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.
Night Owl, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In her latest poetry collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil plumbs the depths of nighttime, crafting a series of nocturnes that explore the magic, sensuality, and life that emerge as the rest of the world goes to bed.
Night Owl navigates questions and concerns for the environment that envelops us. It meditates on our connections to family and beloveds, and explores our position within the broader beauty of the planet. Just as the night transforms how we see things, love in its many forms shifts our understanding of togetherness and the natural world. And these poems are deeply suffused with love—each an expression of Nezhukumatathil’s captivating responses to the animals, plants, and people who have her heart and enliven her world.
Night Owl presents a dazzling vision of nature that celebrates the beautiful noises and silences of this planet, as well as its many complications. Nezhukumatathil provides a singular contribution to writing on the natural world, calling on our sense of love—even in the face of increasing violence to one another and the environment—by focusing on the revolutionary impact of the dark.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times bestselling author of two illustrated collections of essays: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders, chosen as Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year and as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She has published four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade serving as the poetry editor for environmental magazines, first for Orion and then Sierra. A professor of English and creative writing for more than twenty-five years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi State Parks and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her family.
The Time of Falling Apart, Wendy Donawa
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
Without a traditional faith to navigate the horrors and wonders of life on earth, Wendy Donawa lingers with small beauties in a spiritual quest to keep love alive in a “darkening world.”
The speaker’s eyes are wide open on catastrophes of aging, illness and family strife. But early memories are idyllic, entangled in the tides and towns of Vancouver Island, grounded by the coast’s sensory world: “the tide’s pebbly click and shush / and crows cawing in the arbutus.”
As she ages, the speaker’s internal narrative expands to consider a wider world populated with casualties of colonizing desires, fuelled by competing ideologies and a destabilizing pandemic—the “time of falling apart.” Here are the social hells of racism, war, colonial violence and homelessness. Here are despair over a damaged earth and grief over nature’s destruction.
And yet, how not to notice when bees hum in the lavender, cyclamen gleams in December, and bears burrow in their marvellous, layered coats? When Bach blasts on the sound system, friends and cappuccinos are at hand, and, at the back of it all, there is always the unfathomable, glorious mystery of the cosmos.
Elegiac, meditative and unwaveringly kind, this collection is for anyone who has felt unable to reconcile the implacable passing of time, but determined to recognize love and beauty wherever they may be found.
Wendy Donawa left her natal Victoria as a young woman to settle in Barbados. She attended the University of the West Indies, taught college literature and became a curator at the Barbados Museum. Decades later, she returned to Victoria to complete her Ph.D., taught literature for several years and turned her focus to her first love, poetry. Her poetry collection, Thin Air of the Knowable (Brick Books, 2017), was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection, Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions (Frontenac House, 2021), launched with the Frontenac Quartet. The Time of Falling Apart is her third poetry collection. Her poems are published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Prairie Fire, Freefall, The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Room and others. She is a contributing editor with Arc Poetry Magazine and a board member with Planet Earth Poetry reading series. She writes a monthly review, “Unpacking the Poem,” celebrating the diversity and creativity of BC poets. She and her wife live gratefully on the unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen-speaking) Esquimalt and Songhees people, in Victoria, BC.
November, November, Isabella Wang
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
Dedicated as letters and long epistolary lyrics to those who are missing a loved one, November, November acknowledges poetry’s “palpitating vulnerable form,” and how sometimes a poem might be the only comfort that resides between silence and grief.
Isabella Wang’s second collection began as a tribute to the late Phyllis Webb, and was completed in the aftermath of Wang’s cancer diagnosis. The poems respond directly to Webb’s work and collapse the fine landscapes separating death and Wang’s own mortality. Over the course of treatment and “days [when] we don’t get to rewrite the history of our bodies,” the pace of Wang’s poetry slows down in the complicated recovery from cancer. Entering the cloudless silver of November days, her words tell a story of loss and illness, and her poems linger in the cold air, visible.
Isabella Wang is the author of Pebble Swing (Nightwood Editions, 2021), a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the chapbook On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). Among other recognitions, she has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award and Long Poem Contest, Minola Review’s Inaugural Poetry Contest, and was the youngest writer to be shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Wang’s poetry and prose have appeared in over thirty literary journals and five anthologies, most recently The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022). She collaborates with poetry in canada, and directs her own non-profit editing and mentorship program, Revise-Revision Street. She lives in New Westminster, BC.
Paper america: New & Selected Poems, Emmy Perez
Publisher: TCU Press
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez gives lyrical witness to the Texas–Mexico border in Paper america, a collection of precious lines of poetry, testaments to resilience and hope.
Paper america: New & Selected Poems gathers the poetic vision of Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez, a voice rooted in the landscapes and communities of the Texas–Mexico border.
Drawing from her acclaimed collections Solstice and With the River on Our Face, alongside powerful new work, Pérez offers poems that confront the realities of immigration, border walls, cultural invisibility, and violence, while celebrating resilience, motherhood, and the enduring ties of family and heritage.
Writing from McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley, Pérez continues the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chicana/Latina writers who turned la frontera into a literary ground of strength and survival. Whether she is memorializing the children of Uvalde, reflecting on the river that sustains border communities, or capturing everyday encounters in classrooms and neighborhoods, her lines of poetry are precious—each one crafted with compassion, clarity, and urgency.
With Whitmanesque scope yet firmly grounded in Mexican American identity and borderlands experience, Pérez’s poetry bridges the personal and the political, reminding readers of the power of words to bear witness, resist injustice, and cultivate hope. Paper america is both an introduction to one of Texas’s most vital poets and a career-spanning testament to the necessity of art in difficult times.
Emmy Pérez, the 2020 Texas Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of With the River on Our Face and Solstice. A Chicana poet and professor based in McAllen, Texas, she has dedicated her life to uplifting the voices of the Rio Grande Valley and borderlands communities. Her work blends lyrical beauty with social witness, honoring Mexican American heritage, the landscapes of la frontera, and the lived realities of families too often rendered invisible. Frequently compared to Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Langston Hughes, Pérez is known for a powerful poetic voice that bridges activism and artistry.
Cold Fire, David Mason
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Hardcover
David Mason’s poetry circles the globe. The urgent and beautiful poems of his new book, Cold Fire, have settings in Australia, India, Greece, Turkey and the American West. A title sequence takes up the Aboriginal practice of cool burning for fire mitigation, and moves to the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes of Mason’s childhood home in the Pacific Northwest—fires of creation and destruction. Here the dream life of art is pitched against human conflict. Here we have poems of family life, aging, and a deep conversation with history and myth. This is a book of light, love, and powerful remembrance from the edge of the world.
Born and raised in Bellingham, Washington, David Mason has lived all over the world. His verse novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007 (2nd ed. 2010), and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. It was also featured on the PBS News Hour and won the Colorado Book Award. Mason’s memoir, News from the Village, appeared in 2010. Mason has written many essay collections and also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies. His own work can be found in Best American Poetry, The Penguin Book of 20th Century American Poetry, and others. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, Mason served as poet laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, and taught at Colorado College. Mason lives in Tasmania, the island state of Australia.
if: prey, then: huntress, Christina Shah
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
From a poet working in heavy industry comes an eclectic collection of observations and experiences as a woman on the road and out in the field in traditionally male-dominated environments. if: prey, then: huntress is an exploration of vulnerability, agency and existential homelessness, replete with portraits of beer drinkers and hellraisers and urban landscapes. These poems illuminate the beauty and truth amid the concrete, twisted metal and scraped knuckles.
At a time when many countries are reimagining their resource-based economies, Shah’s poems position her as a wandering eulogist for old industrial ways of knowing—and for their greying practitioners in the mines, paper mills, shipyards and scrapyards that undergird modern life. The reader is invited into a world that, like the breath, is both dying and being born every minute.
Christina Shah lives in New Westminster and works in heavy industry, where she drinks from the firehose of knowledge. Her poetry has appeared in numerous Canadian literary journals. Her work has been shortlisted for the Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2023. She is one-fifth of the Harbour Centre 5 poetry collective, whose chapbook, Brine, was released in 2022. Her first video poem, “rig veda” (in collaboration with videographer Mark Mushet), was translated into Spanish and screened internationally. rig veda, her first solo chapbook (Anstruther Press), received an honourable mention for the bpNichol Chapbook Award in 2024. if: prey, then: huntress is her first full-length poetry collection.
I Would Like to Say Thank You, Joseph Dandurand
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Prolific Kwantlen writer Joseph Dandurand offers his latest poetry collection, following The Punishment and The East Side of It All, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Building on his legacy as a skilled storyteller, Dandurand continues to write about trauma, love, grief and forgiveness. These poems are about the streets, the East Side, self-pity, spirits and Dandurand’s people, the Kwantlen. As the jury of the 2022 Latner Writers’ Trust Award wrote, “his quotidian reflections read like parables, with startling economy.” After putting this collection down, don’t be surprised to find yourself saying “thank you,” too.
Joseph Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation, located on the Fraser River about twenty minutes east of Vancouver, BC. He resides there with his three children. Dandurand is the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Centre and the author of several children’s stories and books of poetry including The East Side of It All (Nightwood Editions, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2021, Dandurand received the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
Pearl, George Bowering
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
The making of a poem is like the making of a pearl – you take something gritty and create a jewel. George Bowering’s final book of poetry, Pearl, follows this impulse, sprawling in search of the next glimmering insight, tugging at different threads with a multifarious large-heartedness. Pearl centres around a promise Bowering made to himself that one day he would write a poem about his mother, Pearl Bowering – a hillbilly, athlete, and champion bridge player. This promised poem anchors a book about the grit of life and what poetry can make from it. Touching, ribald, and cheeky, Pearl reflects on a life well-lived and well-written.
George Bowering, Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, is a major Canadian literary figure and one of the country’s most prolific authors, having written more than one hundred books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His texts have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian. A founder of the influential poetry journal TISH, Bowering went on to become a distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, and historian and a tireless supporter of fellow writers. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the BC Book Prize, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Bowering is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and has also been awarded the Order of British Columbia and the British Columbia Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. The George Bowering Collection and Reading Room at UBC Rare Books and Special Collections is scheduled to open in 2026.
Be Easy: New and Selected Poems, Adrian Matejka
Publisher: Liveright
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Hardcover
Revered for his “patient, clever, controlled, [and] visionary” (Hanif Abdurraquib) poems, Adrian Matejka has been a mainstay of contemporary American poetry for over two decades. Gathering hits from six extraordinary collections, Be Easy showcases his singular sonics and narrative vision in fresh, dynamic poems that lyrically complicate place, race, and identity.
Traversing the Midwest from Indianapolis to Chicago, new poems explore the twitchy unease of unintentional migration and economic instability as the country faces a future every bit as unsettling and circus-like as parking lot carnivals of the poet’s childhood. Selections from Mixology (2008)—“a post-soul tour de force” (Kevin Young)—reverberate with the rhythm of ’80s hip-hop, while “revelatory” (Gabrielle Calvocoressi) odes from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist The Big Smoke (2013) reimagine the legacy of prizefighter Jack Johnson and transcendent poems from Map to the Stars (2017) brim with cosmic jazz.
Matejka’s smooth lyricism flows into a singular, indispensable collection of memories lost and found again. Tracing the continuum of a “rocket-powered” (Campbell McGrath) writer, Be Easy affirms Matejka as one of the most exciting voices of our time.
Adrian Matejka is the author of six poetry collections and the graphic novel Last on His Feet. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, served as the poet laureate of the state of Indiana from 2018–2019, and is editor–in–chief of Poetry magazine. He lives in Chicago.
Spruce to Cedar, Lasänmą
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
Set in the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Vancouver, Lasänmą’s debut poetry collection takes the reader from her childhood into adulthood by sharing both warm and harrowing memories as they shaped her. The poems follow a young woman discovering the healing of being alone and of finding identity through culture as well as in isolation. Using English, Southern Tutchone, and Dene, the fragile but courageous speaker yearns for the comforts of childhood, yet at the same time looks squarely both at the difficulties of the past and the possibilities of the future. Unashamed, she bares it all.
Lasänmą (she/her) was raised in Haines Junction, Yukon and is a member of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nation. Her English name is Mariah MacDonald, and she is a part of the Wolf Clan. Mariah lived in Haines Junction and Whitehorse before moving to Vancouver at the age of twenty-one, where she studied at the University of British Columbia (located on the unceded Territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations). Spruce to Cedar is Lasänmą’s first published work as an author.
The book of destructions, Margarita Vélez Verbel, María Fernanda Del Castillo Sucerquia (tr.)
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In The Book of Destructions, Margarita Vélez Verbel dismantles the foundations of inherited power. The sacred is interrogated, the familial pedestal cracked open. Father and mother lose their mythic shine, and society emerges as a snarled, punishing knot where freedom and dignity are routinely sacrificed.
Nothing holds still here. Pain burns clean through memory. God mirrors the patriarchy that worships Him.
The “destruction” at the heart of this book is the deliberate breaking of the ancient rules meant to keep women obedient, invisible, and domestic.
David—the acclaimed king who felled Goliath—appears instead in his full grotesquerie: a predatory man who cloaked violence against girls in divine approval. John the Baptist—self-appointed moral sentinel—hurls “whore” at Salome’s mother while ignoring the rot within his own tradition. And in a satisfying reversal, the prophet who despised women is finally undone by a woman’s whim, a poetic justice rendered with the sharp edge this book wields so well. Vélez Verbel’s work is not an act of destruction for its own sake—it is a necessary breaking, a blaze set to the myths that have ruled women’s bodies and lives for millennia.
Margarita Vélez Verbel, Corozal (Sucre) es autora de los poemarios:”Los ángeles sólo bajan una vez”, “Espinas y cenizas”, “Del polvo y el olvido”, entre otros. Voz trágica y transgresora, la de Margarita se constituye en una de las más originales en el concierto de voces de mujeres poetas del Caribe.
October, Nur Turkmani
Publisher: Hajar Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza.
Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee.
Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.
Nur is a writer from Beirut. Her work appears in Poetry, New England Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus and others. October is her debut poetry collection and was selected by Chen Chen as winner of the inaugural Purple Ink Press Poetry Contest.
Nur is at work on a short story collection and was awarded the Anthony Veasna So Scholarship for fiction from The Adroit Journal. She studied creative writing at the University of Oxford and politics at the London School of Economics and the American University of Beirut.
new york ironweed, Amanda Deutch
Publisher: Fence Books
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Paperback
new york ironweed is a field guide unlike any other. An intimate companion to take along with you on walks in New York or anywhere, new york ironweed’s poems are energetic supersonic living beings. Intentionally “imperfect,” the electric poems invite typographical irregularities, mirroring ecological realities. The hyper-conscious poems emerge from our shared experience of climate and insect crisis, paying care and attention to the plants wildly growing from cracks in concrete. These strange, witchy creatures err without erring as they decompose like plants back into the soil. Deutch’s plants-as-poems build new interspecies architectures through their transcendent being.
Amanda Deutch is a poet born and raised in New York City. She is the winner of the 2025 Fence Ottoline Prize for her collection, new york ironweed. Deutch’s poetry has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Oversound, The Rumpus, Cimarron Review, and in many other journals and magazines. Deutch is the author of several chapbooks including Bodega Night Pigeon Riot (above/ground press, 2020), and Surf Avenue & 29th Street, Coney Island (Least Weasel Press, 2018). She lives in Brooklyn, where she is the founder of Parachute Literary Arts in Coney Island.
Furious Harvests, Alex Averbuch, Oksana Maksymchuk (Tr.), Max Rosochinsky (Tr.)
Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Publication Date: March 31, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Furious Harvests transports readers to Alex Averbuch’s homeland of eastern Ukraine. Amid the bloody destruction brought by Russia’s war of aggression, the poet toils in fields of memory, reaping lyrics from family archives and mementos to amass testaments to the complex and painful histories of this place and its peoples. A family tree, letters to home, and the faint scent of a grandmother’s dress kept in the back of a closet speak to histories of inter-ethnic violence, WWII forced laborers, and the Holocaust. Mixing dialects, styles, registers, and voices, Furious Harvests—presented in a bilingual edition—defiantly cries out in its rage and longing toward reconciliation of the self and other.
Alex Averbuch is Assistant Professor of Ukrainian literature and collegiate fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the collection The Jewish King, a finalist for the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s highest award for culture and literature. English translations of his poems have appeared in Manhattan Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit, Birmingham Poetry Review, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. With Max Rosochinsky, she won the first place in the Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship. For the translation of Marianna Kiyanovska’sThe Voices of Babyn Yar (2022), Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky were awarded the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association of America, the Peterson Translated Book Award, and the American Association for Ukrainian Studies’ Translation Prize.
Max Rosochinsky is a poet, scholar, and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, and co-translated Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar by Marianna Kiyanovska. Their award-winning work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, and others.
Everybody Knows a Ghost, Elana Wolff
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In these rhythmic lyric pieces, ghosts appear as indications, veils and shades, shadows and chance—in illness, art, nature and relationship; in the nebulousness of memory. Hosts of soul, self, and other. In Everybody Knows a Ghost, knowing denotes a closeness where there’s space for struggle and fumbling, interplay and change. For when has it ever been unhuman to morph, perish, linger, or reappear.
Elana Wolff is the author of eight collections of poetry and a collection of essays on poems. She has also co-authored, with the late Malca Litovitz, a collection of rengas and co-translated, with Menachem Wolff, poems from the Hebrew by Georg Mordechai Langer. Elana’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces are widely published in Canada and internationally and have garnered awards. She has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario. Elana’s collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions, 2020), received the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her latest book, Faithfully Seeking Franz (Guernica Editions, 2023), a cross-genre quest for dead mentor, Prague modernist author Franz Kafka, is the recipient of the 2024 Canadian Jewish Literary Award in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture.
I Used to Be a Pisces, Camilla Gibb
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
I Used to Be a Pisces is a deeply felt meditation on love and belonging, exploring changing landscapes, loves, and selves. In these poems, accompanied by her original collage work, Gibb generously invites us to engage with our surroundings, recognize the relationships that shape our existence, and examine our longing for restoration and regeneration.
Grappling with what it means to feel at home in a time of upheaval, and woven through with threads of hope, grief, and the persistent pursuit of renewal, I Used to Be a Pisces is a masterful poetic work from one of the country’s most beloved and celebrated authors.
Camila Gibb is the internationally acclaimed author of five novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so’ s Life, Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and The Relatives. She is also the author of the RBC Taylor Prize shortlisted memoir This Is Happy. Gibb has received the Trillium Book Award and the City of Toronto Book Award and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Victoria College, University of Toronto.
Soap Bubble, Nimi Wariboko
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Soap bubbles symbolize aesthetics, fascination, joyfulness, playfulness, and even the transience of life. These fragile transparent pieces confront us with the contradictions of life: the relentless conjunction of gain and loss, happiness and sadness, present and past, plenitude and lack. Rich in forms and styles, Soap Bubble intimates the creative and destructive movements of human co-existence, bearing witness to the caducity, rhythm, and happiness of life. In this collection of poems that is lyrical and enterprising, Nimi Wariboko demands that we engage the mystical, mystique, misery, and mundane that are in every human society. Terse and light on the eyes, his poems explore the familiar terrains of life’s twists and turns with subtlety and novel insights, affirming and celebrating the soap-bubbly life that is superbly human.
Nimi Wariboko is a public intellectual, poet, and philosopher. He is the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics and Director of African Studies at Boston University, United States. Wariboko is a writer of profound knowledge, a poet of emotional depth, and a master of lyrical, accessible, and spare lines. He is a transtylistic poet.
The Book of Marys and Glaciers, Carrie Olivia Adams
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems collected in The Book of Marys and Glaciers traverse both the psychological and physical landscape to explore the too-muchness and overwhelm that categorizes our demand-driven age. The longest series, “Dust Cover,” is a meditation on deserts of all kinds—geographic, urban, celestial, domestic, and linguistic. The poems themselves enact their own ideas of space and emptiness, building to a work that grain after grain becomes heavy as a whole. In contrast, the title sequence “The Book of Marys and Glaciers” is an expansive work of feminist ecopoetics that asks questions about the role of women as mothers, religious figures, friends, and lovers in a society that rarely makes room for quietude anymore.
Altogether, the poems are controlled, precise investigations and interrogations of the ideas and images we take for granted.
Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago where she is the poetry editor for Black Ocean and the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press. Her books include Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence, in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. She is the curator of the Poetry & Biscuits house reading series and the newsletter of the same name, and when she’s not making poems, she’s probably making biscuits.
Moon Base One, Jemma L. King
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
When poet Jemma L. King learned that her unborn son faced life- threatening conditions, her world unravelled. In his first fragile months, she turned to poetry to make sense of the impossible, asking: what happens before we begin, and what happens when we meet our most significant endings? Spanning centuries and continents, this breathtaking collection moves through time and space – from the icefields of Antarctica to the Salem Witch Trials, from ancient Greek myths to the neon-drenched visions of Warhol and McQueen. King’ s verse travels to the stars and back, interrogating the boundaries of existence, the fragility of life, and the fierce power of motherhood. With exquisite lyricism and unflinching insight, this collection is a meditation on survival, rebirth, and the ever-unfolding mystery of what it means to be alive. A cosmic, deeply personal journey that pulses with wonder, it reminds us that even in our darkest moments, we remain part of something vast, luminous, and filled with possibility.
Jemma L. King won the Terry Hetherington Young Welsh Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Wales Book of the Year Prize and the Sundress Prize for her haunting debut poetry collection, The Shape of a Forest. Her breathtaking second collection, The Undressed, was inspired by a cache of antique nude photographs of women, returning voices to those previously lost to history. The first prize winner of the 2024 International Cambrian Mountains poetry competition, Jemma’s latest work has been published by magazines including Acumen, Littoral, and Seaside Gothic. Moon Base One is her third collection. Jemma lives with her husband, son and dog in the Welsh countryside.
Breakfast with the Scavengers, Ben Rhys Palmer
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A Welsh poet based in Mexico, his poems about Mexico capture the magic and vibrancy of a country André Breton once described as ‘the most surrealist in the world.’ Other poems pay homage to Welsh cult heroes John Cale and Adrian Street, and Ben’s plucky ancestor, Rebecca Howells, who emigrated to Patagonia after her husband was killed in a mining explosion at Blaengwawr Colliery. At once funny, tender, and beautifully bizarre, Breakfast with the Scavengers explores love, loss, loneliness, our never-ending quest for connection, and those blink-and-you-miss-them moments of transcendence that can light up our lives.
Ben Rhys Palmer is a poet, translator, editor, and musician born in Cardiff, Wales and now based in Guadalajara, Mexico. His poetry has been published in The London Magazine; Poetry Wales; New Welsh Review; Forklift, Ohio; Wales Arts Review; The Caterpillar; Under the Radar, and Neon. Winner of the Verve Poetry Competition 2022, Ben was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2023 and highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize, the Kent & Sussex Poetry Competition, The Interpreter’s House Poetry Competition and the Welshpool Competition. Breakfast with the Scavengers is his debut collection.
Graveyards On Other Planets, Roberto Pastore
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
In his sophomore collection, Roberto Pastore hones in on an era of constant flux, violence and grief, offering a kind of bewildered solace with a misfit voice that feels truly renewed. ‘I attend the reunion of myself./ Swapping out lime water for chamomile tea./ Comb-over days in which we refuse to accept what is lost.’ In poems that are self-reflexive and elegiac, yet full of flashes of the unexpected, we are invited to look tenderly and unflinchingly at our own mysterious experience of living, our own ‘sad heartsong’. Here are poems that feel both intimate and timely, yet somehow beamed in from another planet, far, far away.
Roberto Pastore is a poet based in Cardiff. He studied Art History & Creative Writing in Carlisle where he was part of the renowned Speakeasy spoken word scene. His first collection Hey Bert (Parthian, 2019) was highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and subsequently appeared in the Forward Book of Poetry 2021. In 2022 he released a poetry pamphlet entitled Absolute Joy which led to a collaboration with artist Rob Churm. Graveyards On Other Planets is his second full collection.
Instagram: @bertpastore
I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, Jason Bredle
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane, or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent, at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor, introspection, and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead, they capture the way thoughts shift, contradict, and collide.
Inspired by the poet’s dreams, as well as travels throughout central Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America, the poems are alive in voice and detail, yet the speaker’s connections, and more so, disconnections, turn toward isolationism, solitude, and loneliness. At times, the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry.” Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets.” This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions, observes, and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd, others deeply reflective, but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable.
Jason Bredle is the author of eight poetry collections, including four chapbooks. He is recipient of the New Issues Poetry Prize and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. His work has appeared in JAMA, Denver Quarterly, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, among other publications.
Who Follow the Gleam, Christian Wessels
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 3, 2026
Format: Paperback
Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany’s Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island’s dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: “maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.”
In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: “The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves.” This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.
Christian Wessels is a poet, essayist, and critic. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals. His criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books. He is a visiting assistant professor of poetry at the University of Rochester. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest of Germany.
Some Hard Stars, David Thacker
Publisher: Signature Books
Publication Date: April 6, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Some Hard Stars knits together past and present in pursuit of a deeper understanding of love, rebirth, and sustaining joy. Through poems full of care and tenderness for family, neighbors, and friends, Thacker demonstrates how “love requires / a willing mind,” especially when confronting the difficulties of mortality with honesty. These poems sing and think out loud, through traditional forms and meters as well as through music invented for the needs at hand. They are intense and exacting in their questions, careful and complex in their laments, and delicate with sacred moments of change.
Some Hard Stars knits together past and present in pursuit of a deeper understanding of love, rebirth, and sustaining joy. Through poems full of care and tenderness for family, neighbors, and friends, Thacker demonstrates how “love requires / a willing mind,” especially when confronting the difficulties of mortality with honesty. These poems sing and think out loud, through traditional forms and meters as well as through music invented for the needs at hand. They are intense and exacting in their questions, careful and complex in their laments, and delicate with sacred moments of change.
David Thacker is a recipient of the Creative Writing Award from the Western Literature Association and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and he was selected by Tracy K. Smith for Best New Poets. His poems have appeared in Image, The Kenyon Review, Orion, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho and his PhD from Florida State University. He teaches at the Ethel Walker School, where he chairs the English Department, runs the Visiting Writer Seminar, and is the Director of Community Partnerships (a relationships-based service program). Some Hard Stars is his first book.
Only the Scent of You Remained, Duncan Mercredi
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Duncan Mercredi was Winnipeg’s Poet Laureate in 2021. In this frank, raw, and honest collection the poet chases down the river of who he is. Each bend, each stone, every waterfall, a sharing of self. Then the writings can be rolled up and when the time comes, the time that he leaves the place he calls home, they will be placed on the sacred fire. To return to where they came from.
You are invited to walk with the author during intimate reflection and pause to remember the people who have been a part of his life and journey, the ones who influenced him, both good and bad. The paths taken, the roads travelled that led him to this city. As the wick burns the last of its wax we recognize its existence as the scent of smoke still remains long after the light goes out.
Duncan Mercredi is a Cree and Métis poet from Winnipeg. In 2020, Mercredi became the second (after Di Brandt) Poet Laureate of Winnipeg. In 2021, he won the Manitowapow Award at the Manitoba Book Awards.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/31 and 4/6 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.”