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.
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, Keetje Kuipers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with.In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010); The Keys to the Jail (2014); All Its Charms (2019); and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025). Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times and over a hundred other magazines. Keetje is currently the Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including a dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, at the foot of a Rattlesnake Wilderness. She lives there with her wife and their two children.
no swaddle, Mackenzie Kozak
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: April 10, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Mackenzie Kozak examines the complex question of whether or not to bear children. Through a series of untitled American sonnets, the poems speak to themes of origin and desire, noting the shame that can accompany such a decision. Many poetry collections speak to the varied griefs of becoming a mother, losing a child, or being unable to have a child, but this collection gives specific voice to another grief that feels unspeakable: the possible conclusion of not wanting to be a mother.
no swaddle reads as a sort of meditation on theme, its repeated form mirroring the spiraling nature of indecision and reconsideration of the same major question alongside its continuous struggle to name. In the end, this grappling with elements of grief and shame becomes a way of moving toward greater agency and fulfillment.
Mackenzie Kozak is associate editor at Orison Books and works as a therapist specializing in grief counseling. Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, jubilat, Missouri Review, Muzzle Magazine, Sixth Finch, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Kozak lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
The Worried Well, Anthony Immergluck
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Anthony Immergluck balances the thin lines between healing and ailing, between humor and tragedy throughout this exceptional debut poetry collection. Reveling at precipices of imminent disaster while grieving at thresholds of relief, The Worried Well asks, how do we live loving and full lives while being confronted with our mortality? How does language carry us between liminal spaces?
The “worried well” is a term often used pejoratively by medical professionals to describe a group of patients who may be lacking visible symptoms but opt for testing and preventative interventions, who seek treatments for ailments that don’t manifest readily in medical diagnostics. Immergluck unpacks the term by writing in the spaces where worry and wellness meet.
Despite the profound subjects explored, the collection carries us with a keen sense of humor, grounds us in the everyday, and rises to meet us with unexpected ruptures or sutures of language on each page. Summoning the restless dybbuk of Jewish mythology as well as David and Goliath, navigating hospital rooms, and surviving economic precarity, Immergluck creates a voice that is utterly new and needed in the literary landscape, a voice that reflects, “I don’t / know why I told a worry / child not to worry when / surely the trick is to give / the worry a name and then / to call it again and again.”
Anthony Immergluck is a poet and publishing professional with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from NYU-Paris. His work has been widely published in journals including Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly. Originally from the Chicago area, he now lives with his wife and pit bull in Madison, WI, where he works at W.W. Norton as the Midwest Social Science Specialist for the academic publishing branch.
i cut my tongue on a broken country, Kyo Lee
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Lotus flowers, youthful hunger, and other temporary beauties intertwine to tell this coming-of-age story, a set of pulsating poems that move toward a distant memory or a flaming future.
Kyo Lee’s intimate debut poetry collection is simultaneously a vulnerable confession and a micro study of macro topics including lineage, family, war, and hope. i cut my tongue on a broken country explores the Asian American diaspora, queerness, girlhood, and the relationships between and within them, pushing and pulling on the boundaries of identity and language like a story trying to tell itself.
i cut my tongue on a broken country documents a search for love. It’s a eulogy for the things we gave up to get here. It’s an ode to tenderness. It blossoms and bleeds in your hands.
Kyo Lee is a queer Korean Canadian high school student living in Waterloo, Ontario. She is the youngest winner of the CBC Poetry Prize and the youngest finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, Nimrod, The Forge Literary Magazine, and This Magazine, among others. She loves summer storms and sweet peaches.
Cut Side Down, Jessi MacEachern
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Cut Side Down feasts on books. Diving face-first into the bookcase, MacEachern calls up the pleasure and pain of influence in sumptuous, body-and-mind-bending poems. Here Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and companions attend salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman, while Lorine Niedecker scolds Charles Olson in class. There are glimpses of the poet too—a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, a young woman in Montréal—as she concocts worlds and words. Immersed in a life of reading, and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down melds lyric and conceptual experiment in a delightful banquet of autobiography, desire, invention, landscape and memory.
Jessi MacEachern born in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island, currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, where she teaches English literature. As a poet, professor, and scholar of contemporary feminist poetics, her critical and creative writing has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and around the world. Her debut poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks was published by Invisible Publishing in 2021.
rock flight, Hasib Hourani
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family.
As incantatory and stirring as Inger Christensen’s alphabet or Raúl Zurita’s Inri, rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.
Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, artsworker, and educator who lives in so-called Australia. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme, and his 2021 essay “when we blink” appears in the anthology Against Disappearance. Hourani was awarded The Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund in 2022 and has been a fellow at the Varuna National Writers House in2021 and 2022.
I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, Douglas Kearney
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
On the heels of Sho (winner, Griffin Poetry Prize) and Optic Subwoof (Pegasus Award in Poetry Criticism), Douglas Kearney’s visual poetry masterpiece, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, pushes further into Kearney’s long-time practices of performance typography, collaging pre-existing media sources to create singular, multiplicitous texts that defy neat categorization.
Through AfroFuturistic exploration of these techniques, Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow. Engaging a rich history of visual poetics, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always almost predicts its endurance as a visionary work of genius.
Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays to libretti. His most recent book is a collection of talks he presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series titled Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022). His most recent poetry collection, Sho (Wave Books, 2021), is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner, and a National Book Award, Pen America, Hurston/Wright, Kingsley Tufts, and Big Other Book Award finalist. He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. Kearney is a 2022 McKnight Writing Fellow. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
I Feel That Way Too, jaz papadopoulos
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A critical response to the #MeToo movement, I Feel That Way Too is an experiment in narrative poetics. It weaves through past and present, drawing together art, philosophy, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and childhood memory to interrogate how media and social power structures sustain patriarchal ideologies. Inspired by the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Anne Carson, A.M. O’Malley and Isobel O’Hare, these poems are lyrical and meditative, moving to make sense of the nervous system in battle and in recovery.
jaz papadopoulos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer, educator and video artist. They hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia and are a Lambda Literary Fellow. A self-described emotionalist and avid Anne Carson fan, jaz is interested in media, horticulture, lyricism, nervous systems, anarchism and erotics. Originally from Treaty 1 territory, jaz currently resides on unceded Syilx lands. I Feel That Way Too is their debut poetry collection.
Every Sound Is Not a Wolf, Alberto Ríos
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Alberto Ríos’ Every Sound is Not a Wolf evokes and awakens the senses—the smell of herbs, “the geckos at their mysterious work.” Even silence grows loud and expansive in its stillness. Told entirely in couplets, and with remarkable lucidity, Ríos balances the harmonies and disharmonies found throughout all of existence—between people and the natural world, between life and death, between spirit and body, between borders real and imagined. What does it mean for a body to house two languages? And what is an imaginary line between countries? From backyard to Sonoran desert, from mining town to river, this collection journeys the human experience, through grief and joy, tuned to the “small buzzing of a live world.” Ríos asks us to feel the connective electric pulse between all things, to find newness, musicality, and beauty in the mundane. That the world keeps moving forward, this is miracle enough.
Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate, has won acclaim for the lyrical language of his poems and short stories which reflects his Chicano heritage through both magical realism and the magic of the everyday. Ríos is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently, Not Go Away Is My Name, preceded by A Small Story about the Sky, The Dangerous Shirt, and The Theater of Night, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also written three short story collections, a novel, and memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border. Ríos is the host of the PBS programs Books & Co. and Art in the 48 and has taught at Arizona State University since 1982. In 2017, he was named director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
death is a mariachi, Marcy Rae Henry
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Marcy Rae Henry’s speaker roams from New Orleans to New Delhi in death is a mariachi, a raw yet nuanced exploration of the shifting nature of identity, spirituality, and place. Reckoning with death through the lens of Buddhist ideology, the speaker technicolors her world: a blue-green whiptail lizard reproduces through parthenogenesis, golden oil glistens in petrichor, even the morphine in a grandmother’s IV takes on a kaleidoscopic sheen. Henry engages texts from 1970’s electronica to molcajetes and tejolotes this intersectional, eco-feminist exploration of the body and the soul, their limits, and their excesses. In her formally inventive and full-throated debut, Henry sings of the liminal, of the “soul separating from skin,” of words that are “useful as bones.” The speaker names what she sees and lets it go. She never tells anyone that she’s time travelling.
Marcy Rae Henry is an associate editor for RHINO Poetry and an associate professor of English, Literature and Creative Writing at Wilbur Wright College, a Hispanic Serving Institution, where she serves as Coordinator of the Latin American and Latine Studies Program and was awarded Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s 2023-2024 Outstanding Educator Award. She lives in Chicago.
Openings for Light to Pass Through, Kimberly Cloutier Green
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Openings for Light to Pass Through considers experiences of natural phenomena, people, creatures, dreams, objects, and art as kinds of maps that orient and reorient us across a lifetime—our many selves, in every season, steering by what light may lead us home.
Kimberly Cloutier-Green is a poet and artist from Kittery Point, Maine. She formerly taught poetry and non-fiction in the UNH Department of English.
The Apple Tree, Catherine Arnold
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
In The Apple Tree, the title poem in this collection, Catherine Arnold explores the cost of emotional repression, of feeling trapped in a code of silence and invisibility. The poems that follow dive into the experience of a woman gradually discovering her creative voice, becoming an artist and learning to embrace the world of color and touch.
In vivid, lyrical language, Arnold explores what it means to leave behind a set of inherited rules that distrust the physical world and shut down the power of wonder and spontaneity. She considers the price of freedom, what it means to feel like an exile, and the nature of maternal love; many of the poems are addressed to her daughter.
This is Arnold’s second collection. Her debut, Receipt for Lost Words, won the 2022 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize.
Catherine Arnold grew up in England and, having fallen in love with painting, moved to the US to study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, she exhibited and taught widely, and received awards from The Royal Academy of Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Flintridge Foundation and The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. While making her living as an artist, she also wrote, torn between the equally seductive demands of words and color. Over the years, the need to write became increasingly urgent. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, Natural Bridge, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Python with a Dog Inside It, Max McDonough
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Set on the marshlands of working-class southern New Jersey, Python with a Dog Inside It, the debut collection by poet Max McDonough, traces the tangled story of two gay brothers as they endeavor to survive their mother’s erratic and escalating violence. They retreat to the privacy of suburban woods and swamps, a world of their own glimmering with ruin and possibility: abandoned furniture, mud-caked jewelry, a time machine. The poems in this collection occupy, as Judith Herman describes it, the space between “the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud.” Ultimately, Python with a Dog Inside It is not only a story of survival, but one of redemption. By proclaiming the events of a particular, harrowing childhood, McDonough invents a future beyond it, one marked by radical openness, hope’s flame brighter for the darkness.
Max McDonough’s debut poetry collection, Python with a Dog Inside It, won the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. His poetry has been published in AGNI, Ecotone, Northwest Review, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, including a Boys in the Band crossover feature in T Magazine, guest edited by Danez Smith. His prose has been nominated for a James Beard Award, and has appeared in The New York Times, Food52, and Flipboard’ s ‘ 10 for Today,’ among others. He earned his MFA from Vanderbilt University and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this riveting sixth poetry collection, Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Ester Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon Captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.
Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of Tallcheif, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize) and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including in Poetry magazine, the New Yorker, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She is the editor of The Eloquent Poem and has edited or coedited numerous other anthologies including the New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. A cofounder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mix-Mix, Dani Putney
Publisher: Baobab Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Mix-Mix, Dani Putney excavates facets of their mixed-race heritage using reformulated text from the “Asian Romance Guide to Marriage by Correspondence” to consider their relationships with their Filipina mother and late white father, problematizing—but also attempting to understand—the circumstances that led to their parents’ marriage across two continents via mail correspondence. In addition, the collection puts queerness and non-binary identity into conversation with heritage, invocations of pop-culture icons, reflections on the speaker’s daddy issues, and general explorations of queer sexuality. In Mix-Mix Putney seems to ask, “Why were we born? How do we live with the circumstances of our birth, both historically and culturally?”
Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. Their debut full-length collection, Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They are also the author of the poetry chapbook Dela Torre (Sundress Publications, 2022) and the creative nonfiction chapbook Swallow Whole (Bullshit Press, 2023). Their poetry appears in outlets such as Bennington Review, Cream City Review, Grist, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others, while their personal essays can be found in journals such as Crab Creek Review, Glassworks Magazine, and Quarterly West, among others. They received their PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and their MFA in Creative Writing from Mississippi University for Women. Mix-Mix is their second full-length poetry collection. They live in Reno, Nevada.
Comic Timing, Holly Pester
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Comic Timing, Holly Pester’s extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase.
Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness.
These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humor. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker’s rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalized bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.
Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection.
Once When Green, Mark Irwin
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 11, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“We breathe, and then / vanish,” proclaims a speaker in Once When Green, a new collection by accomplished poet Mark Irwin. While deeply personal, the book engages the earth, “gulls, / gray, quarreling air, their ha-ha-ha-ing at our trace / of garbage and carbon,” and addresses mortality as well as the consequences of global warming—how it impacts humans, animals, and the plant life that sustains us all. Poems here accent the lateness of our attempt to control pollution, while interrogating the natural world through myth and the voicings of different creatures, beings displaced or relegated to other spaces, including apes, birds, and an arcade bear that reflects: “I once thought that was freedom— / but how in a receding wilderness no longer mine?”
Sighting those areas where metropolis and wilderness collide, Irwin conveys the tension between the natural and digital world as a speaker laments: “I am so lonely for a river’s one rushing / minute with scuttling crayfish, nymphs, and eddies blurring clouds, not its / imagined thousand pixels changing colors toward forms / on a screen.” These poems remind us how forms of the spirit cannot be bound by technology and capitalism, imploring “how to become explorers, cartographers / again.”
Mark Irwin is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including Joyful Orphan, Shimmer, and A Passion According to Green. His poetry and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Conjunctions, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, New York Times, and Paris Review, among others.
Naomie Anomie: A Biography of Infinite Desire, Jennifer Hasegawa
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Jennifer Hasegawa’s NAOMIE ANOMIE: A Biography of Infinite Desire, is an experimental poetic take on biography, growing increasingly surreal as it follows the truths behind its unreliable narrator through paradoxes rendered in luxurious detail. This book is a portrait of a flawed life, a call for attention to the looming ecological crisis, and a lyrical experiment in truth-telling.
Feeling ever-increasing existential strain leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and culminating in her decision to no longer venture outside of her apartment, Naomie is not surprised to find her name is an anagram for anomie, a term for the breakdown of social norms. In these pages is a meticulous account of everything that went wrong in Naomie’s five decades of life. We find retellings of a life’s most significant moments—not because they are sources of pride, but because they stand as the only decipherable moments of humanity amid a world of static. This story in verse acts as a survival guide, romance novel, liberation handbook, pulp thriller, and jokebook for those who will live through ongoing plagues, environmental change, total AI integration, water wars, and cyberattacks and who will come out the other side ready to restart.
Jennifer Hasegawa is the author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, which was longlisted for The Believer Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Bamboo Ridge, Bennington Review, jubilat, Tule Review, and Vallum. She is the founder of the Kau Kau Chronicles (kaukauchronicles.org), a website dedicated to preserving and sharing recipes from out-of-print cookbooks published by Hawai’i community organizations from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Hasegawa is a third-generation Japanese American, born and raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i, and she currently lives in San Francisco.
Clay, Martha Ronk
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Clay look to the process of forming clay on a potter’s wheel to examine our sense of touch and texture, emptiness, fragility, and the nature of time. Martha Ronk moves through the steps of creating a pot that must be formed, dried, bisque-fired, glazed, and fired again. This practice is paralleled in Ronk’s process-oriented language that addresses how we read texture and color, the ways history and landscapes appear in glazes, Mimbres bowls that covered the faces of the dead, and Giorgio Morandi’s still life paintings of ceramic forms.
For Ronk, pottery raises questions about the value of repetition, inevitable failure, and how we may become one with matter. As the potter’s hands ache and age, the bowl seems to age as it slumps or breaks. Clay includes observations from other potters and writers as well as small photographs of pots.
Martha Ronk is the author of thirteen books of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of short stories, Glass Grapes. Her books include The Place One Is, A Myth of Ariadne, Silences, Ocular Proof, Transfer of Qualities (longlisted for the National Book Award), and in a landscape of having to repeat. Her work has been included in the anthologies Lyric Postmodernisms, American Hybrid, Not for Mothers Only, and most recently in North American Women Poets in the 21st Century. She is the emeritus Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
Hover, Liza Flum
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Liza Flum’s Hover focuses on queer polyamorous families, considering the ways people in radical family structures are both highly visible and erased. From hummingbirds to stars, historical records, and cemetery monuments, Flum searches for images to represent lives and loves like her own and to find lasting traces of queer and chosen family. In the poetic lexicon of Hover, hummingbirds become emblems of ungraspable survival and vitality, while records on paper and in stone afford enduring, though limited, representations.
The book explores sexuality, love, reproductive choice, and infertility in sonnets and expansive prose meditations. Linked stanzas, which act as little rooms, suggest the intermingling of bedrooms, doctor’s offices, and hospital rooms. The many forms in this collection claim space, both on the page and in poetic discourse, to make the intimate outwardly visible.
Liza Flum is a poet and teacher. Her poems have appeared in journals including AGNI, Narrative, Poet Lore, and Washington Square Review. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Aspen Summer Words, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She lives with her family in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Apprentice to a Breathing Hand, Laynie Browne
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.
Laynie Browne is the author of seventeen collections of poems, three novels, and a book of short fiction. Her recent books of poetry include Intaglio Daughters, Practice Has No Sequel, Letters Inscribed in Snow, and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists. She coedited I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and edited A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel. Her work has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, A Public Space, New American Writing, BrooklynRail, and in anthologies including The Ecopoetry Anthology, The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award. She teaches creative writing and coordinates the MOOC Modern Poetry at the University of Pennsylvania.
Inventorys, Sam Creely
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this work of hybrid historiography, Sam Creely modulates the English sentence to map the ways anglophone imperial self-fashioning moves in and out of social coherence, investigating how syntactic requirements reflect colonial history and how the rules of language structure thought. Through scenes including intimate encounters with dye, fabric, and garments, Creely reveals the sexual and racial grammars of empire.
Inventorys takes as its point of departure the voyage, shipwreck, and eventual excavation of the Spanish trade vessel El Nuevo Constante. Animated by the image of sixty thousand pounds of dye bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico, this six-part poetic documentation follows the wreckage of the Constante linguistically, moving among early modern lexicography, and ultimately toward enmeshed histories of catalog, fabrication, and revision.
Inventorys is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest, selected by Shane McCrae.
Sam Creely is assistant professor at ArtCenter College of Design. With Pia Sazani, they are a founding editor of the DanceNotes Chaplet Series and coauthor of Throat Draw Come Out With It. Inventorys is their debut poetry collection.
Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
This is a collection of poems about how we find and cultivate love amid wars, including wars that often go ignored. Throughout Bloodletting, Kimberly Reyes considers how we define love and who gets to experience it, paying special attention to the ways that race and sex influence how we are perceived and valued by society. Through the voice of a Black woman coming to terms with her own perspectives on relationship-building, Reyes shows the damage that contemporary culture can do to women, and Black women in particular. Resisting passivity, Reyes’s poetry cuts through pervasive doom scrolling, virtue signaling, and parasocial relationships, inviting readers to remember what care is really supposed to feel like.
Kimberly Reyes is a poet, essayist, and the author of the poetry collections vanishing point. and Running to Stand Still. Her book of essays Life During Wartime won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work has been published in various outlets including the Atlantic, New York Times, New York Post, Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Village Voice, ESPN the Magazine, Irish Examiner, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, and Best American Poetry Blog. Reyes is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
No One Knows Us There, Jessica Bebenek
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this stunning debut collection, Bronwen Wallace Award finalist Jessica Bebenek presents two distinct and moving portraits of early womanhood. The first is that of the devoted, caregiving granddaughter navigating hospital hallways and the painful realities of palliative care. The second is that of a woman a decade older, compassionately looking back on her younger self. In this second half, Bebenek rewrites poems from the first, honouring unimaginable loss and turning it into genuine healing.
At once sensual, visceral, and dreamlike, No One Knows Us There takes us from the sterility of the hospital into the sumptuous natural world. We face horror in a manicured garden and discover beauty in a suncapped lake. A theoretical mathematician leads us to an elk encounter, the crooked bodies of birds are found in the spring thaw, and we become our own pet snail in a mason jar.
Ultimately, grief is radically transformed through plainspoken yet lyrical language, and this keen examination of trauma evolves into a striking celebration of the inevitability of change.
Jessica Bebenek is a queer interdisciplinary poet and educator from Tkaronto (Toronto) who now splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack on unceded Anishinaabeg territory. She works as a risograph printer and bookmaker at Concordia University’s Centre for Expanded Poetics, where she organized the international Occult Poetics Symposium. In 2021, Bebenek was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize and Pushcart Prize, and she is the author of seven poetry chapbooks, including I Remember the Exorcism. No One Knows Us There is her first book of poetry.
What Trammels the Heart, Kelly Fordon
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: April 14, 2025
Format: Paperback
Anyone who has seen the film Spotlight will find a powerful poetic companion in this poetry collection. What Trammels the Heart casts new light on the clergy cover-up and grapples with the assaults that abruptly ended so many childhoods and ruined so many lives. Compounding the devastation of the pedophilia scandals was the later confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the ascension of the religious right. While a parent’s complicity might be the most shattering companion piece within this text, the author ultimately attains a semblance of personal redemption while honoring the testimony of the victims and challenging centuries of entrenched religious abuse.
Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story.”
The Deletions, Sarah Green
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sarah Green’s The Deletions is a spiritual and psychological reckoning with ecological grief, infertility grief, and the loss of a marriage. These poems live at the intersection of ode and elegy, simultaneously observing and reflecting upon multiple kinds of love (friendship, romance, family). With a tone that ranges from poignant to stoic and from playful to irreverent, the speaker sifts through generational layers of divorce, revisiting the violence of teen girlhood and ultimately rediscovering her own resilience.
The Akron Series in Poetry was founded in 1995 to discover and amplify writers who speak in original and compelling voices. Each year, The University of Akron Press offers the Akron Poetry Prize, a competition open to poets writing in English. The winning poet receives $1,500 and publication of their book in the series. The final selection is made by a nationally prominent poet.
Sarah Green is the author of a previous collection, Earth Science (421 Atlanta), and the editor of Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press.) She has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University.
Lady Smith, Jess Smith
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 8, 2025
Format: Paperback
Propulsive and erotic, searching and incisive, Jess Smith’s debut collection Lady Smith explores the overlap between private and public violence. These poems investigate the troubled relationship between control and intimacy and deconstruct the messaging women receive about their bodies, starting in childhood. Lady Smith resists the urge to offer a tidy healing narrative, instead revealing the way victims absorb violence and try to live with the long shadows of cultural misunderstandings and self-doubt. Smith offers readers a fearless invitation to pleasure, sensuality, and our own complicity in everyday brutalities.
The Akron Series in Poetry was founded in 1995 to discover and amplify writers who speak in original and compelling voices. Each year, The University of Akron Press offers the Akron Poetry Prize, a competition open to poets writing in English. The winning poet receives $1,500 and publication of their book in the series. The final selection is made by a nationally prominent poet.
Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith, the winner of the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize. Originally from Georgia, she is currently an assistant professor of practice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing.
Against Vanishing, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Publisher: University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 11, 2025
Format: Paperback
For almost two decades across seven collections, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s poetry has moved, inspired, and comforted readers worldwide. Now, after a seven-year silence, this beloved poet returns with her most powerful work yet. Through the lens of her late mother’s wisdom, Against Vanishing fearlessly explores life’s pivotal moments— pregnancy, miscarriage, motherhood, grief, joy, and love— with radiant honesty and masterful craft.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is a New York Times best-selling author and poet whose work has earned fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, and Hedgebrook. Her previous collection The Year of No Mistakes was named Poetry Book of the Year by the Writers League of Texas.
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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.