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.
Visitations, Julia Alvarez
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In these poems, Alvarez traces her life gently, a fingertip following lines on a page, through memories of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, a dictatorship dramatically survived, the smells of sancocho and sofrito, the formative influence of her tías and her sisters, her move to America and the challenges of learning English, the search for mental health and beauty, redemption and success. We meet her grandchild and her mother, her lovers, visit the homes where she grew up and the homes where she grew into the formidable writer read in thousands of classrooms across America today. Her wisdom is as clear and beautiful as the light that shines through glass and yet grounded through the form and substance of self-knowing.
Told with a storyteller’s intimacy and the comfort of a warm hearth, this is a master writer’s reflection on family, aging, love, the body, having a voice, and the very act of composing poetry itself, experienced across the arc of decades—a collection of searching for an artistic voice, for the author’s very essence, until, “the way it sometimes happens: we arrive / where we were promised, belong to / what we longed for in ourselves, each other.”
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960, at the age of ten. She is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including her beloved first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, and In the Time of the Butterflies, which was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its Big Read program. She was the subject of an American Masters documentary, Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined, on PBS and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. She lives in Vermont.
Creature Feature, Dean Young
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Creature Feature is Dean Young’s first posthumous collection since his death in 2022. More feisty, hilarious, surreal, and heartbreaking than ever, Young and his tireless inventiveness are on full display in fierce poems that refuse to compromise yet are guided by love and amazement at living. These poems resound with risk-taking, mischief, and aching beauty. Young remains committed to the generative possibilities of poetry even as he writes his own elegy again and again.
Young envisioned Creature Feature to serve as the third and final installment in a trilogy that includes Shock by Shock (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and Solar Perplexus (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Together, these three books were imagined during the turbulent years following his successful heart-transplant surgery, and they demonstrate a vigorous recommitment to artistic recklessness and poetic inventiveness. Through all their painful genius, these poems reveal an abiding awareness that time is short and art in our time is more urgent than ever.
Dean Young (1955-2022) was the author of seventeen books of poetry and poetic theory. His iconic, comedic style was derived from the New York School of Poetry and from contemporary art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism. In an interview with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Young said, “For me the human drama, the squishy, time-limited pulse, is always at the center of the poem.” His book Elegy on Toy Piano was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, and his work has been celebrated with the Academy Award in Literature and the Colorado Prize for Poetry. The former Texas Poet Laureate, Dean Young received multiple fellowships, including the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, the Stegner Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Splashed Things, Leigh Lucas
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
With startling honesty and emotional precision, these poems tell the story of a woman in her twenties navigating loss, from the funeral service and her dead-end job, to her therapist’s office and the subways of New York City, revealing the way her beloved’s death infiltrates every corner of her life.
The speaker searches for traces of the departed in unlikely places—the physics of splashes, the history of seasickness, the science of depression—while confronting the limitations of elegy and the futility of trying to contain sorrow in words. Splashed Things is not a neat arc toward healing, but a testimony to the unwieldy shape of mourning and the persistence of love in its wake.
Selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty, Leigh Lucas’s Splashed Things marks the arrival of a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry.
Leigh Lucas is the author of Splashed Things, winner of the A. Poulin Jr Poetry Prize (Boa Editions, 2026), and Landsickness (Tupelo Press, 2024), selected by Chen Chen for the 2023 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award. The recipient of residencies from Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, her writing can be found in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Adroit, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson. She lives in San Francisco, CA.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Lambda Award–winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost cherished friends and comrades and met their estranged parents’ end of life.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled QTBIPOC ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale—not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.
This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them) is the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs; Tonguebreaker; Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (all Arsenal Pulp Press); and Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press), co-edited with Ejeris Dixon. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Cordova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister, and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They live in Philadelphia, PA.
Walking Wheel: Novel-in-Verse, Molly Fisk
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and timeless.
Fisk describes the journey of newlyweds Phoebe and Miles Imlay from their birthplace in central Oregon to California’s Surprise Valley. These are quiet, lyrical poems building a private world of intimacy and effort in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie’s baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple’s first year of marriage working side by side is offered to us in resonant, unexpected detail.
Captivating and accessible, by turns tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Walking Wheel chronicles a self-sufficient era that some only half-remember and many find hard to believe. With these linked poems, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times.
Walking Wheel is a book of simplicity and history, of landscape, weather, and hearth, where goats are milked, nails forged, trees felled, and two young people learn by daily practice that the true measure of wealth is love.
Molly Fisk is the author of the poetry collections The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter (#4 in the California Poetry Series), Terrain (coauthor), and Salt Water Poems (letterpress), as well as five collections of radio commentary. She’s the Inaugural Poet Laureate Emerita of Nevada County, California, where she edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She lives in Nevada City, California.
Mermaid Theory, Maya Salameh
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. This daring collection deploys psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and captivating visual poetry.
Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. Salameh scrutinizes established academic and cultural narratives, inviting readers to rethink their own understandings of history and identity.
Maya Salameh is the author of How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Etel Adnan Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Salameh has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. She has served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and a Community Organizer for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Mizna, Poetry, Gulf Coast, and The Rumpus, among others. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
Missed Connections with Tall Girls, Gwen Aube
Publisher: LittlePuss Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Tweaking working-class colloquialisms into new forms of elegy and song, Gwen Aube’s hilarious and uncompromising poems chronicle a precarious, debaucherous carnival of trailer-trash divas and Discord autistics, living and delighting in survival at the edges of technocapital.
Like a digital-age Wanda Coleman, like a transsexual Kevin Killian, like Elizabeth Smart infused with Sybil Lamb, Missed Connections with Tall Girls establishes Aube as a brash and unstoppable singular voice for a monstrous new world.
Gwen Aube is a working-class writer living in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review, The New Orleans Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Expat Press, and Room Magazine. She is a 2025 Artist-in-Residence with the Ontario Heritage Council, a Kevin Killian scholarship recipient for the Jack Kerouac School Summer Writing Program, and was a finalist for the PEN Canada New Voices award. She is the author of the chapbook Pulp Necrosis (above/ground press, 2025).
good luck in the real world, Adrienne Novy
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
good luck in the real world is a journey through mental health recovery. After a near-suicide attempt, Adrienne Novy was partially hospitalized. Over a year later, her mother suffers a brain bleed. Exploring suicidal ideation, hospitalization, the burnout from working hospitality and food service, and Novy’s fascination with music and pop culture, good luck in the real world explores what we cling to when we learn how to heal and what it means to fall in love with life again.
Adrienne Novy is an artist from the suburbs of Chicago (Potawatomi Land). A 2020 graduate from Hamline University’s Creative Writing program, Adrienne’s work has been nominated for Bettering American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net. She is the author of three poetry collections: Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018/2023), Erev Gildene: The Pop-Rock Survival Guide for the Modern Jewish Millennial (Game Over Books, 2022), and good luck in the real world (Button Poetry, 2026). Adrienne lives on social media at @adriennenovy.
Cryptid, Annah Browning
Publisher: The University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Annah Browning’s poetry collection Cryptid takes on weird phenomena and real desire. In these pages, a young woman from the rural South longs to be abducted by aliens; a female sasquatch spies on human families and pines for love; a Chinese spy balloon is heartbroken by being shot down. Through these personas and a host of strange happenings from American folklore, Cryptid probes the longing for something more buried at the heart of the lives of women and those deemed “other” by an unjust world. By turns irreverently funny, grotesquely bodily, and eerily heartbreaking, Cryptid insists on the beauty of the unseen and the disbelieved.
Annah Browning is the author of the poetry collection Witch Doctrine (University of Akron Press, 2020) and the chapbook The Marriage (Horse Less Press, 2013), and is a cofounder of Grimoire Magazine. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Hailing from the foothills of South Carolina, Browning currently calls southern Illinois home, where she is a professor of English at Blackburn College.
Paperweight, Ryan Teitman
Publisher: The University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Ryan Teitman’s second book uses myths and meditations to create gemlike, multifaceted poems. Filled with doubles and dreams, Paperweight dives into how humans harness their ability to create—whether to make works of art or to simply find hope in the depths of grief. By exploring the boundaries of the prose poem, Teitman finds unexpected lenses through which to view the beauty of the natural world, the breadth of contemporary culture, and the narratives of everyday life.
Ryan Teitman is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City (BOA Editions, 2012). His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review, and his awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Glenside, Pennsylvania, with his wife and daughter.
I’ll Take My Body To-Go, Kindall Fredricks
Publisher: The University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Kindall Fredricks’ debut collection, I’ll Take My Body To-Go, begins by following a rattling hive of girls who came of age in the early 2000s. This is a book about girls who burn at the belly like a shot tin can. Girls who feel freshly peeled, ugly, and certain they’ve been cheated of something, they’re just not sure of what yet. Girls who wing their eyeliner as fiercely as an oath. Girls who can “find the nape of anything” and dig their name into the bark of their world by being as loud and as defiant as possible.
With brazen reverence, Fredricks does not shy from illuminating the trauma of their lived experiences, which are a rejection of the wax-paper world of girlhood that is so often portrayed—together, they flick the ashes of amen to the dirt, shoplift cheap wine from gas stations, and hunt for any escape from the everyday violence girls are expected to endure. I’ll Take My Body To-Go is about girls who listened, women who are listening still.
Kindall Fredricks is a practicing registered nurse and poet who received her MFA from Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Boulevard, New Letters, Grist, North American Review, and more. She lives with her daughter, husband, and collective of furballs just outside Houston, Texas.
Self-Portrait as the “i” in Florida, P. Scott Cunningham
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Cunningham’s second collection weaves together ecological and familial landscapes, capturing both the spectacle—burning sugarcane fields, snake farms, chaotic highways—and the daily rituals that bind a family: school drop-offs, sick days, and small kindnesses. Blending formalist and free verse, the book becomes both an inquiry into belonging and a celebration of the essential everyday moments that define a life.
At once panoramic and deeply personal, Cunningham writes with a documentarian’s eye and a father’s heart.
P. Scott Cunningham is a poet and essayist from Boca Raton. His debut collection, Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and others. He is the editor of Eight Miami Poets (Jai Alai, 2014), a mini-anthology of Miami poets, and Ballerz 2K20 (O, Miami, 2021), a zine of basketball poems, as well as the creator and series editor of The Miami Trilogy, three anthologies of Miami writers that address issues critical to their communities. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the founder of O, Miami, a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying the poetry of Miamians. He lives with his children and his wife, the writer Christina Frigo, in Illinois.
. . . AGAIN, Mark Nowak
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Told through five abecedarian prose sections, . . . AGAIN is a photo-text commentary on MAGAism in America. In his sobering voice, Nowak captures the depredations of capitalism, the desensitizing regularity of mass shootings, and the extremism that has fueled white nationalism. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection through Donald Trump’s re-election, Nowak chronicles the transformations as the seasons change around him, attempting to make sense of a bitterly divided nation that elected a polarizing figurehead . . . again.
Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and . . . AGAIN, all from Coffee House Press. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and Creative Capital foundations. Nowak recently wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press). He is founding director of the Worker Writers School.
No More Animal Poems, Marc Vincenz
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
No More Animal Poems breaks new ground with a genre of eco-poetry that could be described as ‘cosmic cli-po’, or climate change poetry, invested in evocations of a multiverse in crisis. Employing a play on the futuristic eye/I, the poetry in this volume anticipates universes changed by climate. In the year 2026, the Anthropocene is in crisis and biodiversity is becoming increasingly less diverse, as extinctions continue to occur around the globe. Global warming continues apace and many national governments refuse to significantly decrease their burning of fossil fuels. These poems probe a wide variety of issues and life forms associated with the rising extinction rate and the associated folly, greed and shortsightedness of humanity in the face of potential climate disaster. Importantly, this volume is pointedly structured as a series of courses on a menu, or perhaps a futuristic omakase. These witty but often savage gastronomies advocate for the non-human and critique contemporary consumption, including tokenistic veganism.
They also refer to a growing hierarchy of foods which prioritise rarity often at enormous expense.
There is a mordant and ironic humor informing many of the poems in this collection, and a keenly observant eye that complements Vincenz’s interest in history and contemporary values. Indeed, some of the more overtly satirical poems skewer the human capacity for self-delusion and self-justification. Vincenz reminds the reader that numerous of our fineries and pretensions are causes of our increasing vulnerability.
As the world changes, humanity’s sense of a secure future dwindles.
Their sense of their place in the world not only becomes more insecure but is riven by contradiction and crisis. And, in the midst of such change, poetic language itself becomes a plea.
Marc Vincenz is a multi-lingual poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician, and artist. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and translation. His recent poetry collections include The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, Spells for the Wicked, All the Tricks of Language, and IRØNCLAD.
Marc’s translation of prize-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz’ selected poems, An Audible Blue, received the 2023 Massachusetts Book Prize for Translated Literature. He translates from the German, Romanian, French and Spanish. His most recent books of translation are In the House, Still Light, also by Klaus Merz, and Mother’s Letters: Pure Caviar, the selected poems of the Romanian poet, Ion Monoran.
He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of the essential New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-nosed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than bi-pedal earthlings.
Sage & Disciple, Samuel Green
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
50 years in the life of a poet who has deliberately lived a life outside the academy, writing poems that come from direct engagement with the natural world, a heritage of working class experience and connection, and a conviction that poetry can play a crucial role in our everyday life, both as readers and creators. Samuel Green has spent a lifetime writing from the locus of place, grounded in his beloved Pacific Northwest. This gathering of poems from his prior collections lends testimony to that major preoccupation. Whether he is writing about interactions with the environment, with other people, with the often difficult fact vs. myth of family, with wartime service, with loss and grief, Green’s work is always immediate and honest.
Samuel Green has lived off the grid for nearly forty years on an island off the Washington coast. With his wife, Sally, he is co-editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press. He has been a visiting professor at multiple colleges and universities, and was selected as the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, & a Washington State Book Award in Poetry. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Seattle University. From 1966-1970, he was in the U.S. Coast Guard, with service in Vietnam.
Lightmesh, Choi Jeongrye, Sue Hyon Bae (Tr)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Light Mesh, Choi Jeongrye’s final book, performs a dislocation of the everyday. In poems that are playful, imaginative, and sometimes surreal, we move through a series of familiar yet uncanny locations, always grounded with Choi’s wit. This book showcases Choi’s style with succinct imagery and descriptions of everyday life in deceptively simple language.
Choi Jeongrye (1955-2021) was a South Korean poet. She received a PhD in poetry at Korea University and published seven volumes of poetry. Choi was co-translator of an English selection of her poetry, Instances, with Brenda Hillman and Wayne de Fremery. Light Mesh was her last work before her death from a rare blood disorder.
Sue Hyon Bae is the translator of Radio Days by Ha Jaeyoun, also published by Black Ocean, co-translator of A Drink of Red Mirror by Kim Hyesoon, and the author of a poetry collection, Truce Country. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.
Lucky Charms: New & Selected Poems, 2000–2025, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Since her arrival in San Francisco from New Orleans via the now-legendary New College Writing and Consciousness program, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux has been an integral and idiosyncratic voice in Bay Area poetry. Lucky Charms maps her creative trajectory over a 25-year period, from fugitive zines and pamphlets through full-length volumes, and concludes with a substantial selection of new and previously uncollected poems, which, as Alice Notley has written, find her seeking out “pleasure amid personal and societal dread.”
Thibodeaux writes of the cosmic and spiritual from a profoundly human perspective. There are reflections on New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, loving snapshots of motherhood, wrestlings with mortality through cancer diagnoses, grieving over losses of friends and family, all set against the struggle to stay true to the earth and to her calling as a poet. Embodying its title, Lucky Charms offers the poem as talisman, a lyric device for capturing magic and releasing it into the world, wielded masterfully by a poetic persona that partakes of the botanist, the alchemist, the astrologist, and the witch all at once.
New Orleans native Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The World Exactly (Cuneiform Books, 2020), as well as over a dozen small books, including Witch Like Me from the Operating System. A graduate of the legendary New College poetry program, where she studied with the likes of Joanne Kyger and David Meltzer, she was also co-publisher of Auguste Press and Lew Gallery Editons. Thibodeaux is a teacher, neighborhood activist, and tree enthusiast. She is the mother of a Scorpio and wife of a poet and splits her time between San Francisco and New Orleans.
Buffalo Free Rapid Transit, Joe Hall
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
The sequel to Joe Hall’s intense and unsparing Fugue & Strike, Buffalo Free Rapid Transit combines a darkly observant stroll through the city with a love letter to Buffalonians trying to get by.
In these poems, a cop cracks Martin Gugino’s head open in front of the world; the wildfires of Ontario smudge the skies above while a home burns below; a white terrorist massacres ten members of Buffalo’s Black community; and a city’s failed response to a blizzard contributes to the deaths of forty-seven people. Hall grapples with Buffalo’s decades of abandonment and its prominence in 2020-2023 as the site of violence and disaster that grabbed national headlines. Through it all, as Hall shows, Buffalonians had to live and cope and work and dream. The long and searching lines of these poems come from the strange place where cold reality, dread, and visions of Buffalo’s better future crack open into each other.
Joe Hall was first taught poetry by Lucille Clifton and decades of bad jobs. He is a writer and educator in Buffalo, where he spends the summers in the dirt. He is the author of several other books including, People Finder, Buffalo, Pigafetta Is My Wife, Someone’s Utopia, The Devotional Poems, and Fugue & Strike, the latter four also published by Black Ocean.
Opera Fever, Chelsey Minnis
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in Chelsey Minnis’s Opera Fever read like a dangerous bodice-ripper, glamorous and haunted. From the covid claustrophobia in which they were written, these poems sharply maneuver from steamy observations to gravitas (and then some groaning under the fur coats../Let’s be very hard on veils.. / Like a dark summer with too many funerals…). In movements that feel delightfully restless and darkly romantic, we readers are lucky to be caught in their quake.
Chelsey Minnis lives in Boulder, Colorado, and also writes screenplays under the name Merrit Schmidt. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and her books of poetry include Baby, I Don’t Care, Poemland, Bad Bad, and Zirconia. Two of her drama screenplay features placed in the semifinals in the Austin Film Festival in 2024: opera biopic Baritone and contained magical drama Autobiography of a Very Normal Person. A New York Times review for Baby, I Don’t Care called her “a provocative thinker about gender and poetry and the erotics of dislike.”
The Daughter Industry: A Hauntological Confession, Alternative History, Speculative Autopoetics in Three Acts with Seven Players, Soham Patel
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
In a prismatic meditation on survival, Patel assembles a chorus of seven voices to sing songs of resistance and queer desire. Patel transforms medical language, pop culture fragments, and dream sequences into an unflinching examination of what it means to exist in a world that doesn’t want you. From yoga halls to ultrasound clinics, from Bollywood dance routines to ghost stories, Patel maps the daughter industry with her signature wit, prosody, and clear-sighted documentation of erased histories.
Soham Patel is the author of all one in the end/water— (Delete Press, 2022), ever really hear it (Subito Press, 2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (The Accomplices, 2018). They live in Blacksburg, Virginia where they run the graduate publishing certificate on the MFA faculty at Virginia Tech, teaching courses on literary magazines, small presses, and digital publications.
Cloudwatcher, Michael Bazzett
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Cloudwatcher, Michael Bazzett’s poems reside in an otherwhere of missing rivers and bottled starlight, where the sea leaves cryptic letters for beachcombers on shore, where rain “wipe[s] the name clean off the mountain.” Bazzett is a master at building a world slightly parallel to this one, a place of weirdness and mystery where a “cage of [one’s] own desires” comes replete with cedar shavings, feed tray, and water bottle. With its evocative imagery and language crackling with energy, Cloudwatcher brings us to a place where the eternal rubs shoulders with the everyday, leaving us with a heightened sense of how absurd and wondrous it is to inhabit a temporary body in this world, and the life-affirming reminder that “until / you crack a bit, you can’t be over-joyed.”
The Stern Prize is an exciting new partnership from The American Poetry Review and Copper Canyon Press that addresses an often-overlooked category in book prizes: poets 50 years of age or older who are contributing innovative and dynamic works to the publishing landscape.
Michael Bazzett is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber (Milkweed Editions, 2021)—as well as a verse translation of the creation epic of the Maya, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed, 2018), named by The New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2018. His translation of the selected poems of Humberto Ak’abal, If Today Were Tomorrow, was published by Milkweed in 2024, and his chapbook, They: A Field Guide, was the editors’ choice for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize (Factory Hollow, 2024). The recipient of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and translation, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, GRANTA, The Nation, The Paris Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Review, and The Sun.
Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Moony Days of Being, Nathan Hoks’ fourth collection of poetry, is a surreal and tender reckoning with absurdity, memory, and the unravelings of daily life. These odes, self-portraits, and dedicatory poems fuse humor with emotional urgency as they wrestle with parenthood, intimate loss, and ecological and political despair.
The book opens in a place of existential estrangement and gradually adopts an elegiac and relational tone, speaking to family, poets, and imagined interlocutors with uncertainty and longing. The title poem, a cento composed of lines from the book, weaves refrains from earlier pieces into a coda. Interspersed throughout the book are quatrains of found images captioned by lines from the poems, an intermedia form that presents a playful visual index of the book’s motifs.
Hok’s poems resist tidy epiphany. Instead, they zigzag and pulse with associative energy—a lyricism that questions its own coherence while inviting the reader into resonant, affective spaces. With homages to influences like Vallejo, Plath, and O’Hara, Moony Days of Being is as much a book of grief and exhaustion as it is a performance of loopy.
Nathan Hoks is the author of The Narrow Circle, Reveilles, and Nests in Air, the latter also published by Black Ocean. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Any Gesture, Whitney Koo
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
A braided, elegiac journey through death and recovery, Any Gesture takes on loss, anticipatory grief, and the little deaths experienced in the space between mourning and survival.
The collection’ s four narrative threads speak to a modern, suburban Ophelia; pre-elegize a sister on the brink of suicide; reconcile miscarriage and infertility; and question the proper care for the dead in the face of escalating and dehumanized losses. In these haunting, urgent poems, Whitney Koo interrogates the notion that death is a singular event. Here, grief is illuminated as a living thing, sometimes violent, sometimes hungry, sometimes a “ long / drawn sucker punch.” Through striking, vivid language, Koo reinvents the elegy as something past, present, future— and we are both witness and mourner.
Whitney Koo is the Founder/Executive Editor of Gasher Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Poetry Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, American Literary Review, and others. She holds a PhD in English-Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The Tinder Sonnets, Jennifer LoveGrove
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Unabashedly confessional and radically vulnerable, The Tinder Sonnets rallies against the long-standing demand that “women of a certain age” politely accept being rendered non-sexual. Each poem is based on a date, relationship, or contemporary dating insight, and highlights how misogyny impacts the way we connect in the modern world–or don’t.
Juxtaposing folklore and the natural world against the digital sphere of texting and dating apps, this is poetry that defies invisibility and instead confronts and subverts it through a discerning feminist lens. While experimenting with the traditional form of the sonnet, these sonically textured poems are playful and wry, erotic and joyful, all while refusing to shy away from palpable anger, frustration, and disappointment.
Centering strength and resilience in the face of a resurgence of misogynistic chauvinism, The Tinder Sonnets is a staunch refusal to recede from view, to cede sexual space, or to be quiet and polite.
Jennifer Lovegrove is the author of the Giller Prize–longlisted novel Watch How We Walk, as well as three poetry collections: Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes (longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award), I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel and The Dagger Between Her Teeth. She is currently working on a new novel, and creative nonfiction. She divides her time between downtown Toronto and Squirrel Creek Retreat in rural Ontario.
Leaning Into It, Rik Emmett
Publisher: a misFit book
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Rik Emmett’s second collection originated during the dark limbo of COVID-19: 2021–22. Five parts go from autofictional narration to observations on the modern world, moving inside out, then outside in. Eventually, Leaning Into It looks beyond.
Leaning Into … what? The prevailing chaos of narcissistic, egotistical, patrimonial power-mongering lends these poems renewed vitality, as the author’s frustration and disappointment with current undemocratic global politics play out.
How much leaning gets us a tiny bit closer to wisdom? Emmett favors the balatrones, jesters, fools, poets, comedians, and atheists in his social media feeds. “Power” ignores the balanced values of a sense of humor and a good-natured humility — but this poetry takes on the world as it is, ultimately leaning into hope.
After a dozen platinum LPs from ’75 to ’88 with Triumph, Rik Emmett has released 20 more solo projects, ranging across genres. The avowed family man retired from touring but still writes and records. A Guitar Player magazine columnist for over a dozen years, he also taught with the Humber College music faculty for a couple of decades and now lives in Burlington, ON.
Pitiful, Brandi Bird
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Part self-interrogation, part confession, part hospital diary, the intense, heartbreakingly frank poems in Brandi Bird’s second collection detail the author’s ongoing struggles with eating disorders and depression, conditions that disproportionately afflict Indigenous girls, women, and two-spirited persons. These challenging poems investigate the relationship between sexuality and eating disorders as well as how the voyeurism of religion (the idea of being eternally watched) intersects with both of those spheres. They also raise questions about body shaming and body sovereignty—a failed sovereignty in this case, as “sovereignty” itself is a communal concept. In the tradition of poets like Amy Berkowitz (Tender Points) and Hannah Green (Xanax Cowboy), the poems in Pitiful also lay bare the way patriarchy, medical sexism, and bigotry have not only sabotaged the treatment of such conditions but often make them worse.
Brandi Bird is an Indigiqueer Saulteaux, Cree, and Métis writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory. They currently live and learn on the land of the Squamish, the Tsleil-Waututh, and the Musqueam peoples (Surrey, B.C). Their debut poetry collection, The All + Flesh (Anansi, 2023), won an Indigenous Voices Award and was a finalist for both the Gerald Lampert and the Governor General’s awards. Brandi Bird is currently completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia.
The Wren, A.F. Moritz
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A.F. Moritz’s twenty-third book of poems originated with an impulse, beginning in April 2019, to write a series of continuous poems. The first goal was to keep them short. The second was to make them separate, in the process reflecting the whole of human life, stable in moments and bodies. In The Wren, Moritz arranges 70 short poems in a sort of galaxy: an apparent scatter, not of stars but of poems, of feeling-thoughts. What is the unity of these active “states” of ours, given that they do not simply follow, or hook onto, or neighbour, or echo one another in a chain of resemblance that seems to have gaps and missing links that reappear later, healed? The title was chosen partly to speak to Moritz’s The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), but also because, among the many short poems of this collection, one of them asked to be central: a poem about a small bird that hops from within a thicket of stems to peer out at the poet for a second and then disappears back inside. This tiny story of a tiny fellow creature is the narrative, the “novel,” of this book: a little story that is nonetheless one of the great and ever-retold stories.
A.F. Moritz’s most recent books from House of Anansi Press are Great Silent Ballad (2024), As Far as You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018). Three of his books have been finalists for the Governor General’s Award; The Sentinel won the Griffin Poetry Prize. His work overall has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and other recognitions. A.F. Moritz was Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2019 to 2023.
Ultra Blue, Graeme Bezanson
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
“The truth no one wants to name,” writes bell hooks, “is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within.” These intense, insistently strange poems developed from Bezanson’s struggles with guiding his young son through a culture of toxic masculinity and violence. This is work in dialogue with existing texts of boyhood and masculinity, in particular Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. The book’s three main sections make up a kind of fractured reader’s diary, broken up by two interludes of “divinations” – sparser erasure poems made using the changing positions of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to pick words from the transcript of an interview between self-proclaimed proponents of toxic masculinity Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate. By processing existing texts and recasting them into a present, personal moment, Ultra Blue navigates the joy, despair, vivid arcana, and routine violence of boyhood under Western patriarchy.
Graeme Bezanson is a Nova Scotian writer who spent the past eleven years living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from The New School in New York City. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the US, and Europe, in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems.
Girl Trouble, Diana Whitney
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
“Stop trying to write something beautiful / and write something true.” Girl Trouble is an excavation of female adolescence, a brazen journey through rape culture from the ‘80s to #MeToo. Diana Whitney’s earthy poems spill secrets, make trouble, reckon with stories of desire and harm, and explore the agency and oppression of women and girls. Deeply rooted in the natural world, Girl Trouble grieves the planet’s degradation while celebrating queerness and seeking healing for the next generation. By the end of the collection, a myriad of voices builds to a full-throated roar. This is a book for survivors and advocates, for mothers and daughters, for anyone moving through trauma with resilience.
Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of two full-length poetry collections, Wanting It and Dark Beds. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
Neurotica, Maxwell I. Gold
Publisher: Shortwave
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Thirty-two bold new literary poems including “A Stretch of Highway”, “A Prelude to Madness”, “A Picture of Dead Stars in the Sky”, and more paint a modern, interpersonal portrait of the Jewish poet.
Maxwell I. Gold is a Jewish-American author and poet with an extensive body of work comprising over 350 poems since 2017. His writings have earned a place alongside many literary luminaries in the speculative fiction genre. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Maxwell’s work has been recognized with multiple nominations including the Eric Hoffer Award, Pushcart Prize, and Bram Stoker Awards. Find him and his work at www.thewellsoftheweird.com.
Overtakelessness, Daniel Moysaenko
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Overtakelessness is a powerful reckoning with war, its ruinous proximity to daily existence and the dissonance of experiencing it from afar. These poems trace the long history and the present circumstance of the ongoing and devastating war in Ukraine, a country whose origins far predate Russia’s, despite Moscow’s propagandist claims. Through the lens of the Ukrainian diaspora witnessing the current violence from America, Daniel Moysaenko attempts to square a centuries-old motherland with a newly aggrieved contemporary nation. A third country emerges in these poems: one that, though spectral, exists in a perpetual future, “astounded at what’s left of living.”
In spare lyrics, prose poems, and ravaged blocks of text, Overtakelessness becomes a book of gaps that haunt the spaces between ancient folktales, lost Soviet records, relatives’ failing memories, nationalist misinformation, and the rhythms of Ukrainian speech. Many of these poems are collages mediated by technology, the news coverage of bombings, the photos of soldiers shared on social media, the time delays of Zooming with family—the war experienced firsthand and by smartphone, “its screen a reflective blank, a sky populated by ghosts.” These gaps and rifts argue, finally, that what cannot be held cannot be seized.
Overtakelessness is a moving and extraordinary debut collection.
Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He practices law and lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.
Cantares, Edgar Garcia
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Cantares is a multipart engagement with the poetics and history of the colonial and Indigenous Americas, oscillating between poetry and essay in a structure of repetitions derived from Mesoamerican poetics. Edgar Garcia reimagines the Cantares Mexicanos, a sixteenth-century anthology of Nahuatl songs from Central Mexico, and brings these songs to life not just as historical documents, but as music, to give presence of thought to their historical layers and complexities. His adaptations evoke the sound and texture of the sixteenth century, blending Indigenous and Baroque traditions, exploring themes of translation, adaptation, race, and historical memory. The collection moves between poetry and scholarship—between poems and micro-essays. The essays provide commentary and historical context about the colonial soundscape of Central Mexico. At the same time, the poems emphasize the songs’ sonic, spiritual, and poetic dimensions.
The Cantares emerge from a time of cultural collision—after the arrival of the Castilians but still rooted in older, Indigenous worldviews. These songs are not nostalgic or idealized; they reflect crisis, survival, and creativity. Garcia’s work draws inspiration from the Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ Maya creation story, which begins in colonial darkness and still insists on the possibility of light. Through these adaptations, Cantares becomes a meditation on history, imagination, and the power of art to endure and create in the face of loss.
Edgar Garcia is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Program in Creative Writing. He is the author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography, and Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu.
Midsummer Night’s Toast, Mamie Morgan
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Publication Date: April 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Midsummer Night’s Toast is a sharp, tender, and darkly funny poetry collection that explores love, memory, trauma, and domestic life through vivid, intimate snapshots—blending humor and heartbreak in poems that move between the everyday and the surreal with lyrical precision.
Midsummer Night’s Toast is a collection that answers to no one, a freedom we learn the speaker has finally afforded herself after a half-life spent under the glaring light of tradition, fear, of men, of institutions. She’s answered to her parents, to students, to academia, shame, to the workshop model, to various earlier versions of herself and is ready—in short—to have a good time. The invite list for this particular party belongs entirely to her: friends, street names, Kelly Ripa inside a crossword puzzle, bounced checks, hurricanes and Marilyn Hacker, frat boys and birds, bridal shops, Chaucer, the pictures her husband draws, King Arthur, Adrienne Rich. She’s sad for sure, and angry, but she’s also fierce as fire. At times these poems feel hurried, because they are. The landscape of this book feels like that penultimate moment in When Harry Met Sally when Billy Crystal says, “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” Mamie Morgan is reenacting a half-life of pain utilizing a kaleidoscope she’s crafted from discarded paper, felt, cheap gemstones, crayons worn to nubs, and mixtapes. Lots of mixtapes.
Mamie Morgan‘s poems and essays have appeared in Oxford American, The Atlantic, Muzzle, Four Way Review, Sixth Finch, Carolina Quarterly, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Everyone I’ve Danced with Is Dead, was published by JackLeg in 2024. She lives in South Carolina with her husband and their dogs, Henrietta Modine and Wednesday Stewart.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 4/7 and 4/13 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”