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.
Freeland, Leigh Sugar
Book Excerpt: Ars Poetica by Leigh Sugar
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Format: Paperback
Drawing critical connections between her personal and familial history, the Jewish diaspora, the racial imaginary of whiteness, and the philosophical and literal evolution of the prison machine, Leigh Sugar obsessively searches form and language to communicate what happens in the U.S. mass incarceration system. Refreshing and honest narrative poems follow the gradual dissolution of a once intense love that begins to blur amidst the constant crush of the speaker’s loneliness. How do you choose between loving someone who exists in your life only in shadow, and walking away, knowing they don’t have the same choice?
Expanding out to touch on her own experiences with mental illness and disability, Freeland is a devastating and urgent testimony of love across the physical, political, and social boundaries of the prison industrial complex, interrogating questions of abolition, race, solitude, and memory in poems that simultaneously embody and resist formal structures.
Leigh Sugar is a writer, editor, and educator. Her debut poetry collection Freeland is forthcoming from Alice James Books in June 2025. Sugar is an associate producer for Rachel Zucker’s poetry podcast Commonplace and the creator/editor of That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings (New Village Press, 2023). She has taught many courses and workshops at sites such as the Institute for Justice and Opportunity and Justice Arts Coalition, and her work is widely published in print and online. Sugar holds an MFA in poetry from NYU, a Master of Public Administration specializing in Criminal Justice Policy from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is a University of Michigan Hopwood Writing Awardee. She lives in Michigan with her pup.
The Light Becomes Us, Colleen S. Harris
Book Excerpt: Challenger by Colleen S. Harris
Publisher: Main Street Rag
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Light Becomes Us is a collection of narrative poems exploring how the American family holds both the grace to save us and the tragedies that doom us. Poems from the perspectives of mother and daughter delve into the details of love won, lost, fought for, discarded, and salvaged.
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, other poetry collections include Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014). She co-edited Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets (McFarland, 2016) and Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching (McFarland, 2012). Harris grew up on Long Island, and as an academic librarian has made her home in places including Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, California, and Texas.
Book of Spells, Gary Lemons
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This collection of spells begins by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. We can never catch this creature, who perhaps is made real by our pursuit of it. There are glimpses—shadows—made into poems in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowers—corpses—schoolyards—the smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world we’ve constructed as it is.
Gary Lemons has written poetry since 1965. He attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1971 and 1972 and graduated from the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1975. He has studied with some of the great poets of his and any generation, including Norman Dubie, Maxine Kumin, William Stafford, John Berryman, Diane Wakoski, and Donald Justice, none of whom are to blame for what he made of their guidance. He has published eight books of poetry, including The Snake Quartet. Of the many things he’s done to support his writing, he’s most grateful for the time spent reforesting clear-cuts in the PNW where he planted over 500,000 trees. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, between the sea and the mountains, with his life partner Nöle Giulini, to whom this and all his books are dedicated.
Ocean of Clouds, Garrett Hongo
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In a surpassingly beautiful collection of poems, with his characteristic long-lined, rolling music, Hongo is alert to the possibilities of individual moments of perception and grace in the landscapes of his life, whether waiting for a ferry in Balboa after a writing workshop (“An oil slick from a yacht . . . / Spread rainbows on the water, an aleph / curving toward us”) or hanging out and playing LPs with the late, great poet Michael Harper, or watching his daughter in the sun with a halo of messy twelve-year-old’s hair, or listening to the sea, which speaks to him in so many places: at the Wai‘ōpae Tidepools, at Cassis, at Divi Bay in Saint Martin, where, he tells us, “I thought of writing to the soul of Nâzim Hikmet, / saying loving a woman was like writing a book— / . . . it is love’s body on which you write a page of kisses . . .”
These poems of cloudy moons and sandstone cliffsides, the black glass of lava shattered into sands, waves surging, and stories of a poet’s gratitude for the journey he has made, come together to make a paean against forgetting.
Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawaiʻi, and grew up on the North Shore of Oʻahu and in Los Angeles. His most recent books are The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo, The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays, and Coral Road: Poems. He has been the recipient of several awards, including fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hongo lives in Eugene, Oregon, and teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.
I Woke a Lake, Susan McCabe
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Publication Date: June 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present. Poised between reveries and ruins, the book traverses several layers: the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe’s mother’s home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake, in conversation with the oldest tree alive. These channeled non-human voices, both whimsical and uncanny, animate more recent landscapes—such as Dalarna’s nearby seventeenth-century copper mine, now closed, along with a fantastical modern ice hotel in a state of meltdown. The landmarks of loss are sometimes dizzy-making as McCabe celebrates her childhood pantheism and queer development in West Hollywood, mourns dead relatives and lost habitats, and confronts her masculine lineage, blotted out through grief, addiction, and war. I Woke a Lake holds up an invisible telephone connecting recurrent locales, among them, blasted orchards, the Veterans’ Cemetery, Elizabeth Bishop’s childhood home in Great Village, grieving parties, and a cryopreservation site. These different layers reverberate with each other, taking on a haunted and haunting music, reaching toward an otherworldly, tender overhearing.
Susan McCabe is a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, teaching poetics, modernism, ecology, and creative writing. She is the author of two books of poetry, Swirl, a Lambda Literary finalist, and Descartes’ Nightmare; two critical books, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, and Cinematic Modernism; and a dual bi-biography, H.D & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, and Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere.
Agrippina the Younger, Diana Arterian
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: June 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Agrippina the Younger follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness. Agrippina was a daughter in a golden political family, destined for greatness—but she hungered for more power than women were allowed. Exhausted by the misogyny of the present, Diana Arterian reaches into the past to try to understand the patriarchal systems of today. In lyric verse and prose poems, she traces Agrippina’s rise, interrogating a life studded with intrigue, sex, murder, and manipulation. Arterian eagerly pursues Agrippina through texts, ruins, and films, exhuming the hidden details of the ancient noblewoman’s life. These poems consider the valences of patriarchy, power, and the archive to try to answer the question: How do we recover a woman erased by history?
Diana Arterian is the author of the poetry collection Playing Monster :: Seiche and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A poetry editor for Noemi Press, Arterian writes The Annotated Nightstand column at Lit Hub. She lives in Los Angeles.
Gyms, Kyle Booten
Publisher: dispersed holdings
Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Format: Paperback
Our computational devices—increasingly powerful, increasingly “intelligent”—can now think for us, perceive for us, pay attention for us, write for us. Lest we forget how to do these things ourselves, we dearly need new models for co-existing with algorithmic media, the artificial minds on our desks and in our pockets.
Kyle Booten’s Gyms offers one such model. This book documents Booten’s process of developing nine different “gyms”—computer programs that, as he composes poems, place his human mind under unusual strain, trigger its unused muscles, and test its focus and endurance. One gym goads him to pick up and ponder weighty allusions. Another challenges him to painstakingly perceive and describe the features of various artworks. Still another stretches his verse’s syntax beyond the limits of human cognition. Gyms is a collection of poetry, but it is also the lab notebook of a speculative and idiosyncratic Human-Computer Interaction research, or of an applied, empirical approach to the future of poetic form. It invites the reader to imagine—and, more than imagine, create—their own answers to the question: how can we program ourselves to think the uncomputable?
The Unlikeness of Things, Virginie Poitrasson, Michelle Noteboom (tr.)
Publisher: Litmus Press
Publication Date: June 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Virginie Poitrasson’s debut poetry collection in English, The Unlikeness of Things, roves the territories where the ambiguities of perception brush up against the unspeakable, or even the fantastical. The writing opens onto a stark, startling, phenomenological field, in which the ordinary objects of everyday life participate fully in the ongoing formation and deformation of the self, and the body merges with its domestic surroundings, such that “fingers stiffen like wood” and a cup of tea is “steeped in… thoughts, traces of memories and halftone images.”
Inspired by the hauntingly enigmatic work of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, and Dorothea Tanning, The Unlikeness of Things offers a precisely related series of small sensory epiphanies: hallucinations, strange visual impressions and experiences. In Michelle Noteboom’s deft translation, Poitrasson’s uncanny world comes to life in a subtly defamiliarized English—as what’s unalike flickers into likeness and back again. Boundaries and thresholds are constantly crossed: “What overflows here is not my flesh but my very presence.”
Virginie Poitrasson is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her translations into French include works by Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, Ben Lerner, Cole Swensen and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. She has written about the art of Pierre Soulages for the New York gallery Levy Gorvy Dayan. Her readings and performances have been featured in festivals and events both in France and internationally. Together with composer and flautist Joce Mienniel, she co-created the musical show Chambre(s) à Écho(s), which was awarded a grant by SACD/Beaumarchais. She holds an MA in French Literature from Université Lyon 2. She was an adjunct teacher in the French department at Tulane University in New Orleans, then Fordham University in New York, and currently lives and works in Paris.
Michelle Noteboom grew up in Michigan and holds a BA in English literature from the University of Michigan and an MA from Université de Paris III – la Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the author of Landskips (Estepa Editions, 2021), Roadkill (Corrupt Press, 2013), The Chia Letters (Dusie Kollektiv 2009), Edging (Cracked Slab Books, 2006) which won the Heartland Poetry Prize, and Hors-cage (in French translation by Frédéric Forte, Editions de l’attente, 2010). She’s lived in Paris since 1991 where she co-founded the Ivy Writers Series with Jennifer K. Dick, a bilingual reading series. She works as a freelance translator in the French audiovisual industry and also translates French poetry.
something happens, Stéphanie Chaillou, Laura Mullen (tr.)
Publisher: Lavender Ink / Diálogos
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
Format:
“Stéphanie Chaillou’s something happens is a haunted chamber work evoking fugitive psychic states rarely experienced on the page. It is a piece exquisite in its beauty—poignant and arresting in its dread and despair. A shadow world of childhood lived for a lifetime in intimations, now brought to English in a lucid and sensitive translation by Laura Mullen. There’s a terrible inevitability to the narrative as it obliquely works its way into our souls in unbidden, uncanny, indelible images and leads us to the place we sense we dare not go.” —Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child
Stéphanie Chaillou’s books of poetry include Quelque chose se passe, Un Léger défaut d’articulation and La Question du centre, all from éditions isabelle sauvage. Her novels include L’Homme incertain, selected for the RTBF Première Prize and the FNAC literary season and adapted for the stage by Julien Gosselin. Her second novel, Alice ou le choix des armes, was awarded the Prix Révélation 2016. and her third novel, Le Bruit du monde, won both regional and national prizes for YA literature, and was adapted for the radio by l’Atelier fiction de France Culture. Her most recent works are: Un jour d’été que rien ne distinguait (2020), and Le Goût de la trahison (2024) and the forthcoming (August 2025) Return to Marimbault.
A MacDowell and Karolyi Foundation Fellow, a Rona Jaffe Award recipient and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Laura Mullen holds degrees from the University of Iowa and U.C. Berkeley and she has taught at Naropa, Brown, and Columbia College as well as Colby, Colorado State University, and Louisiana State University—among other institutions. Her poetry has been anthologized in collections from Norton, Wesleyan, and elsewhere; her first book, The Surface, was a National Poetry Series selection, and her subsequent poetry collections and hybrid-genre works have been published by the University of California Press, FuturePoem, and Otis / Seismicity, among other presses. A CD of Jason Eckardt’s setting of her poem “The Distance (This)” is available from Mode records. A collaboration (Verge) with artist John David O’Brien was published in 2017, and her translation of Veronique Pittolo’s Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. Solid Objects published her ninth collection, EtC, in 2023.
Animal for the Eyes, Kenia Cano, Indran Amirthanayagam (tr.)
Publisher: Lavender Ink / Diálogos
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Animal For The Eyes poems respond to violence, particularly in the state of Morelos, Mexico. They refuse, however, to reproduce the horrendous acts and yet they do not stand aside. How to reconcile the image of a bodily sanctuary against the heightened image of a cadaverous culture? How to preserve innocence in this context?
The deer, an easy and yet attentive prey, is one of the symbolic elements in this poetic scenario. In language that goes from prayers (in the manner of Vedic prayers) to a fragmented and confused postmodernism, through notes, images and phrases, the poems reveal the pursuit of innocence in a vulnerable and hostile environment. This body of sound invites us to a free and meditative dialogue.
Kenia Cano was born in Mexico City and currently resides in Cuernavaca. Her poetry books include Oración de Pájaros (2005, poetry and paintings), Las Aves de Este Día (2009, with a visual portfolio dedicated to Rodin and Audobon, winner of the Carlos Pellicer Ibero-American Poetry Prize), Autorretrato con Animales (2013), Un Animal para los Ojos (2016), Diario de Poemas Incómodos (2017, prose poems with an interwoven diary), and Parcela Blanca (2023). Her work is collected in several national and international anthologies, and poems have been translated into French, English and Italian. She has exhibited paintings in Mexico, France and the United States and been a fellow of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Conaculta. She has a master’s in Art and Literature from UAEM (Toluca, Mexico), leads workshops on correspondences between the arts, and practices yoga and human figure drawing.
Indran Amirthanayagam is a Sri Lankan-American poet-diplomat, essayist, translator and musician in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. A member of the U.S. Foreign Service, he is currently oa a domestic assignment in Washington D.C. Amirthanayagam has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Sun Scars, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Jake Syersak (tr.)
Publisher: Lavender Ink / Diálogos
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sun Scars is the first English-language translation of Moroccan-born francophone author Tahar Ben Jelloun’s earliest poetry. Originally published in 1972, this work remains a timeless scorched-earth indictment against those who would cower in “the fault-lines of… silence” while profiteers of political, economic, and religious orders trample a nation. Armed to the teeth with a vitriolic, surreal linguistic, Ben Jelloun chews away the fantastical vision of Morocco as a sun-drenched tourist’s daydream of pay-as-you-play exotica, revealing a people and a landscape writhing in agony just beneath the surface. With seismic finesse and lyrical vision, Sun Scars declares it bad faith to see anything but: “you’ve just got to drag yourself by the tip of your tongue-tied-ness by the pupil of your eyes / what’s unthinkable.”
Tahar Ben Jelloun (1944 – ) is an acclaimed poet, novelist, scholar, and human rights activist. In 1966, he was interned in a military camp for participating in student demonstrations against the Moroccan government. There, he wrote his first poems and discovered his passion for writing, eventually establishing himself as one of the most outstanding writers of the Souffles-Anfas generation. He went into exile in France in 1971, where he received a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Paris and authored numerous works, including The Sacred Night (1987), for which he became the first African-born recipient of the Prix Goncourt, and This Blinding Absence of Light (2004), which received the International Dublin Literary Award. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times. He lives in Paris.
Jake Syersak is a poet, translator, and editor. He is author of the poetry collections Mantic Compost (Trembling Pillow Press, 2020) and Yield Architecture (Burnside Review Press, 2018). He is also the translator of the poetry collection Proximal Morocco– (World Poetry Books, 2020) and co-translator, with Pierre Joris, of the the hybrid novel Agadir (Diálogos Press), both by Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine. He edits Cloud Rodeo, an online poetry journal, co-edits the micro-press Radioactive Cloud, and serves as contributing editor for Letter Machine Editions.
Escritoire, Sheila E. Murphy
Publisher: Lavender Ink / Diálogos
Publication Date: June 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Reading Escritoire is like hearing intimate, philosophical music that sings from the heart and mind, always intensely noticing the inner and outer worlds. These poems show a deftness and originality with forms and free verse ranging in topic from the quotidian to the cerebral. It is as though she’s always on high alert to hear and capture language that transcends itself and colors experience. Humor reigns supreme as she hears her titles (“Moderator from Modesto”; “Kissed by Key Lime Pie Charts”; “Stilton at the Hilton”). There is a consistently optimistic strain that runs through the work of Sheila E. Murphy. She’s amazed in her gratitude, delicately sending and rendering subtleties of loving interchange among people while recognizing political and social hurdles. There is no one standard issue Sheila Murphy poem. The range and variety are astonishing. Sometimes taut, sometimes sprawling, always focused and discovering. On the spectrum ranging from expectation to surprise, Murphy decidedly leans toward surprise.
Sheila E. Murphy is a widely published and award-winning text and visual poet with numerous individual book publications and a host of collaborative books with other poets and artists. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. Green Integer Press. 2003. Murphy was awarded the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland) in 2017 for her book Reporting Live from You Know Where. 2018. Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, she was educated at Nazareth College at Kalamazoo, Michigan (B.A. in English and music, with a minor in flute, the University of Michigan (M.A. in English Language and Literature), where she was a Michigan College Fellow, and Arizona State University (Ph.D. in Educational Administration and Supervision), where she was a Mott Fellow in the Ph.D. program. Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Poetry, Hanging Loose, and Fortnightly Review. Her most recent book is Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). She has earned her living as a management consultant and educator for more than 30 years. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/10 and 6/16 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.
Book Excerpt: Ars Poetica by Leigh Sugar
“[C]ould there be, a poetry that does investigate the body, without explosion? Maybe even with an effort towards reconstruction?” Read an excerpt from Leigh Sugar’s book, FREELAND, from Alice James Books, along with words from the author.
“…she has a sense of style, a modicum of grace, and she recognizes her place in the cosmic order, where revolution rules every other Wednesday and twice, of course, on Sundays…” Read three poems by Bart Edelman along with words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: I Worry by Flavian Mark Lupinetti
“I can’t begin to imagine doctors in Gaza courageously practicing medicine while intentionally targeted by the Israeli army aided by the United States.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for June 2025, “I Worry” from The Pronunciation Part by Flavian Mark Lupinetti.
“Quantum physics leads us to the uncanny and the terrifying. I know people fear black holes, but to me they rearrange our relationship to time and to our own lives.” Read four #poems by Victoria Korth along with words from the poet.