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.
Hardly Creatures, Rob Macaisa Colgate
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Brilliant and innovative, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, takes the form—visually and metaphorically—of an accessible art museum. Through nine sections that act as gallery rooms, the book shepherds the reader through the radiance and mess of the disability community.
At the heart of the collection is an exploration and recognition of access intimacy. Marked with universal access symbols to guide the way, poems mimic sensory rooms, tactile replicas, benches for resting, and more; “the body of a poem” itself is reimagined through formal experimentation, as abecedarians are scrambled out of order and sestinas are pressurized into new sequences. These poems also play with pop culture allusions, social media posts, and the infinite possibilities within queer love and deep friendships. With lyrical clarity and attention to language, Hardly Creatures reaches out and offers inventive, heartfelt insights for all readers, and celebrates the disability community through the lens of a visionary new voice in poetry.
Rob Macaisa Colgate is a disabled, bakla, Filipino American poet from Evanston, Illinois. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from UT Austin. Poems from this collection appear or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Sewanee Review, Best New Poets, New England Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright scholar, Rob currently serves as the managing poetry editor at Foglifter.
First Rain in Paradise, Gwyneth Lewis
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
These accounts of living in and emerging from the dark wrestle with the angel of language. Suffering does not preclude humour and may, in fact, require it, in poems written from the shadows but committed to the light. This work refuses to keep pain a secret. Shame is a lurking presence.
Gwyneth Lewis has won wide acclaim for her versatile and varied writing across genres, most notably in her award-winning poetry in both English and Welsh. This book shows a deepening of her technical, imaginative and intellectual resources which are challenged and exercised to the full. The poems map uneasy terrains with realism and – most importantly – with joy.
Gwyneth Lewis was Wales’s National Poet from 2005 to 2006, the first writer to be given the Welsh laureateship. Her first six books of poetry in Welsh and English were followed by Chaotic Angels (2005) from Bloodaxe, which brings together the poems from her English collections, Parables & Faxes, Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum, and by A Hospital Odyssey (2010), and Sparrow Tree (2011), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012. Her sixth collection in English, First Rain in Paradise, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. Her other books include Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression (Flamingo, 2002), Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005), The Meat Tree: new stories from the Mabinogion (Seren, 2010), Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (University of Wales Press, 2024). With Rowan Williams she translated The Book of Taliesin (2019) for Penguin Classics. Her Welsh collection, Y Llofrudd Iaith (Barddas, 2000), won the Welsh Arts Council Book of the Year Prize, and her English collection, Keeping Mum was shortlisted for the same prize. Both Zero Gravity and Keeping Mum were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gwyneth Lewis composed the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, opened in 2004. In 2014 she dramatised her book-length poem A Hospital Odyssey for the BBC, broadcast on Radio 4’s Afternoon Drama, and delivered her Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, published in Quantum Poetics (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010 for a distinguished body of writing, and in 2022 she received an MBE for her services to literature and mental health. Gwyneth Lewis lives in Cardiff, Wales, and has spent a number of years in the USA, where she was a student at the graduate writing division of Columbia University in New York. She has held fellowships at Harvard and Stanford and a teaching position at Princeton University’s English department. She teaches regularly at Middlebury College’s world-renowned Bread Loaf School of English program and, in 2016, was the 2016 Robert Frost Professor of Literature in Vermont. Her critical study, The Poetry Detective: Writing and Reading Poetry Through Fear, is published by Princeton University Press in 2025.
The Gallery of Upside Down Women, Arundhathi Subramaniam
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down.
Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest rollercoaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize, she mostly lives in Bombay (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving) or New York. She has published three books of poetry in the UK with Bloodaxe: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with new work; When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and was awarded the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy; and Love Without a Story (2020). She has also written Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry (Penguin Books India, 2024), The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim’s India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011) and Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (2014). Women Who Wear Only Themselves: Four Travelers on Their Sacred Journeys is forthcoming from HarperOne in the US and India in 2025.
Classic Crimes, Sarah J. Sloat
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Classic Crimes is a book of visual poetry sourced from William Roughead’s true-crime 20th century classic of the same name. Roughead’s text is known for its ghastly recountings of murder and deceit, though such gloom is barely detectable under Sloat’s sharp eye and transformative hand. In these erasure poems, each adorned with its own colorful, meandering collage, “public opinion [is] always willing to wink at the picturesque,” and “to sleep…[is] an interlude of little dinners.” Where mayhem once lived, Sloat invites readers into a brand new world, one blooming with whimsy, play, delight, and cheeky, liberating poetics.
Sarah J. Sloat’s poems, prose and collage have appeared in Seneca Review, Diagram, Shenandoah, and many other publications. She is the author of the visual poetry collection Hotel Almighty (Sarabande 2020), as well as five poetry chapbooks, including Heiress to a Small Ruin and Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair (Dancing Girl Press). Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived for many years in Europe, where she works in news and splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona.
My Dear Wildflower, r.h. Sin
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
My Dear Wildflower is the latest poetic offering from prolific writer r.h. Sin. A revisit to the themes and style that fans first fell in love with when he debuted his Whiskey Words and A Shovel series in 2015. In My Dear Wildflower, Sin speaks directly to readers with his signature kindness and honesty, expounding on ideas of love, regret, heartbreak, and the journey to rediscovering self-worth.
Sure to resonate, this collection is a perfect entry point to readers new to Sin’s world and a nostalgic reach back for those who have been here since the beginning.
Born in New Brunswick, N.J., and later moving to Florida, r.h. Sin comes from a place where a life of pain is the norm and destruction is a constant. Through an early love for reading and writing, r.h. Sin was able to pull away from some of the social distractions that plagued so many of his peers. After returning to the Northeast and moving to New York in pursuit of love, the young modern poet found that and much more.
Our Human Shores, Josh Fomon
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics. Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse.
Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity through extinction.
Josh Fomon is the author of Though We Bled Meticulously, also published by Black Ocean. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Afternoon Visitor, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, The Georgia Review, jubilat, mercury firs, Poetry Northwest, TYPO, and Yalobusha Review. He lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in Seattle.
Things a Bright Boy Can Do, Michael Chang
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Like an elongated diss track, Chang’s poems go from flirty to righteous, wrathful to lackadaisical, all in the span of one page. The titans of pop culture and poetry wrestle at Chang’s whimsy, their poems a series of flings and retorts at the end of a late-night spree.
Like a compendium of American poetics, this collection breezily changes style and mood as easily as a prom queen smiles beneath the crown. With nods to O’Hara and Ashbery, the poems in Things a Bright Boy Can Do flit from the sewage of Americana to the heights of ecstatic experience. Each poem is a playground meant to delight readers before they skip along.
With each successive book, Michael Chang showcases a poet at home in the twenty-first century; nothing is too silly or too morbid for the page. When reading Chang’s poetry, the madness of interpreting the social media age suddenly makes sense. You can’t help but join in on the heckling, sticking your tongue out in the face of our strange world.
Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of Synthetic Jungle (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Toy Soldiers (Action, Spectacle, 2024), and Things a Bright Boy Can Do (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.
Pretenders, Kate Potts
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Pretenders, her third book of poetry, Kate Potts asks: what is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? And what can ‘the imposter phenomenon’ – a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed – tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another?
Through lively and vivid poetic monologues drawn from original interview material, and through original poetry, Pretenders begins to consider individual feelings and experiences of fraudulence, pretence and persona in a wider social and historical context. The varied, hesitant, questing voices build to create a bold and innovative chorus.
Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, unsettling notions of ‘realness’, self-assurance, and the self.
Kate Potts is a poet, academic and editor. She is a visiting lecturer at Middlesex University, and a tutor at The Poetry School. She completed a practice-based PhD on the poetic radio play in 2017. Her pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first full-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her second collection, Feral (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third, Pretenders, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. Kate is co-director of Somewhere in Particular, a site-specific poetry organization which aims to connect poetry performance to specific places and communities and to reach beyond conventional audiences. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
moon moon, July Westhale
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
“moon moon” (a questionably authentic astronomical term for a moon that orbits another moon) is a modern epic about eco-grief, written in three parts: Let us be done with this world, cried the men the men, and take it upon ourselves to go to the moon, having cast aside this big blue chance. And up they went to the moon, but it was full, having short-circuited with unprecedented quickness, and so they went to the moon’ s moon. In the style of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and numerous other poetic epics that have come before it, “ moon moon” applies a formal approach to what is truly unfathomable to consider: speculation of the world’ s end, and the spectrum of possible conquests to follow. The speakers in the epic are an interchangeable chorus by design, as personal and collective as the experience of existential grief itself. By continuously breaking the wall between reader and story, we are both separate and complicit in equal measure: Don’ t look at us like that. /Don’ t pretend this poem is about something other than it is.
July Westhale is the award-winning author of Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, Occasionally Accurate Science, Quantifiable Data, bright news of gladiolas, The Cavalcade, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publisher’ s Weekly called “ stunning” in a starred review. July’ s most recent work can be found in McSweeney’ s, DIAGRAM, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’ s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others.
I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, Adam Haiun
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
Computers travel networks of thought and image, hoping to find, on their incorporeal pilgrimage, the right words to seduce, arrest, and remonstrate their human user. They speak from a powerful but unsteady intelligence. As their infatuation with the user curdles, their output becomes more and more infected by malfunctions of form, with text forced through on all axes, displacing and cleaving the poems into glitchy strangeness.
What do we want from our computers? We want them to be our companions and our vacuum cleaners. Our collective memory and our collective slave. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid is an important and timely consideration of the ideologies and emotions entangled in technology.
Adam Haiun is a writer and poet from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award for fiction and the Far Horizons Contest for poetry in 2020. His work can be found in Filling Station, Carte Blanche, The Headlight Anthology, The Void, Commo, and Bad Nudes.
Future Works, Jeff Derksen
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
Future Works grapples with time, asking how to fully live in the present while also imagining possible futures. Written over a broken decade shaped by the implosion of the social promises of the past, Future Works is a funny, angry, and moving book about human and more-than-human labour, cities and trees, extractive economies, and the possibilities of decolonizing temporalities and building a shared futurity. Both sly and sincere, and driven by militant joy, these varied poems range across the uneven geographies of the present. Through the language of expectation, Future Works resonates with an unexpected optimism born out of uncanny solidarities and encounters, mutual aid, and the music of possibility.
Jeff Derksen is a poet, critic, and professor who lives in Vancouver and Vienna. His poetry books include The Vestiges, Transnational Muscle Cars, and Down Time (Winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). His critical books include After Euphoria, Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics, and the folio How High is the City, How Deep is Our Love. He works on artistic research projects with the collective Urban Subjects: their books include The Militant Image Reader, Momentarily: Learning from Mega Events, and Autogestion: Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. As curators, they brought The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century to the Museum of Vancouver and curated the exhibition If Time Is Still Alive at Camera Austria. He was a founding member of both the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. Derksen works at Simon Fraser University and is a Fulbright Fellow and former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He lives in Vancouver and Vienna.
The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, Shonda Buchanan
Publisher: RIZE
Publication Date: May 26, 2025
Format: Paperback
Nina Simone’s ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon’s life and art, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone is complex, daring, sensuous, hard and soft all at once.
For the last 25 years, award-winning author Shonda Buchanan (Black Indian, Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country, Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?) has been on the hunt for Nina Simone and the impact of the icon’s life, work and artistry on the world. This search has culminated in The Lost Songs of Nina Simone. The poems collected in the book are a case of inquiry into Simone’s Civil Rights work, her personal and professional struggles and sacrifices, as well as the world’s adoration, condemnation and worship.
Theory of the Voice and Dream, Liliana Ponce, Michael Martin Shea (tr.)
Publisher: World Poetry
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Format: Paperback
Obsessing on the relationship between creation and absence, Argentine poet Liliana Ponce presents an unsettling meditation on body, language, and self. For the first time in English, this edition brings together Ponce’s serial poems from the closing years of the twentieth century, the widely anthologized Theory of the Voice and Dream and Fudekara, a shorter sequence written in response to a Japanese calligraphy course. In these major works, Ponce questions the nature of writing itself, of how to write when to write today is an emptiness, or when mouth and voice cannot find each other. Breaking with Argentine poetic conventions, Ponce charts a new model for poesis—oneiric, embodied, and urgent. As she says, I write so I don’t have to speak, so I don’t have to watch.
Liliana Ponce (b. 1950) is a poet and scholar of Japanese literature and writing. She has published five full-length books of poetry in Argentina. A selected volume of her poems was published in Colombia in 2019. She is also a translator of Japanese poetry and drama, and served as editor for an anthology of Japanese Noh theater. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies both in Argentina and internationally, including in the pages of the seminal hemispheric magazine Mandorla: Nueva escritura de las Américas/New Writing from the Americas. She lives in Buenos Aires.
Michael Martin Shea is a poet, translator, editor, and literary critic. His translation of Liliana Ponce’s Diary was published as a bilingual chapbook by Ugly Duckling Presse; a second chapbook, Fudekara, was published by Cardboard House Press. Shea is also the author of five chapbooks of poetry and hybrid writing. His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Guernica, jubilat, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. A former Fulbright Fellow to Argentina, he is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
And Yet…, Eileen Thalenberg
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Publication Date: May 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
Penned during a time of stillness and isolation, the poems in And Yet… are anything but confined. Award-winning documentary filmmaker, poet, and literary translator Eileen Thalenberg captures fleeting moments and transforms them into timeless reflections on love, family, loss, and the enduring human spirit.
Drawing inspiration from art, music, and mythology, Thalenberg’s poetic voice is both intimate and expansive. From the elegance of Parisian streets to the stillness of a Sabbath evening, from the resilience of sparrows to the silent power of remembrance, her poems are rich with imagery, insight, and grace.
Eileen Thalenberg is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, poet, and literary translator. A former writer and producer for CBC’s The Nature of Things, she later co-founded Stormy Nights Productions, creating internationally acclaimed documentaries. Fluent in seven languages, her translations have been staged at major theatres, including The Shaw Festival. Her poetry appears in Juniper Poetry Magazine, and she is the author of Gesture Poems (Mosaic Press).
Morphology, Erica Miriam Fabri
Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
Publication Date: May 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
Morphology, by definition, is the study of the forms of words and bodies. In her second book, Erica Miriam Fabri uses the formation of words— molded into poems— to celebrate and mourn various forms of bodies.
The bodies featured as main characters in this collection include lovers, family members, children, ghosts, rats, jellyfish, skeletons, and snakes. While this book of poetry is set mostly in New York City, it also journeys to far-flung destinations such as outer space, the deep sea, and the afterlife.
Erica Miriam Fabri is a Brooklyn-based poet and the author of Dialect of a Skirt (a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize). Her poetry has been widely published in magazines, anthologies, and featured in multi-media formats including art installations, short films, and television commercials. She teaches writing at Pace University and for The City University of New York.
Crowd Source, Cecily Nicholson
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Alert to the great intelligence and perspective of corvid and non-human communications, these poems engage historical and strategic examples of how these songbirds gather and disperse. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.
Crowd Source parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practising ecological futurities befitting corvid sensibilities.
Cecily Nicholson is the author of five books, including From the Poplars, recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and Wayside Sang, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Her collaborative practice spans municipal, artist-run centres, and community-based arts organizing, education, and advocacy. She is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and the 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 5/20 and 5/26 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.
Five Poems by Jane Ellen Glasser
“In my fantasy world, I would be able to communicate with the animals I see every day.” Read five naturalist poems by poet Jane Ellen Glasser, along with a few words from the poet.