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.
Hard Gospel, A.L. Nielsen
Read: Five Poems by A. L. Nielsen
Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
Publication Date: March 25. 2025
Format: Paperback
Consistently, but always surprisingly, manages to insert a wry sensibility into the syncopations and velocities of the poetry. The surprises are what get me, of course. They occasion shifts of position. Perhaps they reflect them, too–some kind of nervous passion, riding the conflict between being obliged to negotiate social reality and being obliged not to? —Lyn Hejinian
A.L. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry. Born in central Nebraska, he came of age in Washington D.C. and Arlington, attending the University of the District of Columbia, where he studied with Gil Scott-Heron and C.L.R. James. He earned a PhD from the George Washington University, where his professors included Amiri Baraka. Nielsen has taught at Howard University, San Jose State University, UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, Central China Normal University and the Penn State University, where he served as the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature. His works of criticism include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, Black Chant, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Integral Music and The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka. Among his awards are The Kayden Award for best book in the Humanities, a Gustavus Myers citation for scholarship on the subject of intolerance in the United States, the Josephine Miles Award, the Gertrude Stein Award, the Darwin Turner Award and an American Book Award for his edition of Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name. His poems have appeared in both Best American Poetry (selected by John Ashbery) and Best American Experimental Writing (selected by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris).
Elixir: New and Selected Poems, Aaron Shurin
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Format: Paperback
From the early days of Gay Liberation to innovations in contemporary verse, Aaron Shurin’s has been a singular voice in American poetry. His work has unwaveringly maintained lyric presence while at the same time utilizing narrative tensions and structural constraints—especially in his chosen form of the prose poem. His queer eye has never wavered—yet his has never been a poetry confined to one audience, one mode. Elixir draws from a dozen books over a period of fifty years, presciently investigating issues of gender, homosexuality, identity, and subjectivity, via ecstatic diction, luxurious sound-scape, creative grammar, and radical form.
Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. He has been a central member of the San Francisco Bay Area writing community for half a century, having taught a generation of poets at universities throughout the city. A graduate himself of the storied Poetics Program at the New College of California, he is a professor emeritus and former director of the MFA Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Shurin has been a pioneer in LGBTQ studies and in contemporary innovative poetry, challenging fixed notions of gender and sexual identity, lyricism and narrativity, the structure of verse, and for forty years, in language both lush and colloquial, he has pioneered the resurgence of the prose poem as a critical modern art form.
A Black Doe in the Anthropocene, Artress Bethany White
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
A Black Doe in the Anthropocene confronts brutal truths unearthed by the present-day descendant of an enslaved American family—author Artress Bethany White. Following her ancestors’ enslavement in 1700s Virginia and North Carolina, White weaves together data from Hairston family plantation archives and her Black Hairston mother’s inherited oral slave narrative to create searing poems on a history of Scottish genes and African ancestry. In doing this sacred work, White expands the historical narrative far beyond Hairston plantation grounds to examine the lives of freed people who emigrated back to Africa to reestablish themselves in a Black nation, and to also chronicle her own life in the US.
Invoking themes of heritage and the lives of mixed-race Hairstons, this collection outlines the hardships many emancipated people faced in the US as well as the ways Americans continue to encounter vestiges of institutional enslavement. An essential addition to ongoing conversations on race and racial (in)justice, A Black Doe in the Anthropocene lays bare our intertwined inheritances and what we leave in our wake for future generations.
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her collection My Afmerica: Poems, selected by poet Sun Yung Shin. Her prose, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and coeditor of the anthology Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters.
All the Lands We Inherit, Darby Price
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Format: Paperback
All the Lands We Inherit is a searing, heartbreaking, and formally inventive debut memoir about family, legacy, and identity. The story centers around the increasingly tense relationship between the author and her mother, a deeply religious woman who has become self-isolated and recalcitrant amidst her many crises: failing health, financial woes, and the accumulated effects of long-untreated traumas.
As the lyric vignettes weave back and forth through time, Price investigates the ways that matrilineal legacy have shaped her mother, and how that shaping comes to bear on the author herself. In this deeply personal lyric memoir, the past becomes at once a backdrop and an active force, a thing that underlies everything that happens in the present day. From survival to substance abuse to born again Christianity, the materials of her matriarchs’ lives inform, if not preordain, the realities of the author’ s own life. Ultimately, All the Lands We Inherit asks: How much do we owe to those who came before us? And how much of ourselves do we own?
Darby Price was born and raised in Southeast Louisiana. She earned her BA at Florida State University and her MFA at George Mason University. Her poetry has appeared in No Contact, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Redivider, and Zó calo Public Square. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Collagist and The Southeast Review. She has taught literature, creative writing, and rhetoric to students from K-12 through college, and has developed curriculum for PEN America, UC Irvine, and WriteGirl Los Angeles. Darby is a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.
Sacrificial Steel, Cate McGowan
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Format: Paperback
Cate McGowan’s Sacrificial Steel uses art, history, and complex, musical poetic lines and forms to explore the biggest question we have as humans: what does it all mean?
Cate McGowan is an artist, critic, historian, and the author of three books. Her collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, will be published by De Gruyter Brill in 2024, and her novel, These Lowly Objects, appeared with Gold Wake Press in 2020. McGowan’s short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award in 2014 and was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize. Cate’s poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous literary outlets, including Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tahoma Literary Review. Professor McGowan (known as McG to her students) holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. and is currently pursuing another advanced degree at Johns Hopkins University. She regards teaching as her lifeblood and lives in Florida with her husband and animal family, but remains deeply connected to her progressive Southern roots in Atlanta, Georgia.
SCAR/CITY, Daniela Elza
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: July 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
When the trees came down no one knew how / to interpret the light. homeless / it bounces off glass surfaces / pierces the wandering eye– These poems walk streets and take snapshots of the impact financialization of our homes has on our sense of community and belonging. Meandering through physical and philosophical materials – cement, memory, water, narrative, history, sand, light, concrete, and others’ voices – Daniela Elza documents this urgent moment. The reader winds through fragments amidst urban fragmentation. A sequence of triptych poems hearkens to silos, skyscrapers, and streets. Readers here have a choice: they can read across the page or down. She channels Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni, who says, “The fabric of our cities is reflected in the fabric of our souls.” SCAR/CITY emerges from the Vancouver context to take on global issues of predatory finance and a market that mines homes for profit. It steps outside of binary conversations in favour of poetic reflection and interrogates a system that results in perceptible depravity and scarcity, which leaves us homeless, metaphorically and literally. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says, “The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed … Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work.” Amidst negotiations and advocacy in the fight for security of tenure and lease renewal, SCAR/CITY is a poetic call to action.
Daniela Elza is the 2024 recipient of the Colleen Thibaudeau Award for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry. She lives in Vancouver, BC.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/17 and 6/23 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.