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.
Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man, Jose Hernandez Diaz
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The collection opens with odes to everyday images and symbols of the Latinx community. In an age of elevated racism, these odes seek to celebrate Latinx culture in the face of constant scapegoating, ridicule, and surveillance. Also, this collection explores surreal prose poetry both in the suburbs and barrios of Los Angeles and the larger American landscape. “A future prizewinner,” according to former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, this collection seeks to celebrate the Mexican American experience while also exploring how surrealism and absurdism can lead to wondrous discoveries about the self, community, and the imagination.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), and The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). He has been published in the Yale Review, the London Magazine, and in the Southern Review. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program. He is from Norwalk, California.
Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
With haunting precision, Mothersalt explores the ways in which the lyric self is split apart and stitched back together through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Interspersed with tender addresses to a child in utero, Mothersalt recounts the fraught disorientation of giving birth in America, where birthing bodies are not always recognized as empowered agents of their own story. Through the failures and reversals of the self struggling to reclaim her experience of childbirth, Mothersalt asserts a powerful new narrative of what is possible, not only in the birthing room, but in all forms of human relation.
At its heart, this is a book about resilience, healing, and joy, and the sustaining life that emerges from practices of embodied care. Through fragmentary forms inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book and the miscellany prose diaries of medieval Japan, Mothersalt brings careful, devoted attention to the labor involved in bearing and caring for young children, transforming the dimensions of the everyday and revealing its ephemeral beauty.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist, and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. She is also the author of the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, winner of the Bateau Press BOOM Contest. Mia holds degrees in creative writing from Stanford University and the University of Washington, and her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize. She is a Kundiman Fellow and a founding member of The Ruby SF, a gathering space for women and nonbinary artists. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
[gamerover], Giancarlo Huapaya, Ryan Greene (Tr.)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through intertextual intervention, this anti-linear collection reconceives the archives of Phoenix, Arizona to create a counter-map of the city and its trajectories of supremacist violence. [gamerover] tracks trajectories of colonial enterprizes, from the Arizona State Fair to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago to the Tornillo Detention Center in Texas, investigating the oppressions of each imperial form in spaces of recreation, exhibition, and spectacle. Understanding the landscape as an ever-moving hypertext, these poems challenge entrenched means of representation, uses of public space, and positions of witness.
Giancarlo Huapaya (born in Lima, Peru) is an editor, writer, curator, and educational facilitator. He is the Editorial Director of Cardboard House Press, a project dedicated to the publication of Latin American literature in translation to English and the creation of bilingual spaces in the United States. As a curator of poetics, he has presented exhibitions at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. As literary translator, he has translated into Spanish work by Muriel Rukeyser, C.D Wright, Susan Briante, Carmen Giménez Smith, Zêdan Xelef, among others.
Ryan Greene is a translator, book farmer, and poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He’s a co-conspirator at F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS and a housemate at no.good.home. His translations include collections of poetry by Claudina Domingo, Elena Salamanca, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. Since 2018, he has co-facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore.
Mirror (Bilingual edition), Zhang Zao, Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Tr.)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
This bilingual posthumous collection in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s inspired translation is a detailed, retrospective look at Zhang Zao, one of the more brilliant poetic minds from China of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He moved to Germany in 1986. After returning briefly to China in 2004, he taught in Beijing as of 2007. These poems span Zhang Zao’s short career, beginning with “Mirror,” one of his earliest and best known works, and ending with “Lantern Town,” written less than two months before his death in Germany at 47 in 2010. As Bei Dao writes in his afterword, Zhang “possessed both a thorough grasp of European literature and culture and an introspective understanding of the broad, profound Asian aesthetics: between the two philosophies, he sought a new tension and melting point.” Mirror is his first book translated into English, bilingual in Chinese and English on facing pages.
Zhang Zao 张枣 is a key literary figure of the “third generation” of Chinese contemporary poetry. Born in 1962 in Changsha, Hunan province, he rose to national fame as one of the “Five Sichuan Masters.” Greatly admired by his peers for championing a complex yet harmonizing fusion of traditional writing and avant-garde flair in his work, and for his versatility in many foreign languages, Zhang was a recognized literary critic, translator, and scholar. In 1986, he moved to Germany. For several years, he served as poetry editor for the literary magazine Jintian and taught at the University of Tübingen. He returned briefly to China in 2005 to lecture at Henan University and the Minzu University of China. Zhang Zao died in Tübingen in 2010 at the age of 47.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a writer, poet, translator, musician, and editor who writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. She is the author of a novel Dear Chrysanthemums (Scribner, 2023), five poetry collections including Rain in Plural (Princeton, 2020) and The Ruined Elegance (Princeton, 2016), and fifteen books of translation, most recently Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm by Yu Xiuhua (Astra House, 2021). Longlisted for the 2024 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Best Translated Book Award. As a zheng harpist, she has performed around the world. She lives in Paris.
I Hope This Helps, Samiya Bashir
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I’m thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.
Samiya Bashir is a poet, performer, and multimedia artist whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, and experienced internationally. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the 2018 Oregon Book Award’s Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Samiya’s honors include the Rome Prize in Literature, the Pushcart Prize, Oregon’s Arts & Culture Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature, plus numerous other awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies including MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the New York Council on the Arts. She lives in Harlem.
Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound, Crystal Simone Smith
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Publication Date: May 16, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
Crystal Simone Smith’s new poetry collection, Runagate, reimagines the experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in a stark and chilling response to the archives of chattel slavery: bills of sale, interviews, narratives, and fugitive runaway ads. Embodying the aesthetics and Japanese poetic forms haiku and tanka, her poems bear witness to the brutal and horrifying treatment of enslaved people and contrast their humanity with the inhumanity of their enslavers. In these poems, fugitive persons evade slave patrol hounds by climbing magnolia trees, use the cover of night and the detritus of a shipwreck to swim to freedom, and find temporary refuge in a cabin where a woman offers bread and water. Throughout, Smith poignantly envisions their flights to freedom—passages that were fueled by love, hope, and impossible dreams. She unceasingly gives voice to those who found courage in both bondage and freedom. In Runagate, the enslaved regain their stories and return to the sensory world.
Crystal Simone Smith is Instructor of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University and author of Dark Testament: Blackout Poems.
My Works, Ye Mighty, Christian Bök
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Publication Date: May 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
My Works, Ye Mighty expands on Christian Bök’s conceptual writing projects The Kazimir Effect and The Xenotext in which he seeks to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become an archive that stores a poem for eternity. He pairs his meditations on these works with an abundance of imagery. This essay, based on Bök’s writer-in-residence presentation at Athabasca University in Canada, is accompanied by a new poem written especially for this book.
Christian Bök is the author of bestseller Eunoia. He is one of the founders of Conceptualism and has earned many accolades for his recitals of “sound-poems.” He has starred in operas and films and has exhibited his artworks at galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and is professor of fine art at Leeds Beckett University.
A Brief History of the Midwest, Andrew Grace
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
A Brief History of the Midwest is a lyric encapsulation of the hardship and hope of the American Midwest. These poems trace the trajectory of the middle of America from its colonization to the present day. Hardships that range from loneliness to the opioid crisis to the largest earthquake in US history reverberate through the collection’ s fields, Northern waters, and derelict barns. The losses here are both historical and personal, as is the resilience of those who survived them. All the while there are moments of light that transcend a history “ written in thorn,” a moment of rest after bathing sheep, the flick of a trout in the Boyne River, a fistful of rose hips.
Andrew Grace was born and raised on Shadeland Farm in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.He is the the author of three books of poems, A Belonging Field (Salt Publishing), Shadeland (Ohio State University Press) and SANCTA (Ahsahta/Foundlings). His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, New Criterion and Adroit Journal amongst others. A recipient of the Guy Owen Prize from the Southern Poetry Review and two Ohio Arts Council awards for Individual Excellence, he is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford and is a Senior Editor at the Kenyon Review. He teaches at Kenyon College.
Adrift, Valeria Correa Fiz, Lizdanelly López Chiclana (Tr.)
Publisher: Sundial House
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Adrift focus on erotic desire, loss, and exile, and reveal two central tensions of the human condition: what one possesses and what slips away; what is desired and what can never be fully attained. This personal anthology by the award-winning Argentine poet, highly celebrated in Spain, offers a deep reflection on the transient nature of passions and life, and embraces language as a place where the fleeting can find a form of permanence. In this collection, the written word stands as a tool to combat the void, a balm that covers the wounds of loss and absence. The book closes with one final question: who controls the poetic act, the poet or the words themselves? That tension between control and surrender, and the instability it creates, is part of the mystery of the poetic craft—and of life itself.
Valeria Correa Fiz is a Spanish-Argentine writer based in Madrid. She is the author of La condición animal, a finalist for the IV Gabriel García Márquez Short Story Prize and the 2017 Setenil Prize, and Había un jardín (both published by Páginas de Espuma). Her poetic work includes: El álbum oscuro, Invierno a destiempo, Museo de pérdidas y Así el deseo. She has recevied the Manuel del Cabral International Prize, the Claudio Rodríguez International Prize, and the Clara de Campoamor Prize.
Lizdanelly López Chiclana is a student at Columbia University, majoring in Philosophy and Hispanic Studies. She is passionate about the field of translation and has edited Spanish to English translations such as Negras by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro and Desolación by Gabriela Mistral. She is also one of two Editors-in-Chief of Portales: LAIC Undergraduate Journal. Adrift is her first book-length translation of poetry.
Day’s Fortune / Fortuna del día (Bilingual edition), Carlo Acevedo, Kelsi Vanada (Tr.)
Publisher: Sundial House
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
Fortuna del día/ Day’s Fortune is Colombian poet Carlo Acevedo’s debut poetry collection, and the winner of the 2018 “Arcipreste de Hita” prize. In three sections, Day’s Fortune carries the reader into deep reflection through Acevedo’s shimmering language, influenced by his Buddhist practice and continuing in the legacy of Latin American writers such as José Watanabe. Day’s Fortune is organized into three sections, each formally distinct: “As the Rooster Crows” is composed of concise, lineated poems of one to three stanzas with the insight of proverbs. “How Sharp the Sky” is dedicated to haiku that hold the universe in a single moment, with a focus on the natural world, and “My Shadow Throbs” is made up of brief prose poems, in which everyday life takes on philosophical significance. Acevedo is a poet of depth, precision, and range, a strong new voice in contemporary Colombian poetry.
Carlo Acevedo is a Colombian poet and, currently, is a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at the University of California, Merced. Carlo’s first collection of poems, Fortuna del día (Day’s Fortune) , was published in 2019. He holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing in Spanish from the University of Iowa. Carlo has professional experience as a cultural journalist, an editor, a creative workshops guide, and a literature and writing instructor.
Kelsi Vanada is a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow, and she holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She writes poems and translates from Spanish and collaboratively from Swedish. She cultivates a readership for poetry in translation by writing reviews, and teaches occasional short-term classes and workshops. Since 2018, Kelsi has been the Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
Fables From Italy and Beyond, Grace Cavalieri, Geoffrey Himes
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this collaboration between poets, Grace Cavalieri and Geoffrey Himes, folktales are adapted, revised, and reimagined. From bears and birds to peasants and kings, these fables in verse recall the timeless quality of storytelling and introduce readers to tales old and new alike.
Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate (2018-2024.) Her new poetry book: Owning The Not So Distant World won the Blue Light Book Award, (2024) and The Long Game: Poems Selected & New was published in 2023. She founded and still produces The Poet and the Poem for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 48 years on-air in 2025. Grace was formerly Asst Director for Children’s Programming, Corporate PBS., and senior media officer, NEH. Among honors, She holds the Bordighera Award, two Allen Ginsberg Awards and the CPB Silver Medal. She’s an Academy of American Poets Fellow.
Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by Best American Poetry, December, Redactions, Gianthology, the Loch Raven Review, Pendemics, Survision, Innisfree, Salt Lick, Cathexis Northwest, Gargoyle and other publications. His poems are included in several anthologies, including Baltimorology, Singing in the Dark, and Speaking for Everyone. His song lyrics have been set to music by Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Sonia, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller and others. He has written about popular music, film, theater and books for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, Paste, Downbeat, Sing Out, No Depression and many others since 1977. His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA, was published in 2005. His book on Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash, In-Law Country, was published in 2024.
Colloquy on Mad Tom, Matthew Cariello
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
A contemplation on loss, grief, and persistence, this poetry collection moves back and forth in time, from childhood to old age, innocence to experience, constantly revisiting the pivot points upon which lives turn.
Matthew Cariello is the author of four poetry collections: two of the poetry collections, A Boat That Can Carry Two (2011) and Talk (2019) were published by Bordighera Press. The Empty Field was published in 2022 by Red Moon Press; Self Portrait in the Dark was published in 2025 by Finishing Line Press. He is a senior lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University in Columbus.
The Widowing Radiance, Dante Di Stefano
Publisher: Bordighera Press
Publication Date: May 13, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Widowing Radiance is a poem about poetry, querying what it means to live a life in poetry, and praising and interrogating the life and art fountaining through the creative imagination. This book of poetry is also about being a father, a husband, a son, and a man. And it is about the influence of the poet’s Italian American Roman Catholic upbringing, from the invocation of his namesake in the prologue to the last canto addressing his children and his children’s children.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook, including, the book-length poem, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His writing has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2018, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize (UK), the Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, among others. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018) and lives in Endwell, NY with his wife and two children.
Silk Work, Imogen Cassels
Publisher: Prototype
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Silk Work, Imogen Cassels’ debut collection, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations, folksongs, geographies of longing, and the work of memory are interplayed, though always with the haunting implication that the words we use to document our lives are never quite enough.
As they weave multiple sources from literature, philosophy, visual art and history into ways of reading and documenting, the poems in Silk Work are an exercise in language’s inbuilt, radiant futility, which is both its suffering and its joy.
Imogen Cassels is the author of Chesapeake, Mother, beautiful things, VOSS, and Arcades. She lives in London.
The Vitals, Marie de Quatrebarbes, Aiden Farrell (tr.)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
As if the relic of a long-forgotten history, The Vitals ghosts through five successive months, measuring time through the vacillations of a bereaved consciousness. An estranged voice staggers through glimpses of childhood, domesticity, conversations lost and found, and memories reverberating into language. These elliptical prose vignettes ask questions about family, survival, and of the shared experience of grief and longing. Through a documentary impulse, de Quatrebarbes’ poem persists suspended in the space left by a sudden disappearance.
Marie de Quatrebarbes (b. 1984) is the author of several books of poetry, as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Warburg, and the recipient of the 2020 Paul-Verlaine Prize from the Academie Française. She published La tête et les cornes, a poetry and translation review, republished the complete poems of Michel Couturier (L’ablatif absolu, La tête et les cornes), and edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women (Madame tout le monde, Le Corridor bleu). Since 2023, she is the co-manager of the French publishing house Éditions Corti. She lives and works in Paris.
Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. He has published two chapbooks: lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence), and his poetry and translations have been featured in Amygdala, Denver Quarterly, Spectra Poets, Asphalte Magazine, Wonder, and elsewhere. He is the managing editor of Futurepoem, and co-curates the Unnamed reading series with Ryan Cook. Born in Paris and raised between three continents, Aiden lives in Brooklyn. The Vitals is his debut translation.
In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse, Mary Mackey
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse offers readers 64 new, beautifully-written, profound poems by Mary Mackey, winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book in the United States Published by a Small Press. In this stunning collection, Mackey unflinchingly imagines the future we will face as the Earth’ s climate changes, while at the same time offering readers inspiring poems that describe how mutual aid and love can preserve hope and joy in even the most difficult of times.
Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, and reading. She is the author of 8 poetry collections, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press. Her poetry has been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Al Young, Daniel Lawless, Rafael Jesú s Gonzá lez, and Maxine Hong Kingston for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. She is also the author of 14 novels.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 5/13 and 5/19 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.
‘What if we started creating together? What if we looked at who we are from the side and saw a much more complete and honest perspective?” Read four poems by poet Sarah E N Kohrs, along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Challenger by Colleen S. Harris
“If we look beyond the voyeuristic tendency to focus on the tragedy, what might we see? This poem was a chance for me to zoom in on the calm before the storm.” New poem from Colleen S. Harris’s new book from Main Street Rag, The Light Becomes Us, along with words from the poet..
Chapbook Poem: What I Did This Summer by Elinor Serumgard
“I love New Year’s and the promise of a new start, but I like to remind myself that you can start fresh at any point throughout the year.” New poem from Elinor Serumgard’s chapbook from Bottlecap Press, Analogous Annum, along with words from the poet.
Four Poems by Christa Fairbrother
“Since women aren’t allowed the power of our anger, we take it out on each other, and that’s what this poem is hinting at.” Read four poems by Christa Fairbrother, along with words from the poet.
Multilingualism and Metaphor: On Desire/Halves by Jaia Hamid Bashir
“Bashir’s elegant debut collection investigates identity as the result of choices between individual appetites and cultural frames. … [It] announces an exciting addition to the global chorus of contemporary literature.” Read D.W. Baker’s full review.