We here at Philly 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.
A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht
Book Excerpt: Love does not exist by Maria Giesbrecht
Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
Publication Date: May 8, 2026
Format: Paperback
In A Little Feral, Maria Giesbrecht delivers a debut collection that navigates faith, family, and personal resurrection through a voice at once wild, intimate, and quietly rebellious. Written in the aftermath of leaving a conservative Mennonite upbringing, these poems chart a parallel journey of breaking away— from father, from God, from the confines of obedience. Giesbrecht’ s language is lyrical and unflinching, a cadence that moves between tenderness and defiance, weaving ancestral memory with moments of stark revelation. A Little Feral asks readers to reimagine where holiness might be found— in the fractures of family, in the undoing of inherited faith, and even in the loneliness of a world shaped by patriarchy and exile.
Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose work explores her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, ONLY POEMS, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Best of Net nominee, and the founder of Gather, an international writing community that connects poets worldwide. Born in Durango, Mexico, she now lives in Toronto, Canada with her fiancée.
THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD, LM Rivera
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
LM Rivera’s THE BOOK OF THE RED ABSURD is a poetic autobiography seen through the lens of literature, cinema, theory, history, mythology, and demonology. Presenting themselves in a sort of kinship with academic traditions, these poems move beyond scholarly preciousness to uncover something deeper, stranger, and more honest. This collection is a descent into an absurdist avant-garde performance, immersing the reader in the head of “red” experiences—those with sensations of extremity, despair, amusement, and derision. Here we find a heart laid bare through poetry that aims for the deadliest parts and dances wildly along the way.
LM Rivera is a writer and coeditor of Called Back Books. His work has been published in numerous journals and magazines, and he is the author of Against Heidegger, The Little Legacies, and The Drunkards. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED, John Cross
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
John Cross’s WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED opens in exile and st(r)ays there. The character Mathias, a trickster who opens this collection, wakes with a primal utterance and startled vision born of commotion. Bewildered by the noise of our culture, he finds brief glimpses of meaning in fleeting, slippery moments. Mathias navigates life in exile, exploring the depths of his situation through the beat of his song and stutter, which manifests in a deranging of language and finds a foothold in cosmic disorder. A “scavenger for armor” in a world of loss and wreckage, he feels the terror of existence while holding onto the promise of a “breath still audible at near dark.”
The second half of the book opens in the harsh light of a sun that “pushes down on our feet” and implores that we witness our world. In this brightness, Cross conjures shadows from his own memory and confronts a world where a president throws “his people to the wolves.” These poems move through the world in wonder, offering an elegiac hushed prayer to all that we are losing in a changing environment, to “the oriole ascending / the palo verde of bee vibration . . . & Mitchell’s satyr butterfly.”
John Cross is the author of the chapbook staring at the animal, and his work was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has appeared in Volt, Lana Turner, Yalobusha Review, and New American Writing, among others. He lives in Los Angeles.
Dismantling, Eve Joseph
Publisher: Anvil Press
Publication Date: May 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Eve Joseph’s latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious. In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legally people, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes the act of taking something apart and building again from scratch allows a poem to find its true form. Dismantling contains new works of prose poetry, along with a series of centos – poems build entirely on the lines of other poets. Old voices engage with new ones. Tomas Tranströmer and Ocean Vuong speak about a great unsolved love while Audre Lorde walks with Ahmad Almallah and César Vallejo as the grass bends, then learns to stand again. Joseph’s poems are about language; how lonely it is until time enters the poem and places it where it is meant to be.
Eve Joseph lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry, The Startled Heart and The Secret Signature of Things, were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry Quarrels (Anvil) won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize, and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and The ReLit Award.
Baby Face / Face de bébé, Sallie Fullerton, Suzanne Girard
Publisher: Invisible Books
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Iconoclastic and authoritative, revered and feared, Baby Face’s story remains nevertheless largely undocumented. Yet for those in the know, the Montréal queer scene is nearly impossible to recount without her. The story of Baby Face is, too, the story of a formative time and place in North American lesbian culture and a testament to those who have worked to preserve her history.
Blending photographs by Baby Face’s personal photographer Suzanne Girard with archival clippings, spliced interviews, audio from independent films, and other marginalia, the book offers a window into a particular moment in queer life—and a nod to the DIY methods often used to preserve histories relegated to the margins.
Sallie Fullerton is a writer living in Hudson, New York. Their work has appeared in Bennington Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Hub, Pioneer Works Broadcast, Frontier Poetry, among other publications, and was anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles. Their work has been supported by a Fulbright Arts/Research Grant and a fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Baby Face/Face de bébé is their first book.
Suzanne Girard is a Montreal-based photographer who began amidst the social photography movement of the 1970s. Co-founder of the photography atelier Plessisgraphe with Marik Boudreau, they documented the emerging second wave feminist movement and a burgeoning lesbian cultural and political scene in Montreal in 1970s and 1980s. Her photographs have been published and exhibited in Canada, Europe, and South America. Some of her documentary photos are part of the National Archives of Canada collection. Suzanne also worked in the festival and events industry for over 30 years (Image & Nation and other various film festivals, the 5th International Feminist Bookfair and she directed Divers/Cité for 21 years). She also taught photography in the Media Arts department of John Abbott College for 25 years.
Soul Cake, Lisa Russ Spaar
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Lisa Russ Spaar’s seventh full-length collection of poems, Soul Cake, which takes its title from an ancient mummer/wassailer’s carol, leans with late-life, hibernal ecstasy into Spaar’s flood subjects: God hunger, soul-making, language, beauty, and an unquenched desire for the b/Beloved. Bodily and mysterious, the poems wrest from their rich, sumptuous, surprising lexicon flashes of dread, beyonding, and gnosis.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close; six acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems; and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, a collection of poetry history and criticism. She was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.
Get Closer, Ryan Van Winkle
Publisher: Polygon
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his latest collection, Ryan Van Winkle uses photographs to access themes of abandonment, generational incomprehension and the very notion of how we end up where we are. This collection is a poetic photo album.
Through these poems, Van Winkle looks at life through a lens – to get closer – to meditate on the anxieties and insecurities of a life. He reckons with how we remember and misremember, and how memories and people can be difficult, and at times painful, to hold on to. In reading this collection it becomes clear that while photographs can be carefully ordered, the emotions and impressions surrounding them cannot.
Ryan Van Winkle, an American who has been living in Scotland for over 25 years, is an award-winning author, artist and producer based in Edinburgh. He is currently the Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. His first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here (Salt), won the Crashaw Prize. In 2015, his second collection, The Good Dark (Penned in the Margins), won the Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of the Year award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland.
raw & zero, imogen smith
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
Occupied with trans spirituality, the genocide in Palestine, and the manifold intricacies of queer love and struggle, the poems in imogen smith’s second collection, raw & zero, open up an unabashedly musical incitement to take a stand on honest ground. At the heart of this collection lies the tensions between the philosophical and the erotic. Language unspools throughout long form pieces influenced by concrete poetry, as the poet plays with a sense of shape, space, and symbols. With raw & zero, smith charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book’s themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.
imogen smith is a poet & transsexual. She is the author of raw & zero & stemmy things, both published by Nightboat Books. They believe in a free Palestine, a borderless world, & trans power.
Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, Maria Paz Guerrero, Robin Myers (Tr)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In María Paz Guerrero’s Pink Tongue Out, Blind Cat, unnamed bodies are cut open in search of disease, legs buckle and collapse under pressure, and a blind cat stalks its way through the collection, bumping into unseen objects as it travels. María Paz Guerrero’s poetry collection is both experimental and lyrical, forcing readers to fall into its eerily clipped rhythm.
María Paz Guerrero is the author of the poetry collection Dios también es una perra (Cajón de Sastre) and the essay “El dolor de estar vivoen Los poemas póstumos de César Vallejo” (Universidad de la Andes), and she is the editor of the poetry anthology La Generación sin Nombre (Universidad Central). Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Pájaros de sombra: Diecisiete poetas colombianas, 1989-1964 (Vaso Roto) and Moradas interiores: Cuatro poetas colombianas (Universidad Javeriana, colección de poesía). Her second collection, Los Analfabetas, will be published in 2020 by La Jaula publications. She received her Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from The New Sorbonne University, Paris. She currently works as a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the Universidad Central in Bogotá.
Robin Myers is a Mexico City-based poet and Spanish-to-English translator. Recent book-length translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (2024), The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (2024), In Vitro by Isabel Zapata (2023), Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022). Other translations have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, Kenyon Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Two Lines, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award in poetry and among the winners of the 2019 Poems in Translation Contest (Words Without Borders / Academy of American Poets). As a poet, Robin is the author of the forthcoming Centro (Coffee House Press, 2026). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2022, Guernica, The Drift, Poetry London, Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, Annulet Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is an alumna of the Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Literary Translation Centre, the Community of Writers, and Under the Volcano.
This Elegance, Derrick Austin
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. Here, artists, thinkers, and pop icons commune in a similar sacred dialogue—Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monáe, Symone, and others appear as guiding spirits and creative kin.
For a Black, queer person so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance—a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song—an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, finalist for a Golden Poppy Award, and a Lambda Literary Award; Trouble the Water (BOA, 2016) winner of the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize, finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award, Lambda Literary Award, and more. Austin lives in Chicago, IL.
The Post Office: An Opera in Poems, Elaine Sexton
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
Elaine Sexton invokes the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general, to witness an America unravelling. In a contemporary one-room U.S. post office, a blistering conflict erupts between co-workers about gay marriage, free speech, the country’ s racial and class divide, and democracy itself. Here readers will find an America, in its gorgeous and messy diversity, that is looking for reason where there seems to be none. This collection of poems that constitute the libretto for a timely chamber opera features photographs and other representations of the United States Post Office, in its many forms, and excerpts from the original score. Written in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, The Post Office will premiere at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in May 2026, marking the debut for a bold, new creative team of Kaminsky, joined by Sexton and architect Charles Renfro, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
The text of this opera in poems was developed in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, whose first opera at Brooklyn Academy of Music, As One, is one of the most produced contemporary operas worldwide with over 60 productions to date.
Elaine Sexton is a maker, critic, teacher, and librettist. The Post Office: An Opera in Poems is her six collection of poetry, and first libretto, written in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky. She is 2026 NY State Council for the Arts Grantee for this work. Her poems are widely anthologized and published in journals including Poetry, O! the Oprah Magazine, with recent work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry International.
Two Tongues, Maria van Neerven
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Written with a tender love for her Yugambeh language, Maria van Neerven reflects on the legacy of colonisation and racism, and the aftermath of intergenerational harm. At the same time, she shines a light on the importance of family and culture, celebrating the Indigenous women who guided and taught her – extraordinary women filled with resilience and strength. In this way, van Neerven reclaims the stories of her ancestors, giving a voice to those who weren’ t allowed one in the past. Two Tongues regathers what has been stolen to reassemble a life of compassion and – above all – love for family and Blak pride.
Maria van Neerven is a Mununjali Yugambeh woman from south-east Queensland. She is a retired library technician who loves reading and writing poetry. She has been published in The Lifted Brow: Blak Brow (2018) and In Our Hands (2022), a collection of poetry from Elders and knowledge keepers. Maria was one of the four inaugural winners of the Mascara Varuna Writers’ and Editors’ Residency for her poetry in 2023, and also a 2024 Next Chapter Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. She has performed her work on stages across Alice Springs, Brisbane and Tokyo. Two Tongues is her first poetry collection.
Orange, Noel Quiñones
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
Through narrative poems and innovative forms inspired by color theory and elementary school, Orange explores the ripple effects of queerness, lies, and finding yourself in a family. In this visceral new collection, however, the scope of “family” expands well beyond the nuclear unit; Noel Quiñones’s poems center relationships between friends, cousins, partners, and many other family members. Painting a vivid and fraught portrait of the North Bronx, Quiñones unflinchingly confronts the contradictions at the heart of love, divorce, gender, religion, and community, unpacking the complexities of coming out, divorced parents, and generational trauma. Orange ultimately argues that truth resembles color: something real, yet elusive, and impossible to prove.
Noel Quiñones is an Emmy award-winning Nuyorican writer, educator, and speaker from the Bronx. Their work has been published in POETRY, the Boston Review, Poem-a-Day, and Michigan Quarterly Review. They have also received fellowships from Tin House, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Poetry Foundation. They currently live in Chicago and teach with the Chicago Poetry Center.
The View from Childhood: New and Selected Poems, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, grandchild of Italian immigrants, granddaughter of coal miners, and author of twelve published poetry collections and thousands of poems, offers her most personal collection to date. These are poems that speak to people, for all of us come from somewhere—some world we have necessarily left behind but that still lives within us and makes us who we are.
This book is for lovers of stories, told through artful poems and vivid prose, as it invites us all to reflect, laugh, smile, shed a tear, re-live, and perhaps even make sense of our own childhood experiences. Dip into it while sitting by the fire or gathered with friends and family in a shared celebration of our personal histories and the bonds that connect us to one another.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., is a writer, poet, and professor. She teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is also founder and co-editor of the Curran Center’s book series, “Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series,” published by Fordham University Press.
Gold Star, Emma McKenna
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
Drawn from the experience of growing up in poverty in a single-parent home and escaping to the city at the age of sixteen, these poems look at the physical and emotional implications of trauma but also reveal how being bisexual and disabled can be sources of resilience, joy, and creativity.
Examining the way sexism and sexual violence exist as a spectre throughout the lives of women and girls, Gold Star also contemplates issues of child abuse and neglect, reproductive health, and the complex decision to be child-free. Never shying away from the weight of its vital subject matter, this is an urgent and unflinching feminist exploration of embodiment.
Emma McKenna is a multidisciplinary writer with a passion for women’s histories and narratives. She received her PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University and has published widely on feminist issues. McKenna is also the author of Chenille or Silk, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry. Born in Duncan, British Columbia, and raised in Alberta, she currently lives in the Waterloo Region with her husband and two dogs.
A Current Through the Flesh, Richard-Yves Sitoski
Publisher: Ronsdale Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
A poetry collection that weaves family history into an abrasive cloth, tailored into the full regalia, pre-moth-eaten and torn, of everyday life. With dry and unflinching humour, Richard-Yves traces traumas back four generations and across families to reveal the flimsiness of male self-images, the perils of silence and the latent power of women oppressed by toxic beliefs. His poetry surprises and unsettles with haunting images like empty hands that always seem to hold a hammer and sharp knives that are invisible in soapy water. As a spoken-word artist, Richard-Yves’ infuses his words with pulse and rhythm creating evocative snapshots: a father as a derelict house, love like the last trip to the vet. But he tackles the dark side of domestic life with compassion, honesty and a tinge of bewilderment: “ Sometimes love / is a thing you catch with bare hands, carefully, / so as not to crush it.
Richard-Yves Sitoski is a poet, songwriter and performance artist. He was the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound, Ontario, on treaty territory 45½ , on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. His poems and reviews have appeared in literary magazines including PRISM, The Antigonish Review, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Train, CAROUSEL, Pinhole Poetry, Watch Your Head, The Windsor Review, and QWERTY. He is co-editor of Poems in Response to Peril: An Anthology in Support of Ukraine (profits from which went to displaced Ukrainian cultural workers). He is the author of the chapbook How to Be Human and the full-length collection Wait, What?. His one-person musical theatre piece, Butterfly Tongue, has played to sold-out houses. He is the Artistic Director of the Words Aloud Poetry Series and serves as Marketing and Publication Coordinator at Kegedonce Press.
This Poor Book: A Poem, Fanny Howe
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback
For decades, Fanny Howe has been our great poet of spirit and conscience, dislocation and bewilderment. In This Poor Book, she has gathered a selection of poems and excerpts from the last thirty years, including new and revised poems, and has arranged them into an astonishing singular poem. Across this brilliant reconfiguration of her work, we follow the poet as seeker, both faithful and foolish, searching for language and existence beyond the machines of economy, judgment, and war. Howe interrogates the contradiction and violence of the twenty-first century, the misbegotten experiences that have given rise to a culture of authority and adulthood rather than one of innocence and childhood.
These spare lyrical shards move with a jagged but persistent direction—leading between doubt and belief and toward Howe’s enduring vision for a life of humility, justice, and imagination.
Fanny Howe is the author of many books, including Love and I, The Needle’s Eye, and Second Childhood, a finalist for the National Book Award. She received the 2023 Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wellwater, Karen Solie
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: May 5, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in Wellwater, Karen Solie’s sixth collection, explore the cultural, economic, and personal ideas of “value,” addressing housing, economic and environmental crises, and aging and its incumbent losses. Places we might think of as home have become unaffordable or inaccessible. A poor excuse for an apartment, a basement suite is “cold on five sides, like childhood,” and “tries to forget we are here.” Power lines, radios, and fluorescent lights all emit a “low hum of menace,” and “vulgar muffins, overstuffed as geese with funnels down their throats” come to represent a culture in decline.
Solie, who grew up in Saskatchewan on a small family farm, sees the economic and environmental crises as intertwined. Climate change has made small farming untenable, and onward creeps the corporate control of food production. “There is no starting over,” Solie writes. And yet, life, echoing with the presence of those lost, ambles along day by day.
Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her five previous collections of poetry—Short Haul Engine, Modern and Normal, Pigeon, The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out, and The Caiplie Caves—have won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and have been short-listed for the Derek Walcott Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2025, Wellwater was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches half-time for the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and lives the rest of the year in Canada.
Maybe, Alice Attie
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in Maybe form a tapestry of voices that slip from visibility to invisibility, illusion to disillusion, the conceivable to the inconceivable. Alice Attie writes of boundaries loosening, of transformations and transfigurations born of the unknown and the uncertain. Her poems suggest that this world will dissolve, and it will reappear as something other, something ineffable yet lodged in language, something fraught with an urgency that is both sublime and unbearable. Attie asks from what vantage point can the seer see, the writer write, the listener hear, learning ultimately that “for the length of my years to lengthen, I place the pebble on my tongue and rearrange the boundaries”?
Alice Attie is an artist and a writer based in New York City. She is the author of These Figures Lining the Hills and Under the Aleppo Sun.
Párodos, Jay Wright
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: May 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Párodos, Jay Wright returns with a collection of poems that challenge through their density and reward with their inherent music. With a polyglot vocabulary and a restless spirit, Wright navigates the landscapes of memory, history, and philosophy. “The soul now must have a feel for the string,” as Wright says, a Pythagorean sentiment that echoes throughout this intricate collection and the entire body of his work. These poems offer a singular testament from one of our most important poets.
Born in 1934, Jay Wright is the author of seventeen previous books of poetry as well as plays and essays. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
Diver, Alan Shapiro
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Publication Date: April 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Diver, Alan Shapiro plunges into the profound depths of mortality, memory, and the human condition with his signature blend of philosophical rigor and emotional clarity. These poems navigate the liminal spaces between life and death, presence and absence, offering meditations on aging, loss, and the strange persistence of love.
From the ancient world of “Tiberius on Capri” to the intimate recollections of “False Teeth,” Shapiro demonstrates his remarkable range, moving seamlessly between the cosmic and the quotidian. Whether contemplating tardigrades on the moon, the mechanics of grief, or his father’s dentures, he finds in each subject a doorway to larger questions about what it means to be human.
With wit, tenderness, and unflinching honesty, Diver captures the precarious beauty of our brief time here. These are poems that refuse easy consolation, instead offering something more valuable: the clear-eyed recognition that even in diminishment, even at the edge of the abyss, there remains the possibility of grace, connection, and hard-won understanding.
Alan Shapiro is the author of 15 books of poetry (including Reel to Reel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Night of the Republic, a finalist for both the National Book Award and The Griffin Prize), two memoirs, a novel, two books of critical essays, and two translations. Shapiro has taught at Stanford University, Northwestern University, Warren Wilson College (in its low residency MFA program for writers), and from 1995 to 2021 he was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina.
Wound Archive, Anna Veprinska
Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Wound Archive is a collection of minimalist poems that document the concurrent ending of a relationship and the onset of a chronic invisible illness. These fragmentary pieces turn woundedness—both emotional and physical—into an act of linguistic reformation. The symbol of the wound recurs throughout, tracing the ways heartbreak and illness inhabit the body, and how the corporeal becomes a portal to the incorporeal: god, ghosts, healing. Tender and precise, Veprinska’s work reveals how brevity can hold the vastness of ache.
Anna Veprinska is the author of Bonememory (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and Sew with Butterflies (Steel Bananas Press, 2014), as well as the chapbooks Stone Blossom (Anstruther Press, 2022) and Spirit-clenched (Gap Riot Press, 2020). Her monograph Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) received Honourable Mention in the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She won the 2025 Chinook Poetry Contest, was a finalist for the 2024 Ralph Gustafson Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2023 and 2021 Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.
We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us, Roxanna Bennett
Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us marks a striking formal shift for Bennett, moving away from the recombinant sonnets that defined her previous three volumes. Infusing disability poetics with concepts of collage, Bennett enacts the improvised experience of disabled persons navigating an inaccessibly constructed world, using whatever comes to hand to make meaning and survive. Though her approach has evolved, her voice remains as singular, incisive, and powerful as ever.
Roxanna Bennett is the author of The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), Unmeaningable (Gordon Hill Press, 2019), and Uncomfortability (Gordon Hill Press, 2023). Her work has won the 2020 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the 2020 and 2022 Raymond Souster Awards, and the 2021 CBC Best Canadian Poetry. It has also been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award for Poetry, and the Pat Lowther Award. We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us is her fourth collection. She lives in Whitby, Ontario.
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Contents
Chapbook Poem: Slow Burn by Evan Wang
“The concept of personifying a slow burn deeply resonated with who I thought myself to be—a slow burn, love flickering around me.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2026, “Slow Burn” by Evan Wang, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: She wants shimmering scales by Nicole Alston Zdeb
“The nexus of the erotic, the social, and the body felt relevant to what I was experiencing at the end of the 20th Century. There are glimmers of personal lore as well…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for April 2026, “She wants shimmering scales” from The End of Welcome by Nicole Alston Zdeb, along with a few words from the poet.
“I wanted to explore how time was registered not only by the calendar and clock, but also in the various utilitarian tasks of my mother’s life.” Read three poems by Ron Mohring, our first biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fuse.”
Three Poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn
“Children in these circumstances are deprived of love at a formative stage and learn to immediately behave like adults without the benefit of the learning path of childhood.” Read three poems by Andrew Pelham-Burn, our second biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Conkers.”
A Conversation with John deSouza
“Language is a powerful tool and can do great harm both to ourselves and to those most close to us when used cruelly or selfishly.” Poet John deSouza discusses his chapbook, This Rough Magic, his creative process, and the influence of John Ashbery in this interview with editor Danielle McMahon.