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.
Tantrums in Air, Emily Skillings
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Emily Skillings’ highly anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry’s shining stars of humor, insight and edge. It follows her first collection, Fort Not, published by the Song Cave in 2017, which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic and hypervigilant debut.” Skillings writes through various poetic forms. Featuring a ballet in four acts—”part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal”—addresses to past loves—”I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open”—and an unconventional treatise on education, Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.
Emily Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.
TERROR COUNTER, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
TERROR COUNTER is a debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians. It moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood.
The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. TERROR COUNTER asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist.
Mockingbird’s Proverbs, Gail Wronsky
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
Mockingbird’s Proverbs is divided into three sections. The first section, “Mockingbird’s Proverbs,” contains “proverbs” poems, modeled on William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. They are short poems that contain statements of prediction, and plumb and interrogate forms and statements of inherited wisdom. The second section, “A Portion of Shadow,” holds poems that contain always the awareness of death and darkness. Some are lively, energetic, imagistic poems that this awareness adds a layer of shadow to. The third, “Struggling, in Spite of Everything, to Survive,” contains poems about surviving in this world in the face of death. “The moon is in labor” refers to the erosion of abortion rights. “Something is dancing in the corner of my eye” is a poem addressed to my daughter, about surviving. The last line in the book, “it (the poem) could save us if it wanted to” leaves open-ended the question of whether or not poetry really can save us. I hope that it can.
Gail Wronsky is the author of eight books of poetry, three coauthored collections of experimental poetry, and two books of translations of the poetry of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy. Her books include, most recently, a chapbook of poems called Some Disenfranchised Evening, winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Prize. Other books include The Stranger You Are, with artwork by the renowned artist Gronk (Tía Chucha Press), and Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press). She lives in Topanga, CA.
In the Roar of the Machine, Zheng Xiaoqiong, Eleanor Goodman (Tr.)
Publisher: NYRB Poets
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Zheng Xiaoqiong is one of the most significant living Chinese poets whose unique poetics brings to the fore the plight of factory workers, women, and the rural poor in contemporary China, while situating these sociological concerns within a larger context that includes classical Chinese poetry, the voices of Zheng’s ancestors, the natural environment of southern China, and her native Huangma Mountains in central Sichuan.
Zheng spent nearly a decade working in the factories and warehouses of Guangdong province, one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world. Her poems give voice to the global economy’s human toll: the twelve-hour days on the assembly line, the endless mechanical din, the injuries and drudgery, the homesick murmur of far-flung dialects in the dorms.
Zheng is an advocate for worker’s and women’s rights, but what counters the roar of the machines in her poetry is the tenderness of her attention: “we / live, the nearby crowds that come and go / they live in my poetry, on paper, immense / yet frail, the tiny voices of these sentences / these fragile hearts.”
Zheng Xiaoqiong is a Chinese poet from Nanchong, Sichuan. She attended nursing school and worked for a time in a local hospital, but discontented with working conditions, relocated to the industrial city of Dongguan, where she took up assembly line work in the factories. The circumstances and subjectivities of industrial labor—in her account, dehumanizing, mechanical, vulnerable, and sublime—would feature centrally in the poetry she began writing, which quickly earned critical acclaim. In 2007 she won the Liqun Literature Award from Peoples’ Literature, and her work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Eleanor Goodman is an American writer, poet, translator, and researcher. Her translation work has won numerous awards, including a translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Henry Luce Translation Fellowship, and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, while her 2016 book of original poetry Nine Dragon Island was a finalist for the 2014 Drunken Boat poetry award. Goodman is a research associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center.
Protocols: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar
Publisher: Ayin Press
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language. By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future?
Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet, artist, and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her debut book, CHORUS, won the 2024 Staford/Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press’s 1st/2nd Book Award. Her book-length poem “Memory of a Larger Mind” accompanies photographs by Julian Stettler in The Glacier Is a Being (Sturm & Drang, 2023). Her work is anthologized in the forthcoming second volume of The Ecopoetry Anthology and in Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology from the Laurel Review. Forthcoming books include: Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2028) and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves, 2026). Molnar lives in Portland, Oregon and in the high deserts of the North American West.
Love, Loss, and Everything In Between, Nicole Loher
Publisher: Rising Action
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Love, Loss and Everything In Between, author Nicole Loher offers a moving collection of poetry and prose that captures the essence of self-discovery amid life’s most profound transformations.
After experiencing the heartbreak of a two-year divorce while completing a Master’s degree during the pandemic, Loher found herself lost, questioning her identity, her self-worth, and her ability to love again. With deep empathy and raw honesty, this collection guides readers through the intense emotions that arise in times of transition, providing a sanctuary for those on similar healing paths.
Loher’s work, influenced by her personal journey, resonates with anyone who has navigated love and loss in a challenging world. Through evocative language and introspective prose, she explores themes of identity, resilience, and renewal. Each piece reveals glimpses of hope and strength, reminding readers that even in the darkest times, we can find beauty, connection, and the courage to move forward.
With over 50 poems and essays, Love, Loss and Everything In Between serves as both a comforting companion and a powerful reminder of our shared humanity. Readers looking for inspiration, solace, and empowerment will turn to this collection time and again as they journey toward self-acceptance, healing, and—ultimately—renewed love.
Nicole Loher is an award-winning writer, teacher, and strategist who wants to make a positive impact on the world. Her work sits at the intersection of insights, strategy, and a deep understanding of human emotion to help tell stories that move audiences. Along with her work receiving multiple awards, including Drum and Shorty Awards, she has been recognized in international press, and her work is featured in the Smithsonian. During the day, she’s the lead writer and strategist at the New York-based for-purpose creative agency, Ideas On Purpose, and is an Adjunct Professor at New York University, where she oversees the publishing of white papers. In her spare time she writes her own personal poems and for her dedicated online following.
Last Day of My Face, James Shea
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: June 27, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Orbiting a vast absence, Last Day of My Face reveals a kaleidoscopic perspective on impermanence: “Tomorrow / is a partial and promised gift.” Rich with reversals, short poems are wedged against skittery contemplations, and an easeful tone coexists with a vein of darkness. Akin to lucid dreaming, this startling volume builds toward a final poem that gathers fragments of selves into a wondrous whole.
James Shea’s previous collections include The Lost Novel and The Star in the Eye. He lives in Hong Kong.
New Songs of Innocence, S. J. Hodson
Publisher: St. Augustines Press
Publication Date: June 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“Poetry is language at play. In New Songs of Innocence S.J. Hodson is hard at work in this playground teasing us with syllabic verse (“Beside Himself with Calm”), haiku stanzas (“A Cougar Strolled By”), sonnet, (“Sonnet for Miriam”), and villanelle (“A Poet’s Dark Night of the Soul”). He relishes the natural rhythm of speech and knows how to polish it metrically. He rhymes in wonderfully complex ways, combining end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme and the unexpected sudden break from rhyme.
But poetry isn’t just play, however clever. Language is a serious matter. It’s not working unless it opens us up to our world. Beauty is at once at odds with and requires truth. In this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, S.J. Hodson comes down squarely on both sides. At its best poetry teaches without preaching. If Blake’s Songs of Innocence calls established religion into question to recover wonder at the religious spirit that gives birth to it, Hodson’s New Songs of Innocence means to call into question science, the established religion of our time, to wonder again at what gives birth to it, the scientific spirit.
S. J. Hodson studied with Annie Dillard and completed his thesis, a collection of poems called Beside Ourselves With Calm. In 1984, a long poem from that collection, “Movement in a Solid—a Composite Figure of the Poet in the 20th Century” (included in this volume) was awarded a Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry by Nimrod literary journal.
Heirloom, Catherine-Esther Cowie
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: June 26, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Moving from colonial to post-colonial St Lucia, this debut collection brings to light the inheritances of four generations of women, developing monologues, lyrics and narrative poems which enable us to see how past dysfunction, tyranny and terror structure the shapes of women’s lives, and what they hand down to one another.
Uneasy inheritances are just the starting point for this debut’s remarkable meditations: Should the stories of the past be told? Do they bring redemption or ruin? What are the costs of saying what happened? Beguiling and cathartic, Catherine-Esther Cowie’s powerful, formally inventive poems reckon with the past even as they elegise and celebrate her subjects.
Catherine-Esther Cowie was born in St Lucia to a Tobagonian father and a St Lucian mother. She migrated with her family to Canada and then to the USA. Her poems have been published in PN Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch Journal, The Common, SWWIM, Rhino Poetry and others. She is a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop fellow.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/24 and 6/30 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.