s poems attempt to connect the personal, private, intimate persona with elements that are always external—external not only to this poet but to every person.
These poems seek to capture fleeting moments of personal connection despite the impossibility of language, the societal dictates of gender roles, the pressures of making a living, the inexorable march of time, and the bewildering strangeness of architectural spaces. At the heart of this collection is “Premise,” an extensive poem that weaves in detours through the history of New York City, themes of discard, references to Bruegel’s “Wedding Dance,” and discussions on representation and memory. The book also contains three full-color illustrations which augment the poet’s themes and concerns.
Allyson Paty is the author of the chapbooks Five O’Clock on the Shore, Score Poems, and The Further Away. Recent publications include poems in Denver Quarterly’s FIVES, Poetry, The Recluce, Yale Review, and nonfiction in The Baffler. A 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and a participant in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2017–18 Workspace Program, Paty is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press, works at NYU Gallatin, and photographs her garbage @trash_days on Instagram.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/18 and 3/24 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”
Dancing With the Dead: On Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
“Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook, Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance.”
Read three poems by poet Wendell Hawken, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “First Hurt”.
Book Excerpt: Slow Chalk by Elaine Equi
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Slow Chalk” from Out of the Blank by Elaine Equi, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: Caro M. by Angela Siew
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2025, “Caro M.” from Coming Home by Angela Siew, along with a few words from the poet.
Read four poems by poet Natalie Marino, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue.
A Conversation with Kate Colby
Poet Kate Colby discusses her latest chapbook, ThingKing, her creative writing practices, and her penchant for poetry chapbooks with PCR Editor Aiden Hunt in this interview piece.
Read three poems by poet Adele Ross, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Heavy Water”.
Book Excerpt: The Self-Combed Woman by Laynie Browne
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2025, “The Self-Combed Woman” from Apprentice to a Breathing Hand by Laynie Browne, along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: To Let Go by Deirdre Garr Johns
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2025, “To Let Go” from Fallen Love by Deirdre Garr Johns, along with a few words from the poet.
Read four poems by poet Sarena Tien, our sixth biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Mother Tongue”.
Life’s Lazy River Journey: On Tributaries by Aspen Everett
“A thread of adulation for matriarchal spirituality and the lifegiving value of water runs through the collection. Its first poem pays homage to [Toni] Morrison.” Read the full chapbook review by Shelli Rottschafer.
Three Poems by Jeanne Bamforth
Read three poems by poet Jeanne Bamforth, our seventh and final biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “New Course”.