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 Catalog of Future Mercies, Serena Chopra
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
In this luminous poetic memoir, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy and cyclical violence in an immigrant family. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to survive, to love and care for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she grapples with national histories of violence and the imperative to stay present with lineages of traumas rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A three-dimensional tapestry that constellates meaning through ecstatic repetition and rearrangement, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.
Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver and has received support from the NEA, MacDowell, Kundiman, and Fulbright. She is the author of This Human and Ic.
Riptide: New and Selected Poems, Enid Shomer
Publisher: Blair
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Riptide, Shomer’s poems, written over the last forty years, illuminate the nature of being—whether human or kudzu—“this / headlong rush, this stammer / of green, this slow / stampede toward light.” Elegant lyrics, anchored in her beloved Florida landscape, use stunning imagery to convey Shomer’s rapturous engagement with the natural world. Longer sequences showcase narrative and formal dexterity while deftly bringing historical personae to life in poems such as “Pope Joan.” New poems powerfully examine mortality and sensuality as experienced in an aging body.
With lush music and deeply spiritual attention, Shomer’s work transforms the mundane into the numinous. Now in her early eighties, Shomer is still at the top of her form.
Enid Shomer is the author of six books of poetry and three of fiction. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Boulevard, Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. Among her awards are two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the State of Florida, the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books for Shoreless, the Washington Prize for Stalking the Florida Panther, the Iowa Fiction Prize for Imaginary Men, and the Gold Medal in Fiction for Tourist Season. NPR named The Twelve Rooms of the Nile one of the six best novels of the year. Shomer has taught as Visiting Writer at Florida State University, the Ohio State University among others. For many years she edited the Poetry Series for the University of Arkansas Press. In 2013, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She lives in Tampa.
A Moment Short of Perfection: Selected Poems of Kristin Dimitrova, Kristin Dimitrova, Tom Philips (Tr)
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
Kristin Dimitrova seems to want to stop time, to make us notice how important the things we consider trivial or coincidental truly are; to remind us of the inexplicable mystery we are part of; to gently suggest that we return the love of those close to us; to offer us snapshots of our fleeting sensations; to bring back the sharp awareness of the pain that comes with life’s transience. Her poems subtly remind us that life, while it still flows, is imperfect — and the moment short of perfection is precisely what we should be grateful for.
Kristin Dimitrova is a poet, writer and translator. She is the author of eight books of poetry and six poetry selections, two novels, and three short stories collections. Books by Dimitrova have been translated and published in the UK, Mexico, Ireland, Switzerland, Chile, India, Belarus, Romania, and Czechia. Dimitrova holds a doctoral degree in journalism and mass communications. She is a winner of seven awards for poetry, four for fiction, and two for poetry translation from English. Works by her have been translated into 29 languages and published in 38 countries. This is her first work to appear in English.
Tom Phillips is a UK-born writer, translator and lecturer living in Bulgaria where he teaches at Sofia University. His poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, pamphlets and three full-length collections while he has also authored around 20 plays produced in the UK. His translations of Bulgarian poetry have also been widely published. Prior to moving to Bulgaria, he worked as a journalist for arts magazine Venue and taught at the universities of Reading and Bath Spa.
The Electrocutionist, Danielle Hubbard
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jaggedly depicting a mother’s death against the backdrop of a shattering affair, The Electrocutionist explores infidelity, athleticism, family loss, and the confines of traditional romantic relationships.
Once upon a time, you folded / around me like an envelope.
Confronting the contradictions, pains, and passions of infidelity, Danielle Hubbard’s new poetry collection jaggedly depicts a mother’s death against the backdrop of a shattering extramarital affair.
Following a strong narrative arc, The Electrocutionist shocks life into a full cast of characters – narrator, husband, lover, mother, father, sisters – each of whom is treated to their own portrait poem. The twin settings of rural Manitoba and Vancouver Island come to life as characters themselves. An electric physicality welds the collection together: What to do in the face of a mother’s terminal diagnosis? When a secret affair crashes into the open? When a marriage ties itself in knots? When a husband leaves? Run, run, run.
Both concrete and surreal, flailingly emotional and tongue-in-cheek, The Electrocutionist bridges the age-old tradition of romance and the modern desire to explode the strictures of monogamy.
Danielle Hubbard is chief executive officer of the Okanagan Regional Library. Her poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, EVENT, Grain, and The Malahat Review, among other places.
Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators, Heather Sellers
Publisher: Lynx House Press
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
Flowing along the subtropical waterways and rooted in the happenstance of our day-to-day experiences, award-winning poet Heather Sellers’ latest poetry collection, Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators, presents radiant portraits of the people — and creatures — that she encounters in her wonderfully weird home state of Florida.
Drawn from the author’s daily observation journals, the collection’s sun-struck, open-hearted poems eavesdrop on conversations among neighbors and follow the quirky behaviors of humans—and other interesting animals—throughout the course of a year in The Sunshine State. And as increasingly powerful hurricanes brew in the background, the reader experiences fresh compassion for the fragile lives carved out of a fragile landscape. In the end, Sellers assures us that paying close attention, noticing wildness in the ordinary, and ultimately, tending our connections to each other, is what will see us through.
Heather Sellers, a Florida native, is the author of two new poetry collections, Field Notes from the Flood Zone and The Present State of the Garden, as well as two previous collections, The Boys I Borrow and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses. Her latest book is How to Make Poems.
Her popular textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, is in its fourth edition, following two books on craft, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter. She’s written a children’s book, Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure, with Amy Young, and published numerous chapbooks, a collection of linked short stories titled Georgia Under Water, and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, featured in O, the Oprah Magazine and an O book-of-the month club pick. Editor’s Choice at the New York Times, her memoir was also featured on NPR, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Rachael Ray Show. Her recent essays appear in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Sun, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Haywire” was selected for the Best American Essays by Leslie Jamison and “Pedal, Pedal, Pedal,” won a Pushcart Prize in 2018. She regularly speaks to audiences about prosopagnosia (face blindness), most recently at NASA.
Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers: New & Selected Poems, Cal Bedient
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: June 24, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers speak to the emotionally and existentially tough challenge presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy: “It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task.”Filled with wit, color, and high-spirited invention, these selected poems offer no room for softness and sentiment. They carry variant voices, whispers like dramatic asides, and mind-expanding assertions as they reveal their layers and nuances. Bedient confronts disasters of politics, love, and faithless time, never turning away from the glinting axe.
This collection also includes new poems that are direct in dealing with the difficulties of keeping faith through life. They recognize that making something—for instance, poetry—is necessary to coach the world into realness and render oneself real in the process, a journey of both intensive investigation and creativity.
Cal Bedient is the author of five books of criticism, including Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Many Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist, and The Yeats Brothers, along with five poetry collections: Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, The Multiple, and The Breathing Place. He was a founding editor of the California New Poetry Prize and is a founding coeditor of Lana Turner. His poems have been published in Agni, AmericanLetters and Commentary, Bennington Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Southern Review, VOLT, and others. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
Let Other Hounds: Poems Breaking Silence Fifty Years After Sexual Abuse at Church, Scott LaMascus
Publisher: Fernwood Press
Publication Date: June 2, 2026
Format: Paperback
Betrayed by a trusted adult, an isolated boy holds his Argos close and whispers the truth into that floppy hound’s ear. Let Other Hounds is a debut collection mapping the journey of that shamed boy of ten as he moves courageously through a decade of terror toward freedom. Scott LaMascus breaks silence as an accomplished husband and father who has learned much about the aftermath of boyhood sexual abuse. After fifty years, it is a courageous and stunning gathering of words held close and distilled into poems which speak difficult truths still feared, denied, and often faced with ambivalence or even recriminations. The poems are driven by force of shattered boyhood-profound sadness, burning anger, isolation and much darkness. Yet the poet fearlessly dives down to that wreck, seeking language and metaphor to brave the perilous ascent back to the sparkling surface of life-toward healing, joy, love and boldness. The poems surprise again and again, but remain grounded in specific place, time, family, and canine companionship. The poems move readers through an experience like that of as many as one in six men in the U.S. Along this arduous path lie toxic masculinity, challenges of agency, the heroism of individual and collective action, the imposters of regret and anger, and the search for solidarity and respect for others who delay telling their stories not just to survive, but to thrive.
Scott LaMascus is a writer in Oklahoma City whose 2024 MFA is from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His debut collection, Let Other Hounds, was long-listed for the 2024 Idaho Prize for Poetry. His chapbook, The Edited Tongue: A Family’s Year with ALS, has become a resource for the rare disease community, recognized by Rare Revolution magazine in the United Kingdom and adopted for ALS Awareness Month by Mercy Healthcare and the Meinders NeuroScience Institute, Oklahoma City. His poetry has appeared in Bracken, Altadena Review, Red Ogre Review, Pennine Platform, and others. He is director of the McBride Center for Public Humanities at Oklahoma Christian University and serves as a board member of the Federation of States Humanities Councils.
Shelter in Place, Laurie Kuntz
Publisher: Shanti Arts
Publication Date: April, 2026
Format: Paperback
Every poem is a journey and every journey, a poem. The poems in Shelter In Place all begin with a journey to places of heart and mind. Shelter In Place, as the title implies, is a collection of poems which reflects upon finding a place of safety and acceptance while grappling with societal and personal issues of dissension, alienation, and assimilating into one’s own personal strength and identity. It is also a book of transitions, the poet’s voice visits all the stages of life from wanderer, partner, mother, lover, and all the epiphanies that come between. Whether it be watching a father and son playing ball, or watching a lover reach for the last mango in the fridge, or witnessing displacement of war torn peoples –the journeys we take in life, the journeys and the destinations we reach all can be the making of a poem, and these poems, the making of Shelter In Place.
Laurie Kuntz lived and worked as a writer and teacher in the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan for thirty-five years, but she is now in nomadic retirement mode. Her poetic themes are a result of working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate, and raising a husband and son. Her previous books are: Balance (Moonstone Press), That Infinite Roar (Gyroscope Press), Talking Me Off The Roof (Kelsay Books), The Moon Over My Mother’s House (Finishing Line Press), Simple Gestures (Texas Review Press), Women at the Onsen (Blue Light Press), and Somewhere in the Telling (Mellen Press). Simple Gestures won Texas Review’s chapbook contest and Women at the Onsen won Blue Light Press’s chapbook contest. Kuntz has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. In 2024 she was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and other journals. She enjoyed long walks with her two dogs, Sage and Merlin, named for wisdom and magic, but unfortunately both dogs are running loose in doggy heaven, so now she walks alone with haiku angels.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/23 and 6/29 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.
Chapbook Poem: from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys
“…what interested me was the idea of a character who didn’t do what he was capable of, not because of external circumstances, but because of either a lack of will or a seemingly perverse one.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for May 2026, from Stray Hunter’s Bullet by Lance Le Grys, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Love does not exist by Maria Giesbrecht
“This poem was inspired by a dream… I had this strange feeling when I woke up that it meant something more and started writing a poem to see if anything would reveal itself to me.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for May 2026, “Love does not exist” from A Little Feral by Maria Giesbrecht, along with a few words from the poet.
“After a loss in my family, I discovered one grieves for both the living who hide their pain and for the dead who sleep in silence.” Read two poems by Patricia Wallace, our third biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Fox.”
May ’26: New Staff, New Calls, New(ish) Name
Editor Aiden Hunt provides information about changes to PCR’s name, format, and staff in this editor’s note, which also contains links to our Spring calls for submissions.
“I kept thinking about how easily adults learn to stop seeing what’s right in front of them, especially when they’re somewhere between one country and another, neither arriving nor leaving.” Read four poems by Nivara Lune, our fourth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Notes Toward an Elsewhere.”
The Lines of Landscape: on The Catastrophes by Marie Scarles
“Scarles’ choice of title points away from place, and toward the book’s deeper and more powerful offering: a changed way of seeing, one of the hallmarks of any successful poetics.” Read the full chapbook review by contributing editor, D.W. Baker.
“Every time I plucked a few of the little orange sun sugars to take inside, their garden smell lingered on my fingers. It was almost enough to just sit with that scent…” Read three poems by Kait Quinn, our fifth biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Tomato.”
Chapbook Poem: Superbloom by Joyce Schmid
“That June, flowers bloomed everywhere in Northern California—as if to honor her, to celebrate her life. This poem is an attempt to accept the fact that she is really gone.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for June 2026, from Superbloom by Joyce Schmid, along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Well by Robin Becker
“Allowing flickering sentiments and images to play against one another, I replicated one form of consciousness. A surprising aspect of the poem: the sudden appearance of figures of government.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for June 2026, “The Well” from Midsummer Count by Robin Becker, along with a few words from the poet.
“Like a lot of my poems, this one reaches toward something impossibly out of grasp. But … maybe that’s the power of a poem, to momentarily touch something out of our reach.” Read three poems by Scott Weaver, our sixth and final biweekly poet of the Spring 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Annotating The Inferno.”
A Conversation with Abby Minor
“[A] long time ago I realized, and more or less accepted, that I would commune with most of my poet teachers and comrades via their work, not in person. And my work is how I talk to them.” Poet Abby Minor discusses her chapbook, Infinity Ballot, her Jewish-Appalachian heritage, and her convictions in this interview with new contributor, Julie Swarstad Johnson.