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.
Bees, and After, John Liles
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
For John Liles, science and the natural world form a route into the workings of love, of grief, and of joy in the thrum of life. Judge Rae Armantrout calls his poems “dense, sonically gorgeous studies of various natural things and creatures, including light, bees, minerals, shellfish and crabs, insects, and the workings (and failure) of the heart.” Written under the shadow of our changing climate, Liles’s poems are tender elegies but also praise-songs for the continual unfolding richness of the world. Writes Liles, “oh unending animal, / you go where / the light goes.”
John Liles is a poet, science writer, and living mammal. His chapbook Following the dog down was the recipient of the Omnidawn Chapbook Prize. He lives in Fort Bragg, CA.
Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.
boy maybe, W. J. Lofton
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
W. J. Lofton writes vivid, accessible poems that channel the energy, urgency, ambitions, joys, and sorrows of a young Black queer artist. They are about love and flirtation, sweet tea and hot sauce, God and family, life and death, police brutality and extrajudicial killings. His verses honor some of the young lives extinguished by these killings—Breonna Taylor, Kendrick Johnson, Ahmaud Arbery. He also pays tribute to some of the towering figures of Black culture who have come before him—Richard Pryor, Assata Shakur. His style is endlessly propulsive, informed by some of the Harlem Renaissance greats—Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks—but also transforming that rich tradition for the present day.
W. J. Lofton, a Chicago-born poet and multimodal artist, is the author of A Garden for Black Boys Between the Stages of Soil and Stardust. His work explores the intersections of race, class, and gender while focusing on Black queer men’s attempts at intimacy and the tensions and wonders of boyhood. Lofton has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Emory University. A recipient of Ava DuVernay’s LEAP Grant, his work has appeared in TIME, wildness, Obsidian, and Scalawag. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he co-curates Rebellion: A Writing Salon.
The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science, Jessy Randall
Publisher: Goldsmiths Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Women have always worked in technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. Sometimes they made important discoveries and breakthroughs; sometimes they simply managed to exist and persist despite endless obstacles and a criminal lack of acknowledgment. Carefully researched, thoughtful, pitch perfect and precise, these poems about historical women scientists are hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time.
There are women here whose names you may know (Rachel Carson, Mae Jemison, Hedy Lamarr, Ada Lovelace, Beatrix Potter) and others you probably don’t (Tapputi-Belatekallim, June Bacon-Bercey, Eugenie Clark, Beatrice Medicine, Gladys West). Randall has a fine-tuned knack for metaphor and plain language, and her poetry unpicks injustice alongside complex scientific ideas. If you’ve seen Randall’s poems in Scientific American, Analog, or Asimov’s Science Fiction, you may already have been drawn into these extraordinary stories. Illustrated with portraits by NASA artist Kristin DiVona, these poems will resonate with scientists, feminists, thinkers, learners, philosophers, poets, and truth-seekers young, old and everywhere in between.
Jessy Randall is the author of the poetry collections Mathematics for Ladies (2022), How to Tell If You Are Human (2018), Suicide Hotline Hold Music (2016), There Was an Old Woman (2015), Injecting Dreams into Cows (2012), and A Day in Boyland (2007), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, McSweeney’s, Nature, and Scientific American.
Unravel, Tolu Oloruntoba
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.
Tolu Oloruntoba was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow.
Forecast: Pretty Bleak, Chris Bailey
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Confessional, candid, and insightful, Forecast: Pretty Bleak looks at life in rural PEI. These poems explore climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and favorable winds tomorrow.
Chris Bailey is a graphic designer and commercial fisherman from Prince Edward Island. He holds a MFA Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Chris’ writing has appeared in Grain, Brick, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2025, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, is available from Nightwood Editions. His piece, Fisherman’s Repose, was a winner of the 2022 BMO 1stArt! Award. Forecast: Pretty Bleak is his second poetry collection.
What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil’ Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.
Therí Alyce Pickens is Charles A. Dana Professor of English and Africana at Bates College and author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, also published by Duke University Press, and New Body Politics: Narrating Arab and Black Identity in the Contemporary United States.
The Museum of Unnatural Histories, Annie Wenstrup
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
This extraordinary debut poetry collection by Dena’ina poet Annie Wenstrup delicately parses personal history in the space of an imagined museum. Outside the museum, Ggugguyni (the Dena’ina Raven) and The Museum Curator collect discarded French fries, earrings, and secrets—or as the curator explains, together they curate moments of cataclysm. Inside the museum, their collection is displayed in installations that depict the imagined Indigenous body. Into this “distance between the learning and the telling,” Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu’a, her own interpretive text. At the heart of the sukdu’a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker’s story to be heard. Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos. Meticulously refined and delicately crafted, they encourage the reader to “decide/who you must become.”
Annie Wenstrup held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center (Alaska office) supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from The CIRI Foundation, and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, Rachel Trousdale
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us.
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (2015). Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (2010).
antibody, Rebecca Salazar
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
antibody is a protest, a whisper network, a reclamation of agency, and a ritual for building a survivable world.
antibody mobilizes body horror as resistance, refusing to sanitize the atrocities of sexual violence or to silence its survivors. Challenging myths of “perfect” victimhood, this collection honours the messy, rageful, queer, witchy, disabled, and kinky grief work of enduring trauma and learning to want to live.
Rebecca Salazar (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
More Songs the Radio Won’t Play, Stan Rogal
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The idea for More Songs the Radio Won’t Play came to Stan Rogal while he listened to singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards’s “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like.” In these poems, he takes formerly “popular” tunes (from various genres) and transforms them. Self-referentiality; mashups of the erudite and the profane; allusions to other arts and sciences; the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts; problematic snippets of philosophy and literary theory, quotes, and bastardizations; deploying non- or a-poetical language to challenge notions of how a poem should work; sampling; and off-kilter humor work together to update Rogal’s playlist for a present-day audience.
While his poems unavoidably serve to comment on the world today, Rogal resists a central message; the true emphasis of this collection is on the process of creation. It’s not the destination but the journey that is of significance. Not mere cover versions, not exactly parodies (though parodic), these poems are redactions, mutations, Frankensteins … they resemble the original — somewhat — yet are also grossly different. And it’s Rogal’s sincere hope that the originating artists, like his readers, accept these burnt offerings as tributes.
Born in Vancouver, and now living in Toronto, Stan Rogal is the author of 27 books, including eight novels, seven story collections, and 12 poetry collections. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Rogal is also a produced playwright and the former coordinator of Toronto’s popular Idler Pub Reading Series.
total, Aisha Sasha John
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John.
Aisha Sasha John is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha’s video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal.
The Seated Woman, Clémence Dumas-Côté, E. S. Taillon (Tr.)
Publisher: Arachnide Editions
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Silent, nailed to her chair, the seated woman writes. She cracks. The poems fidget, slip their fingers: they seek to enter. Perched on her shoulder, the poems whisper in her ear. She captures their messages: “I love the sacred contortions you offer me.” The poems protest: “You’re squeezing us too hard: careful, pet.”
More than descriptors, the words behave as commands or moves in a game—and the voice of the seated woman rises to play.
Clémence Dumas-Côté was born in Montreal in 1986. She studied acting at the National Theatre School of Canada and holds a master’s degree in creative writing. She is the author of two poetry books, L’alphabet du don (2017) and La femme assise (2019), and the novel Glu (2022).
E. S. Taillon is a queer, neurodivergent writer and the former managing editor at PRISM international magazine. They hold a master’s degree in French literature from the University of Toronto and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. They have published prose in Déraciné and filling Station, and poetry in CV2, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Augur Magazine. Their first literary translation, Scenes from the Underground, was shortlisted for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers.
The End of Childhood, Wayne Miller
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hues to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.”
The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.
Wayne Miller’s books of poetry include Only the Senses Sleep, The Book of Props, The City, Our City, Post-, and We the Jury. His awards include a William Carlos Williams Award, two Colorado Book Awards, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six individual awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books from Albanian—most recently Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac, shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century. He lives in Denver, where he co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, and edits Copper Nickel.
True Believer, Jeff Kass
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
Through lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass’s poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer—attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son’s baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass’s understanding of his own identity.
An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers, True Believer is a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can’t be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.
Jeff Kass teaches Tenth Grade English and Creative Writing in Ann Arbor MI. He’s the award-winning author of Knuckleheads, 2011’s Independent Publishers Best Short Fiction Collection of 2011 as well as two full-length poetry collections, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book. He has taught poetry classes and workshops to thousands of students and is a recipient of a prestigious 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship for writers who teach in public schools.
Between Latitudes, Michelle Latvala
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: March 26, 2025
Format: Paperback
Between Latitudes, Michelle Latvala’s remarkable debut collection of poetry, is rooted in both the practice of forging a life in the boreal forest of Alaska and finding footing in contemporary California. The collection provides a window into our complex human experience through Latvala’s vast emotional and poetic range as she explores interior and exterior lives across generations, latitude lines, and a changing climate.
Michelle Latvala put down roots in Alaska two decades ago, though her Finnish ancestors shared the same circumpolar boreal forest for centuries. Her poems are regularly featured in print, audio, and video—most recently in Kerning: A Space for Words, Alaska’s End-of-the-Road podcast, and Irene Young’s video poetry series. Michelle served as Executive Director of Spirit Rock Meditation Center for a decade, facilitates programs through poet David Whyte’s Institute for Conversational Leadership, and recently founded Insight Outside, incubating remote community-based programs that combine meditation, writing, and wilderness. Michelle migrates thoughtfully with her beloveds between her responsibilities in the forests of eastern Alaska and northern California. Between Latitudes is her first book. She can be found at www.michellelatvala.com.
Some Half-Human Creature Thing, Paul Edward Costa
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Publication Date: March 27, 2025
Format: Paperback
An electrifying collection from Mississauga’ s former Poet Laureate Paul Edward Costa’ s Some Half-Human Creature Thing is a fearless exploration of the fractured self. With striking psychological honesty, Costa’ s poetry navigates fear, absurdity, and wonder, shifting between intimate reflections and surreal landscapes. From existential dread to unexpected beauty, this collection pulses with dark humour, sharp insight, and a restless search for meaning. Prepare to be unsettled, intrigued, and ultimately transformed by Costa’ s evocative vision.
Paul Edward Costa held the position of Poet Laureate for the City of Mississauga from 2019-2021. He has an enormous reputation as a writer, spoken word artist and teacher and has featured at many poetry readings. He has published over 60 poems and stories in literary journals and in 2019 he received the Mississauga Arts Council 2019 MARTY Award for Emerging Literary Arts. Paul lives in Mississauga and is a teacher in a local high school.
Most of the Stars: An American Song, Pietro Federico, John Poch (Tr)
Publisher: St. Augustines Press
Publication Date: March 31, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The muse of Pietro Federico’s most recent collection of poems, La Maggioranza delle Stelle (Most of the Stars), is the United States of America, her people and landscapes. In fifty poems (one for each state), Federico plumbs the depths of the historic, geographic, political, emotional, psychological, and metaphysical realms through a variety of voices of these fifty states. Translated from Italian into English by the author with American poet John Poch, this book is unlike any other collection of poems. Federico is fascinated by the American spirit, to use the words of Giancarlo Pontiggia, “an America made up of stories as raw, rough, endless and inconclusive as the immense landscapes in which they took place.”
In Most of the Stars the linguistic power of the Italian literary tradition and the contemporary vernacular combine to articulate an idiosyncratic understanding of the New World—the breadth of its cities, its towns, its frontiers and interiors. Federico’s deeply spiritual understanding of our own American personalities and histories offers us a gift of beautiful objectivity. Students of poetry, linguistics, and cultural anthropology will be grateful to Federico and Poch for the wonder offered in this bilingual collection.
Pietro Federico was born in Bologna, Italy in 1980, and currently lives in Rome. Writer, copywriter, story editor and professional translator, his poetry books are: Non nulla (2003, Ibiskos Editore, Empoli) winner of the prize “Il Fiore” Pistoia 2003; Mare Aperto (Nino Aragno Editore, Turin, 2015) winner of the Subiaco Award 2015 and Ceppo Award 2017; La maggioranza delle stelle – Canto Americano (Edizioni Ensemble, Rome, 2020).
John Poch’s poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Agni, and many other magazines. His most recent collection of poems is Texases (WordFarm 2019). He is the series editor of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and he recently edited the collection, Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South (TTU Press 2020). His first book of criticism, God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination was published by St. Augustine’s Press (2022). He teaches at Grace College in Indiana.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/25 and 3/31 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”.