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.
Apostle of Desire, Bruce Weigl
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: May 27, 2025
Format: Paperback
Taking its cue from James Wright’s goal to write, “the poetry of a grown man,” the poems in Apostle of Desire juxtapose the peace and comfort offered by the natural world with the bruising intensity of manmade violence. These sudden tonal shifts express a vulnerability and extremity of feeling that strips audiences’ own emotions bare, leading readers to question their roles as bystanders and consumers of violent media.
In sharing his intertwining feelings of love and shame for both country and self, Weigl places readers into the role of the watcher and opens a window into the traumas of the Vietnam War and life’s daily battles with PTSD. The honesty of Weigl’s poetry exposes the ghosts of pain while still witnessing the glories of love, nature, and his ongoing experiences with the rich daily life of contemporary Vietnam.
Readers will face the solitude of regret and the hopeful pursuit of redemption—remembering the past and looking toward the future.
Bruce Weigl is the author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, most recently Among Elms, in Ambush (BOA, 2021). His book, The Abundance of Nothing (Northwestern University Press, 2012) was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, and Harpers, among a wide variety of magazines and journals. Weigl lives in Oberlin, OH.
Night Train to Memphis, Richard Tillinghast
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: May 27, 2025
Format: Paperback
Night Train to Memphis addresses several recurring concerns. A sense of mortality runs throughout, including the title poem and the last poem in the book, “Canzona di Ringraziamento,” a “song of gratitude,” which is the title of one of the movements of Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, opus 132. The poem concludes: “Give thanks / for this music that says no matter what, / we’re not done yet,” suggesting that though Tillinghast is intensely aware of his approaching mortality and is engaged in summing up and coming to terms with many of the events in his life, Night Train to Memphis may very well not be the last we’ll hear from him. At an age when many of the writers of his generation have gone silent and are resting on their laurels, this poet is still active and vibrant, writing at the height of his powers.
“The Feast of the Hungry” addresses the poverty and homelessness that plague our society, seen from a historical, even mythical perspective. “When the Chinese Came to Our Village,” a dramatic monologue spoken by a Tibetan refugee, describes the callous take-over of her village by the Chinese Communists, whose egalitarian rhetoric thinly masks brutal conquest, exploitation, and a ruthless determination to destroy the native culture.
Richard Tillinghast’s latest book, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, won the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Night Train to Memphis is his 14th poetry collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. He is recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Richard currently lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Tennessee.
Daphne, Kristen Case
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In dialogue with Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty,” Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt,” among other works, Kristen Case’s poems and lyric essays unearth the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing—or approximating knowledge of—one another.
Kristen Case lives in Maine. She is the author of the poetry collections Little Arias and Principles of Economics. She won the Maine Literary Award in Poetry for both collections. She is also the author of scholarly essays and books on American literature, most recently Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar.
Parade of Storms, Evelyn Lau
Publisher: Anvil Press
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In her tenth volume of poetry, Parade of Storms, award-winning author Evelyn Lau turns her focus on the weather. Never having thought of herself as an environmental poet, the author found that under the strictures of the pandemic the recent effects of climate change became more and more intrusive and unavoidable. Storms, floods, wildfires, environmental devastations sent news headlines leaping out in sharp relief – “a river in the sky,” “atmospheric rivers,” “parade of storms,” “heat dome” – and in such poetic terminology. Weather, both physical and emotional, forms the backdrop to this new collection.
Other themes that appear in the author’s previous work – relationships, the body, aging/illness/mortality, place, mood disorders, the shadows of the past – are explored here too.
Evelyn Lau is the Vancouver author of fourteen books, including ten volumes of poetry. Her first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (HarperCollins, 1989) was published when she was 18; it was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn’s short stories, essays and novel have been translated into a dozen languages. Her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award and nominations for the BC Book Prize and the Governor-General’s Award. Her poems have been chosen for inclusion in both the Best Canadian Poetry and Best American Poetry anthologies. From 2011-2014, Evelyn served as Poet Laureate for the City of Vancouver. Her most recent collection is Cactus Gardens (Anvil, 2022), which was included in CBC’s Top 20 Poetry Books of 2022, and shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award.
Fablemaker, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
Publisher: Gaudy Boy
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup d’etat, imprisoning the country’s democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. Written during the Spring Revolution, when the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance of the military, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s debut, Fablemaker, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning.
The poetry collection follows the speaker as she contends with her father’s untimely death, her country’s violent return to military rule, and her effective exile to the United States. Exploring themes of loss, grief, belonging, and hope, the poems grapple with a seemingly endless well of rage for the systems that failed the speaker’s father and her country—and the fables she created to survive it all.
At the heart of Fablemaker is imaginative necessity. Through Burmese folktales, formal invention, and addresses to a “dear fellow fablemaker,” Tu’s poems utilize the speculative to alchemize the pains of a fractured life into something hopeful, imagining a world that, after its burning, recovers.
The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, Nathan Spoon
Publisher: Nine Mile Arts
Publication Date: June 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
A collection of poems that explore the themes of neurodivergence and the unique perspective of someone who experiences the world differently.
Nathan Spoon brings the complications of consciousness into view. The question that concerns poets with disabilities-real ones as opposed to the metaphorical-is how do we evolve in this light? In the meantime, the poems in The Importance of Being-Feeble Minded have a toughness about them as if perhaps, the epistemology of disability is a street fight. As readers, we like the fight. I’m reminded of Ernesto Cardinal’s utterance: “Life is Subversive.”
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities. His poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Mid/South Sonnets: A Belle Point Press Anthology, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly.
Hag Dances, Susan Wismer
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: May 29, 2025
Format: Paperback
To change and heal takes great courage. To reconcile is to truly face yourself and ask the questions: Why am I angry, shameful, hateful and prejudiced? Why does fear have control of me so profoundly? Why is it so easy to move to prejudice, to be manipulative, to think of myself as better than? Susan Wismer’s new collection of astounding poetry reconciles identity and truth, if truth can even be found.
Susan Wismer (she/her) is a queer poet who is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-zaagai’gan (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent work has been published in These Small Hours (ed. Lorna Crozier) a Wintergreen Press chapbook, Pinhole Poetry, Orbis International Literary Journal, Poetry Plans (Bell Press), Qwerty, Prairie Fire, and Poets in Response to Peril (eds. Penn Kemp, Richard Sitoski).
Today, Aries, Kalie Pead
Publisher: White Stag Publishing
Publication Date: June 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
From Persephone’s descent to the turning of a card, Today, Aries illuminates cosmic binaries to understand all that exists within & outside them. These poems are elegant & inspire infinite perspectives & possibilities past, present, & future to not only find meaning in the cosmos, but one’s place within it. Kalie Pead pays homage to liminal spaces & curiosity in this coming-of-tarot story.
Today, Aries is largely inspired by an online tarot generator also created by Kalie Pead in conjunction with this book. This generator takes 156 poem fragments & randomizes them to create a divinatory meaning or “reading”, utilizing poetry for divination.
Kalie Pead is a queer writer from Salt Lake City, Utah, with a particular love of poetry, essays and computer programming. She graduated in 2023 with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. Her work can be found in publications, including the Southern Review of Books, Shenandoah, Folio, and The Martello.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 5/27 and 6/2 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.