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.
Small Wars Manual, Christopher Santiago
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.
Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where “stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees” and “even small wars waged // on the living room floor” cause trepidation and harm.
This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.
Chris Santiago’s debut collection Tula was selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Copper Nickel, Conduit, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and American Public Media’s The Slowdown. His collaboration with composer Lembit Beecher and ethnographer Todd Lawrence, Say Home, was commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and received its world premiere in 2019. A Loft Poetry Mentor and Fellow of the McKnight Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/ACLS, and Kundiman, he received his PhD from the University of Southern California and recently joined the Faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts in Santa Clarita, CA. He lives in Pasadena.
Ring of Dust, Louise Marois, D.M. Bradford (Tr.)
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Ring of Dust, veteran Quebec poet Louise Marois delights in poetic feints, temporal leaps, asides, tangents, sleights of hand, call-backs and echoes. This ambitious collection of sequences populates plural dialogues between then and now, family and entourage, lover and nature, mother and death, work-person and artist, fables and confidences, limits and new reaches, home and escape, city and field, queer life and a blood red world. It’s a proposition that enters the mess of memory in hopes of reconciling, one disharmony at a time, the many voices who inhabit what keepsakes remain. This book is past and present at war with each other; it’s also the future emerging from the page-by-page bout, all born anew in an exuberant translation by D.M. Bradford.
Louise Marois is an acclaimed writer and artist born in Montreal in 1960. Recognized for her poetic works many times over, her first collection of poetry received the Jacqueline-Déry-Mochon prize and she has twice been a finalist for the Governor General Literary Award. She lives and works in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where she dedicates her time to writing and artmaking.
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator. They are the author of the hybrid poetry collection Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for, among others, the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General Literary Awards. Bradford’s first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Award for Translation. Their most recent book of poetry, Bottom Rail on Top, was a Raymond Souster Award finalist. Bradford lives and works in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá?ka Nation.
allostatic load, Junie Désil
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
allostatic load navigates the racialized interplay of chronic wear and tear during tumultuous years marked by global racial tensions, the commodification of care, and the burden of systemic injustice. Moving between diaristic intimacy and the remove of news reportage, Junie Désil’s second poetry collection invites readers to hold the vulnerability and resilience required to navigate deep healing in a world that does not wish you well, in a world that is inflamed and consequently inflames us, in a world where true restoration and health must co-occur with the planet and with each other.
Junie Désil, born to Haitian immigrant parents in Montréal and raised in Winnipeg, has devoted over two decades to empowering communities made marginalized. An accomplished poet, her debut collection, eat salt | gaze at the ocean (2020), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and explores themes of Black sovereignty and the Haitian diaspora. Currently residing on the Traditional Territories of the Homalco, Tla’amin, and Klahoose, Junie mentors emerging writers at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio. Beyond her professional life, Junie enjoys writing, coaching, consulting, and raising goats.
The Rose, Ariana Reines
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Drawing on the history of “romance” as the troubadours knew it and the titular flower’s ancient allegories for sexuality and mystery, Reines plunges into feminine archetypes to explore masculine pain: “I have always liked helpless / & terrible men because they break my mind.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of gender performance are replaced with bold vulnerability: paradoxes of power and surrender transmute the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and the soul.
The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, approaching the connection between erotic love and spirituality with humor. Investigating war, maternity, violent sensuality, and the role of language in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to uncover the “secret / & terrible shovelings / Of love,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts. Her books include A Sand Book, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her play Telephone won two Obies and has been performed internationally.
My Secret Life: Selected Poems, Krisztina Tóth, George Szirtes (Tr.)
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
My Secret Life is the first book in English translation of the poetry of Krisztina Tóth, one of the leading Hungarian poets of the generation who began publishing in the late 1980s. The recipient of many awards, Krisztina Tóth is also renowned for her fiction which has been translated into many languages including English. The poems in My Secret Life were selected by her from three of her nine published collections, with the addition of some new or previously uncollected poems.
Tóth is, and has been for several years, a major figure in Hungarian writing and, being a major figure with an important public voice, she has also been, and is now, subject to unrelenting attacks by the government-funded, government-supporting, gutter press. She has been self-exiled in England but is moving to Switzerland shortly. Originally attacked for suggesting that a couple of standard pieces of literature might be removed from the school syllabus and replaced by writing by living women authors, her life has become the subject of the sort of storm of defamation already practiced on others perceived to be threatening the values of the government.
Born in 1967, Krisztina Tóth is one of the most popular and best known Central European authors, and the recipient of numerous awards. She studied sculpting and literature in Budapest, spending two years in Paris during her university years. She has published nine books of poetry and ten books of prose to date as well as 24 books for children. In 2015, her novel Aquarium featured on the shortlist of the German Internationaler Literaturpreis. Her works have been translated into 25 languages; her novels, short stories and poems can be read in German, French, English, Polish, Finnish, Swedish, Czech and Spanish, among others. Her bestselling short novel Eye of the Monkey was published in Hungary in 2023; an English translation is published by Seven Stories Press in the US in October 2025. Her children’s books treat topics considered unusual, even taboo, in children’s literature. Mum Had an Operation explains cancer to schoolchildren in a humorous and lyrical tone, while the main characters in A Story for Nose-Blowers are two members of the ‘Snot family’ who live in the right and the left cavity of a nose. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Talk was inspired by the story of her own adopted daughter. Her musical Wanderer of the Years explains passing and letting go to children, whereas Pokémon Go and The Rubber Bat are for adults. Her plays include The Bat, published in English translation in the compilation Plays from Contemporary Hungary: ‘Difficult Women’ and Resistant Dramatic Voices (Bloomsbury, 2023). Two collections of her short stories have also been published in English translation, Pixel (Seagull Books, 2019) and Barcode (Jantar Publishing, 2023). Her work was featured in the anthology New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation (Arc Publications, 2010).
When the Horses, Mary Helen Callier
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
As Walter Benjamin wrote: “Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater,” and it is in this bedraggled theater of memory that Callier stages her poems. A careful, curtained-off darkness lurks at their edges, actors appearing more in silhouette, evoking, often, the shape of a thing, the sound it makes, instead of the thing itself.
Like all memories, these moments are fleeting. To read When the Horses is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking—a dream that haunts a wounded part of you, though you can’t remember which. These are poems of encounter—with place, self, other—and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss.
Mary Helen Callier‘s poems have been widely published in outlets such as Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, and The Arkansas International. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow and was awarded a Howard Nemerov Prize. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and is currently a doctoral student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver in Denver, CO where she lives. Her debut collection, When the Horses, won the 2023 Alice James Award – Editor’s Choice.
The Inside of a Stone, Charlotte Van den Broeck, David Colmer (Tr.)
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Conceived while collaborating with a Dutch artist on a project in Death Valley, California, Charlotte Van den Broeck’s The Inside of a Stone explores desert landscapes and womanhood – and the emotional resonance between the two – while reconceptualising their metaphorical relationship. With close observation and striking images she engages with the arid, eroded landscape. In other poems she considers sexual violence while watching a pair of mating turtles, imagines an alternative emotional life for Ilsebill, the fisherman’s wife from the Grimm fairytale, and explores medieval poet Hildegard of Bingen’s magical healing.
After first making her mark as a compelling performer, Belgian poet Charlotte Van den Broeck was acclaimed as one of Europe’s most innovative and original new voices in poetry. Her first two collections, Chameleon and Nachtroer, were published together in David Colmer’s English translation by Bloodaxe in 2020. The Inside of a Stone marks a departure from the themes of those earlier books, which often return to childhood and youth in urban and European landscapes.
Charlotte Van den Broeck was born in Turnhout, Belgium, in 1991. After studies in English and German, she took a Masters in Drama at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp. She has published three collections of poetry, Kameleon (2015), which was awarded the Herman de Coninck debut prize for poetry by a Flemish author; Nachtroer (2017), which was nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize 2018 and the Ida Gerhard Prize; and Aarduitwrijvingen (2021). The first two volumes are combined in Chameleon Nachtroer, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). David Colmer’s translation of Aarduitwrijvingen is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025 under the title The Inside of a Stone. Her poetry has also been translated into German, Spanish, French, Serbian and Arabic. In 2016 she opened the Frankfurt Bookfair together with Dutch poet Arnon Grunberg. In 2017 she was one of that year’s Versopolis poets, performing at several European festivals including Ledbury in Britain. In 2022 David McKay’s translation of her prose book Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (Waagstukken) was published by Other Press in the US. As well as publishing critically acclaimed books she is renowned for her distinctive performances, which differ from UK/US versions of spoken word as theatre pieces ‘searching for the speakability and experience of oral poetry’, now presented in English as well as Dutch.
We, April Ossmann
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
We takes an unapologetically spiritual stance in bridging politicized divides, exploring conscious and unconscious prejudices with lyricism, warmth, and self-implicating humor, how we are shaped by and create our nation by how we see ourselves and others. The poems investigate what unites us; how the personal is political, and the political is personal; changing our perceptions to heal families, friendships, and country of incivility and villainization by practicing greater compassion; trying to see past egos to souls, as “We” suggests in conversation with Whitman: “I celebrate my being, every atom/of myself and you, lamp and mirror/of all that is”; in a new Preamble to the Constitution; and in the feminist “Peace Hymn for the Republic.” We begins with a non-partisan vision of soul, and ends driving a rural road at dawn in “State of the Union Aubade,” both paeans to our common divinity.
April Ossmann is the author of Event Boundaries (awarded a Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Vermont Book Award finalist) and Anxious Music—both from Four Way Books—and has published poetry widely in journals and anthologies. A former executive director of Alice James Books, she owns a poetry consulting business (www.aprilossmann.com) offering manuscript editing, publishing advice, tutorials, and workshops, and taught at the low-residency MFA in the Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada College. She lives in White River Junction, Vermont.
Country Music, Zane Koss
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Zane Koss grew up listening to stories. Often these were told late at night around kitchen tables or campfires against the backdrop of rural British Columbia. The stories themselves, punctuated by the humour and violence of life in the mountains, offer a means of critiquing “extractiveness”—both the violence of settler-colonial capitalism and the systems of class privilege that devalue rural, working-class experience. Mining these materials for a rural poetics—a country music—Koss begins to understand both his working-class upbringing and academic surroundings. Country Music is a book that wants to find a way forward through the imperfect inheritance we’re given. Shifting between the poetic inquiries of Lisa Robertson and the vernacular improvisations of Fred Wah, the book offers an investigation of identity, family, and place.
Zane Koss is a poet and translator living in Guelph, ON. He is the author of Harbour Grids (Invisible Publishing, 2022) and several chapbooks of poetry. He is the co-translator of Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace (Cardboard House, 2022) and Karen Villeda’s String Theory (Cardboard House, 2024), with the North American Free Translation Agreement (NAFTA). He was born and raised in the East Kootenays, BC, and earned a doctorate at New York University.
Bonememory, Anna Veprinska
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Memory is stored in the body. Memory sprouts in families and is transmitted from one generation to the next. Memory imprints at the level of bone. In Bonememory, Anna Veprinska bares down to the marrow.
An expert lyric poet writing at the intersection of memory and pain, Veprinska fearlessly traces intergenerational histories of struggle and survival. This collection confronts the indelible marks left by immigration, the Holocaust, Canadian settler-colonialism, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Amid these various upheavals, Veprinska finds herself within her own body, facing chronic illness and navigating disability.
Bonememory is an investigation of history and memory studded with moments of insight and revelation. Written with a keen eye and close attention, these poems balance lyrical tenderness and formal experimentation, never forgetting that extending into another can be an act of care and an act of invasion.
Anna Veprinska is the author of Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. She was a finalist in the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, has been shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence, and received an Honourable Mention from the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
jump the gun, Jennie Malboeuf
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
jump the gun digs deep into the dark undercurrents of grief and gun violence that shadow our daily lives in America. These poems uproot the hidden recesses of life, the stages and struggles of womanhood, and our continual fight against violence, both internal and external, in the U.S. today.
The speaker in these poems wrestles with the everyday fears and realities we often try to ignore: the complex expectations placed on young girls and mothers alike, the illusion of childhood innocence, and the very real consequences of our environmental destruction.
Split into two sections—with poems that layer blood-soaked images between close-ups of the body and domestic life—this collection deftly illustrates the beauty that can be found in tragedy, the fragility of the natural world, and the resilience of the human relationships that fill it.
To read jump the gun is to witness yourself through the crosshairs. In Malboeuf’s words, “What hit you has become you. / Pieces of the bullet embedded / in your skin. Even / that which you come from / will never be the same. / But from violence comes / the tides, the seasons.”
Jennie Malboeuf is the author of jump the gun, forthcoming from (BOA Editions, 2025), and God had a body, awarded the 2019 Blue Light Books Prize by Adrian Matejka (Indiana UP and the Indiana Review, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, The Gettysburg Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Harvard Review. Born and raised in Kentucky, she received a BA at Centre College and an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is the recipient of a 2020 NC Arts Council Fellowship. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, son, and dog.
Siren of Atlantis, Cedar Sigo
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Here are poems that speak to Sigo’s profound experience of learning to write again after suffering a stroke in 2022. In creating this work, the author retraces poetic sources and reexamines style and tone, using a variety of compositional techniques to renegotiate what is at stake in the work. There is a joy in this collection, as Sigo allows us to bear witness to the rediscovery of language, imparting the work with a new and dramatic clarity, for the poet and ultimately for the reader as well.
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of endless books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently Siren of Atlantis (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022 he received a grants to artist’s award from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts He has taught all over the country including The University of Washington, Bard College, Washington University, Naropa University and The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
Anything with Spirit, isaiah a. hines
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
I meet isaiah a. hines at the intersection of gender, the Black body, in dialogue with the greats (Gwendolyn Brook, Ntozake Shange, Jean Toomer, Saidiya Hartman, etc.) and black queer life. And just as soon as I make it past their dedication to their brothers and acknowledgement of their grandmothers’ wisdom and realness I am swept away by the first poem. They write: ‘This [null] is ultimately a reference to the historic and present day indifference to anti-black violence in their United States… where Black lives have been considered less than nothing. I am so excited to dig into this collection! isaiah does some interesting things with the construction of words all while centering Black interiority.” — Emely Rumble, LCSW, Psychotherapist, Bibliotherapist
isaiah a. hines is a poet and scholar from Burlington, Vermont. Their debut collection, null landing was chosen as winner of the Slope Editions Book Prize (2020) and a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry (2023). Their writing can be found in FLAT Journal (UCLA) and is forthcoming in Obsidian: Arts & Literature of the African Diaspora and Root Work Journal. They studied film and ethnic studies at Columbia University and Brooklyn College, CUNY moving to Troy, New York for a PhD in communication and rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
The Weight of Drought, Tyler Jacobs
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Weight of Drought explores forms of grief through the internalization of experience and wanders further to wonder if the past is too far away to fix the present while also serving as a love letter to Nebraska. This collection offers a millennial voice within poetry––a voice that not only subverts the norm of what poetry is but defies the stereotypes of a region, offering connection through grief, love, and place––to experience a somewhere which we have never been.
Tyler Michael Jacobs was born and raised in central Nebraska. He is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Kearney and works for the Nebraska Writers Collective as a Teaching Artist. He lives in Kearney, Nebraska.
The Shadow of Words, Ana Blandiana, Paul Scott Derrick (Tr.), Viorica Patea (Tr.)
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.
The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art.
In her early poems, Blandiana’s voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana’s poetry.
Ana Blandiana was born in 1942 in Timişoara, Romania. She is an almost legendary figure who holds a position in Romanian culture comparable to that of Anna Akhmatova and Vaclav Havel in Russian and Czech literature. She has published 14 books of poetry, two of short stories, nine books of essays and one novel. Her work has been translated into 24 languages published in 58 books of poetry and prose to date. In Britain a number of her earlier poems were published in The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989 (Anvil Press Poetry, 1989), with a later selection in versions by Seamus Heaney in John Fairleigh’s contemporary Romanian anthology When the Tunnels Meet (Bloodaxe Books, 1996). She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change. She also re-founded and became President of the Romanian PEN Club, and in 1993, under the aegis of the European Community, she created the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. In recognition of her contribution to European culture and her valiant fight for human rights, Blandiana was awarded the highest distinction of the French Republic, the Légion d’Honneur (2009). She has won numerous international literary awards. Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea have translated all of her poetry into English. Their first translation to appear from Bloodaxe was of My Native Land A4 (2010) in 2014. This was followed by The Sun of Hereafter / Ebb of the Senses in 2017, combining her two previous collections, and a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Five Books, combining five collections, three of protest poems from the 1980s followed by her two collections of love poetry, was published in 2021. This will be followed by a further compilation from her early collections, The Shadow of Words (2025). Ana Blandiana was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Prize for 2016 by the city of Gdansk for My Native Land A4, published in Polish in 2016, the award shared with her Polish translator Joanna Kornaś-Warwas. She received the Griffin Trust’s Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018, and received the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in Spain in 2024.
White Lily, John Emil Vincent
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Why are my problems / always the worst? // And why / because I wrote that / do you think I don’t believe it? White Lily is John Emil Vincent’s love note to Louise Glück and Laurie Anderson, two artists inspired and bedevilled by white lilies. Under their spell the poet dives into parable, fable, received wisdom, compact discs, and ruined utopias like a gleeful truant child. The white lily is ever present – its meanings, messages, and seductive scent. The collection begins with a meditation on Anderson’s song “White Lily” and its treatment of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour film Berlin Alexanderplatz. It goes on to ponder whether, if we take them in earnest, our mistakes come to serve as the surest sign of seriousness. Throughout, Vincent’s poems trouble what’s exact and exacting, always with the white lily as companion, a promise of rebirth delivered in funeral tones.
John Emil Vincent is the author of several books including The Decline and Fall of the Chatty Empire, Bitter in the Belly, and Ganymede’s Dog. He lives in Montreal.
Kingdom of the Clock: A Novel in Verse, Daniel Cowper
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Such exchanges animate the kingdom // of the clock, but one by one their trades / complete, blink out like eyes. The city sleeps. Set in a vibrant yet ragged coastal city, Kingdom of the Clock is a verse novel whose interwoven storylines begin with one day’s dawn and end at the first light of the next. Within the cycles of that single day, the lives of the city’s inhabitants unfold. An aging stock promoter presides over the fruits of his predatory life. A woman tracks her husband’s iPhone to the casino. An artist races to prevent her masterpiece from being seized to cover unpaid rent. A commuter is shaken by a private vision. A mother plots to care for her unwell adult daughter. Senior and junior partners involved in a fraud weigh the risks and rewards of betraying each other. A boy boards an oil tanker with his father in an emergency. An elderly chess player prays to the moon for his grandchild to be born alive. A homeless man does not know his father is dying. After night’s crescendo comes the blank page of a new day. A clear, flowing lyricism fuses the many moving parts of Kingdom of the Clock into an immersive, unforgettable reading experience.
Daniel Cowper is the author of Grotesque Tenderness. He lives on Bowen Island, BC.
Rich Wife, Emily Bludworth de Barrios
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Rich Wife is a collection of expansive long poems whose structures echo the cluttered charm of a dresser adorned with hats and hairpins, vials and scarves. Drawing inspiration from James Schuyler’s looping conversations and Chelsey Minnis’s cascading forms, these poems traverse the interlaced landscapes of motherhood, marriage, wealth, and the unspoken contracts of domestic life.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios folds personal experience into far-ranging meditations on beauty, nostalgia, power, and privilege, following in the footsteps of Gertude Stein’s fluid turns in Lifting Belly and Anne Carson’s woven observations in The Glass Essay. The poems coil back on themselves, creating recursive strands that offer readers both intimacy and critical distance. As much a contemplation of art as it is of womanhood, Rich Wife engages deeply with art history and aesthetics and examines the domestic as an artistic canvas in itself, where every object and relationship becomes a charged symbol.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s previous books include Shopping, or The End of Time, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in both Houston, Texas and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
Daisy, Rachel Feder
Publisher: TriQuarterly
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Daisy: Poems is a captivating and imaginative take on The Great Gatsby that puts F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic in the hands of a messy, ambitious, and possibly devious teen poet. From her privileged yet precarious perch in the roaring 1990s, Daisy navigates the expectations of her parents, boyfriend, and lover, alongside her own artistic ambitions, as she explores whether freedom is what she truly desires—and wonders if it’s even possible. Rachel Feder puts a new spin on beloved characters: Jay, longtime and secret lover; Nick, somewhat mysterious and always meddling cousin; and Jordyn, best friend and companion in doomed relationships. A meditation on juvenilia, constructions of femininity, the purity myth, and canonical literary silences, Daisy is told in sparse, evocative verse that pulsates with youthful passion and offers a new elegy for our lost American dreams.
Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. Her poetry collections include Birth Chart and the chapbook Words with Friends. Feder edited the Norton Library edition of Dracula and is also the author of Harvester of Hearts (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and The Darcy Myth. She is the coauthor of AstroLit with McCormick Templeman and Taylor Swift by the Book with Tiffany Tatreau.
Chronicle of Drifting, Yuki Tanaka
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Yuki Tanaka’s stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka’s restless imagination roams among places and personae—a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo—searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge—like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels “empty, a blue outline.”
Yuki Tanaka was born and raised on a small island in Yamaguchi, Japan. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has cotranslated, with Mary Jo Bang, A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, published by Princeton University Press. He lives in Tokyo and teaches at Hosei University.
Re: Wild Her, Shannon Webb-Campbell
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In nature, rewilding restores biodiversity and ecosystems. In this new collection from award-winning poet Shannon Webb-Campbell, it is a form of Indigenous resurgence and pleasure.
Drawing upon ecology, traditional knowledge, and sexuality, Re: Wild Her is a personal and poetic awakening. In these pages artistry and nature are intertwined, speaking to the sensual musings of lovers in Paris, driftwood and death cycles, and the rise of wild swimming and cold dipping. Throughout, reclaiming one’s divine femininity is celebrated as a powerful act of resistance and rejuvenation.
These “poem spells” each offer a different prism with which to rewild ourselves, answering the call: How does joy help us cope with the harsh realities and complexities of life? How does poetry help us move forward? Re: Wild Her is an invitation to catapult into the otherworldly, to dive with the muses, and to resubmerge ourselves in joy.
Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage and lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation in Newfoundland and Labrador. Her previous books include Lunar Tides, I Am a Body of Land, and Still No Word, which received Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Her forthcoming book, Re: Wild Her, is a form of Indigenous resurgence and pleasure through “poem spells” and offers a different prism with which to rewild ourselves. Shannon holds a PhD from the University of New Brunswick in English-Creative Writing and is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine and Muskrat Magazine.
supreme night, Keith Donnell
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
In supreme night, the troubles of double consciousness and anti-Black violence recede into the temporary haven of night. In poet Keith Donnell Jr.’s imagination, the cover of darkness, both familiar and mysterious, is transcendent. Here, oppressed peoples may find the power to live beyond the social and legal limitations imposed in daylight. These nights are not free of horror and tragedy, nor are they free of love, humor, anger or regret. The supreme night envelopes all that memory preserves, bends, and fabricates. The collection’s micro-narratives, lyrics, monologues, and historical sources twist, bend, and cycle through, coalescing to memorialize the legacy of Black life in America. Both unique and ambitious in scope, humorous and heartbreaking, supreme night is a fractured song of witness, a romance with the veil. Its vibrant language and varied themes subvert expectations to celebrate the power of dissemblance, and the poet as keeper of knowledge and rogue histories.
Originally from Philly, Keith Donnell Jr. is a California-based poet, writer, and book editor. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MFA Program at San Francisco State University. His work blends experimental poetics, storytelling, and historical artifacts to explore experiences of Black life in America, past and present. Keith is the previous author of The Move (Nomadic Press, 2021) and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including POETRY and Best American Nonrequired Reading.
a body more tolerable, jaye simpson
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.
In these visceral poems, teeth gleam, graze skin, and sink into flesh, becoming bloodied and exposing the animalistic hunger that lies within. Pulsating with yearning and possibility, a body more tolerable is a book that resists typical notions of physicality and sex to dream of a world more divine. It is a call-out into the canon for a new age, one filled with retribution and recompense.
jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate, and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hopes of creating utopia. Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay (Nightwood Editions, 2021) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and won the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English.
All Empires Must, Mia Kang
Publisher: Airlie Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
All Empires Must weaves in and out of Rome, taken as a figure for empire, ruin, and the seductions of both. An abstracted narrative concerns the fortunes of Rhea Silvia, the mythical mother of Romulus and Remus, whose story is either a romance or a romantic violation; in any case, she’s dead. In these sometimes meditative, sometimes schematic poems, the desire for contact with a place, a past, or a person (including the self) is always complicated by boundaries and overdetermined by power. Language, then, becomes an austere pleasure. Unflinchingly, All Empires Must takes the measure of harm, without promise of repair.
Mia Kang (she/her) is the author of City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020) and the winner of the 2023 Airlie Prize for All Empires Must (Airlie Press, 2025). Her poems appear in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, wildness, and more. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Contest, Mia has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as residencies from Millay Arts and the University of the Arts. Mia holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. She lives in Philadelphia.
Cursive Paradise, Kaur Alia Ahmed
Publisher: Wendy’s Subway
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Kaur Alia Ahmed’s Cursive Paradise asks how a refusal of cogency can lyrically expand perception. They write, “To weigh heavily on something / is to decide its shape,” and throw language into a state of excess. These poems shift and eddy, loop, and undulate, seeking out spaces of desire and onomatopoeic attraction. All the while, Ahmed offers a view of subjectivity and gender made resonant and malleable, insisting on language that is lush with what cannot be contained by the voice or the page. Cursive Paradise is the recipient of the 2021 Carolyn Bush Award.
Kaur Alia Ahmed is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. They make glass, video, poems, plays, and tattoos, and are a recent graduate of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Their work has been presented at Entrance Gallery, LTK Enterprises, Alyssa Davis Gallery, Interstate Projects, and Rhizome. You can find their poems published in Baest Journal, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and BOMB Magazine.
The Occupant, Jennifer Maier
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Occupant is a collection of persona and prose poems. Maier explores the “inner lives” of common household objects, along with that of “The Occupant” of the house, their human keeper. She provides a window into the thoughts and actions of the Occupant of the house, but at some distance, and works as a “bridge” between these two subjectivities.
Jennifer Maier is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University and was previously associate editor of the arts quarterly IMAGE. Her other poetry collection Dark Alphabet won the Crab Orchard Review Series in Poetry First Book Award and was named one of the Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets. Maier’s poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, New Letters, Smartish Pace, American Poetry Review, and has been featured on Public Radio International’s The Writer’s Almanac.
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Contents
Book Excerpt: The Prize of Québec by Jennifer Nelson
“I tend to lean into the transconstitutory powers of ekphrasis. … Only in poetry can one go to the moon in a way that critiques the quest for the moon.” Read a poem from Jennifer Nelson’s new collection from Fence Books, On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies.
Chapbook Poem: This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . by Shanta Lee
“This poem explores the levels of our participation in handing ourselves over, often to the people, places, or things that deserve no such delight.” Read a #poem from Shanta Lee’s new book from Harbor Editions, This Is How They Teach Us How to Want It . . . The Slaughter.
Three Poems by Jonathan Fletcher
“Instead of having to choose between religion or the LGBTQ community (which I know many member of the latter feel they have to do), I think it is possible (and maybe even biblical) to integrate both into one’s life.” Read three original poems from Jonathan Fletcher, along with words from the author.
What Happened? On You are Leaving the American Sector by Rebecca Foust
“Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook of poems has a strange prescience. … Foust isn’t alone in making the obvious connection between Trump’s first term and Orwell’s dystopia.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor Rick Mullin.