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.
Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, Rhoni Blankenhorn
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet explores landscapes of grief, desire, and identity. How does memory collapse time? In what ways do mourning and longing echo each other? What violence persists beneath narrative and aesthetic surfaces, upholding systems of belief and power? This debut poetry collection revolves around imagination as an act of resilience and rebellion. Blankenhorn’s speaker communes with dead beloveds while buttering toast, petting dogs, kissing lovers, looking at art, holding hands with friends, and traversing cities and deserts. The beauty and comedy of daily life becomes a provocation into nonlinearity, sexuality, family history, and multiracial selfhood. Slipping between exterior and interior with an unflinching gaze, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet invites us to embrace the impossible complexity of human experience.
Rhoni Blankenhorn is a Filipina American writer. Her debut, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet, won the Trio Award and is forthcoming from Trio House Press in July 2025. A Saltonstall fellow, a Sewanee scholar, a Tin House Summer Workshop alum, and a Community of Writers alum, her work can be found or is forthcoming in Narrative, AAWW, Mercury Firs, Honey Literary, Couplet, Beloit, Copper Nickel, Adroit, and elsewhere.
Mele, Kalehua Kim
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Mele, by Kalehua Kim, embodies the meaning of the word “mele” – a Hawaiian song or chant traditionally used to preserve history through the oral tradition. Winner of the Trio House Press Editor’s Choice Prize, Kim’s debut collection evokes modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of family and self, as well as the grace and generosity of healing, acknowledgement, and commemoration. The poems reflect on what we inherit and how who we become is intertwined with who our parents were and are, and the pain of facing that reality: “One day your voice will become mine,Ka leo o maua/Though I am not prepared for your end…” With this mele, Kim honors the memory of a lost mother, as well as the struggles of a daughter as she becomes a wife and mother herself, while honoring her roots and forging a new path.
Kalehua Kim is a poet living in the Pacific Northwest. Born of Hawaiian, Chinese, Filipino and Portuguese descent, her multicultural background informs much of her work. A 2023 winner of the James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets, she is currently pursuing an MFA through the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is a Fellow with the Indigenous Nations Poets and her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal. A winner of the 2024 Trio House Press Editors Choice Prize, her first collection of poems, Mele, is forthcoming from Trio House in 2025.
The Grace of Black Mothers, Martheaus Perkins
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Carried within Martheaus Perkins’ The Grace of Black Mothers are the many howls of lost children and their martyrized mothers. This debut collection brings a lyrical reckoning on behalf of dismembered dreams by boldly finding grace through our Black mothers, aunties, and grannies. The work invites the reader into a yard where “whisper-thin soul-jazz drips over America” to flip through a Nile-long family album. Mamie Till-Mobley, Sybrina Fulton, Harriet Tubman, and the author’s own mothers guide us as we “wander streets like cartographers of poverty” and hold our “promises to come home.” Perkins shows his craft by shapeshifting through fighting game menus, optometry charts, screenplays, pirate codes, social media threads, and forms that embody dreams themselves. The Grace of Black Mothers is a collection drenched in complexity and nuance: homemade heroes and villains, justice and fabrication, wit and risk, resurrection and erasure.
Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas. After a childhood in and out of homes in Houston, he graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University as a first-generation student. He is the recipient of the Robert Creeley Memorial Award judged by John Keene, the President’s Award by Voices, the GMU Rinehart Fiction Award, and the Robert Raymond Scholarship. He co-edits BRAWL Lit and teaches literature at George Mason University. Currently, he lives in the DMV with fellow writers of the “International House of Poets.” The name “Martheaus” is a collection of each woman who raise him: “Mar-” for his grandmother’s nickname, “-Thea-” for his mother’s name, and “-us” for his big aunties.
End of Empire, Marissa Davis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A collection as remarkable for the force of its feeling as for the range of its vision, End of Empire explores the tensions of Black and American identity within an ecological framework. Inspired by the language and landscape of the poet’s rural Kentucky hometown and the ways that inherited religious and political narratives shape our relationships with our surroundings and ourselves, these poems reckon with the ways the speaker, their body, and their natural and ideological surroundings continuously remake each other. Formally dynamic, emotionally resonant, and rich with biblical, mythological, and historical allusions, these are elegant, impeccably crafted pieces that evoke the fearsome power of nature and of the tangled, sensual self.
Marissa Davis is a poet and translator from Paducah, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in Poetry magazine, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals. Her chapbook, My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020) was selected for Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Davis holds an MFA from New York University and was a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Following years in Nashville, Tennessee, and Brooklyn, New York, she now lives in Paris, France, where she is pursuing a master’s in Editorial, Economic, and Technical Translation at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Voice / Poems, Susan Azar Porterfield
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Susan Azar Porterfield’s Voice/Poems, readers will encounter various voices, not all of them sanguine. Some are testy, others reverential. Some are humorous, others not so much. The reader can expect a guide, but the guides may not bother to be consistent. Graceful and intimate, Voice/Poems plucks individual moments from the flow of time to show us how crazy remarkable our ordinary, day-in and day-out, lives are. We are a multitude and a solitude, “a glory, tiny veins in our fingers,/pulley of skin working index and thumb.”
Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of the poetry collections Voice/Poems (2025, Trio House Press); Dirt, Root and Silk (2016); Kibbe (2012); and In the Garden of Our Spines (2004). She was born in Chicago to a Lebanese father and a mother from rural Arkansas, and was the first in her family to attend college. Porterfield has a Ph.D. in Nineteenth-Century British literature and an M.A. in art from the Courtauld Institute in London. She received an Illinois Arts Council Award for Poetry and was featured on the Chicago WTTW 11, Arts Across Illinois program, and is a recipient of a Fulbright to Lebanon.
The Portrait Gallery Called Existence, Neeli Cherkovski
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
To be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.
The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski’s perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.
Neeli Cherkovski (July 1, 1945–March 19, 2024) was an American poet and memoirist. Born Nelson Cherry, he grew up in Los Angeles, where as a teen he began publishing poems and was befriended by Charles Bukowski, with whom he edited the poetry zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. In the 1970s, he was a political consultant in the Riverside area, moving to San Francisco in 1974 to work for then-State Senator George Moscone. In San Francisco, he came out as gay, reclaimed his family’s historical name, and became a major figure in the North Beach literary community. In the 1990s, he became a writer-in-residence at the New College of California, teaching literature and philosophy there until it closed in 2008.
The author of numerous collections of poetry, Cherkovski also wrote the first biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1979) and Charles Bukowski (1991), as well as Whitman’s Wild Children (1988), a collection of his memoirs of 12 Beat Generation poets. He co-edited books, including Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972) and The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2019). His collection Leaning Against Time won the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. In 2017, he was awarded the Jack Mueller Poetry Prize by Lithic Press, which published his 400-page, career-spanning Selected Poems 1959–2022 in 2024. Cherkovski is also the subject of the documentary film, It’s Nice to Be with You Always (2020). He lived in San Francisco with Jesse Cabrera, his partner of 40 years.
Zone: (1973-2021), Barrett Watten
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Lifelong work of a key poet of the post-“new American poetry” generation. A challenge to how we conceive poetry and its relation to the social world. Thrilling poetry in terms of its ideas, forms, suggestions.
Barrett Watten is a professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Total Syntax and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics, winner of the 2004 René Wellek Prize. He coedited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement with Carrie Noland, and A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-1998 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive with Lyn Hejinian. A founding member of the Language school movement of poetry, his creative works include Frame: 1971-1990, Progress/Under Erasure, and Bad History.
Shard, Judith Roitman
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Judith Roitman’ s Shard, koan-like couplets stream through the open space of the page like moments in a day, by turns or all at once tragic and comic, vast and infinitesimal, mundane and surreal: They scooped out half your body. / Conglomerates stride the earth. As readers we may ride these moments into our own transient noticings: Oh God it’ s that bird again / hammering away against the tree. Savoring Roitman’ s nuanced repetitions and variations in syntax, case, tense, tone, and topic, we may ponder the movement of experience and thought into language: the sounding of words, making of marks, reading and rereading of marks in a process that multiplies meanings: Cows drop / against the knife. // Herons rise / from the fog. We may open toward the all-of-us making gestures, sounds, and marks to send back and forth amongst ourselves. In confusion and wonder, in love and rage, in terror, grief, and awe, with judgments and sometimes beyond them, we may find ourselves here, for now, participating. Bring me my crutches. / Feed me my silk. — Sarah Rosenthal
Judith Roitman’s poems have most recently appeared in The Rumpus, Sprung Formal, Otoliths, Human Repair Kit, and DReginald; most recent chapbooks are Provisional (Dancing Girl Press) and Boar King (Magnificent Field). Books are No Face: New and Selected (First Intensity Press) & Roswell (theenk Books). She lives in Lawrence, KS.
Our Human Shores, Josh Fomon
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Our Human Shores is an exploration into how language is rooted within the Anthropocene — and how poetry shapes meaning-making, faith in people and institutions, and death through lyricism, experiment, and ecopoetics. Using a phrase from John Keats’ “Bright Star” sonnet, Our Human Shores explores a tautology of thresholds and shores to remake our world, our experience of nature, and our relationship with climate, creation, and humankind’s existential place in a world staring down the apocalypse. Our Human Shores is a speculative work that will guide humanity through extinction.
Josh Fomon is the author of Though We Bled Meticulously, also published by Black Ocean. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Afternoon Visitor, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, DREGINALD, The Georgia Review, jubilat, mercury firs, Poetry Northwest, TYPO, and Yalobusha Review. He lives on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in Seattle.
Early Autumn, Ted Pearson
Publisher: Chax Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Ted Pearson’ s riveting and generous book, Early Autumn, he reminds us of our ongoing tradition as poets: We’ re happy to welcome a new generation, but song remains the first best answer to the question you’ ve been meaning to ask. I’ ve been reading Pearson’ s poetry over many years and have always admired the etched quality of mind and music that marks this capacious but acute work. Pearson is a supreme formalist, he always finds a way to get it done, book after book, and in Early Autumn, the sentence is the measure of a polis. While the overall effect might teeter on the kaleidoscopic, the thinking is more orchestral in nature. Simply put, throughout his writing life, Ted Pearson has been writing what I would like to call “ a lyric of reality,” and by building a lyric of reality he assures the reality of the lyric as a resonant tool to understand the human project.
Ted Pearson grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula. After early musical training, he began writing poetry in 1964. He subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he published his first book, The Grit, and began his ongoing association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published thirty books of poetry, most recently Overtures (BlazeVox, 2023) & Chamber Music (Shearsman, 2024). He now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Sheila Lloyd, and their dog, Kofi.
Forgotten Necessities, Jared Singer
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through spell-bindingly immersive storytelling, Singer digs to the roots of our deepest woes and cradles our joys with utmost tenderness. Intimacy and vulnerability ache across the time and space of these poems. Forgotten Necessities holds its sadness sacredly and builds shrines to the hope that follows. Persistent reminders of the small kindnesses that make a life meaningful to the living and the dead.
A brilliant follow-up to his debut, Singer’s Forgotten Necessities is itself a necessity, a haunting that heals.
Jared Singer is an Audio Engineer and poet who lives in Secaucus, NJ. While he may have physically grown up with his peers, he has never forgotten the imagination, magic, and nerdiness that were cornerstones of his childhood. He hopes to remind others of these more creative times. He has also appeared on the Indiefeed Performance Poetry Podcast. He has represented New York eight times at the National Slam level, including two final stage appearances at the National Poetry Slam. Jared has long believed in the healing power of the mountains, kittens, and lists of three.
Splice, Anthony Borruso
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Award, Anthony Borruso’s Splice melds contemporary pop culture with enduring questions. This dynamic, sometimes darkly humorous montage of identity, chronic illness, and artistic homage examines the concept of selfhood. Navigating a disorienting experience of a chronic illness where thoughts “get stopped up / like an autumn gutter,” the speaker shape-shifts into a multitude of voices that reconcile and congeal a fragmented existence. Splice ultimately explores our constant cycle of reinvention and imitation, an engine that both holds us back and moves us forward.
Anthony Borruso is the winner of the Louise Bogan Excellence in Poetry Award for his first collection, Splice; He is a former editor of The Southeast Review. He is a 2023 Best New Poet and was selected as a finalist for Beloit Poetry Journal‘s Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, THRUSH, Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier and elsewhere.
By Stone and Needle, Catherine W. Carter
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Shimmering to the pulse of the unseen, By Stone and Needle circles like a compass needle around the figure of the witch. Catherine Carter concocts a book of secular spells and incantations for engaging with, and meditating upon, a world in which all things are connected, in which symbol slides into literal, spirituality into science, exact observation into lamentation and love.
The poems in By Stone and Needle spin connecting threads between night sweats, witch drownings, creation stories, pedicures, goddesses—and, especially, between miraculously interconnected ecosystems and the forces that threaten them. Speakers encompass personae including lactobacilli bacteria, bodily yeasts, and the classical witch Medea, while elsewhere a contemporary version of the goddess Artemis appears in Appalachia. Carter’s poetic vision imbues everyday moments such as putting on a coat, piercing an ear, confronting racism and patriarchy, or eating onion slices with a new definition of magic as “the human thing.”
Catherine W. Carter is the author of three previous poetry collections, most recently Larvae of the Nearest Stars, two chapbooks, and a co-translation of John Gower’s Middle English poem The Lover’s Confession. Her work has also appeared in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, RHINO, and Best American Poetry.
Tips to Help You Do Your Best, Mike Carlson
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Written over a fifteen-year period, a period in which events and politics seemed to defy reason, the poems collected in Tips to Help You Do Your Best seek an imaginative wisdom on the outskirts of conventional thinking. By writing obsessively about the landscape, the objects that litter it, and the people he finds loitering there, Mike Carlson arrives at the emotional truth of his experience, mapping the distance between irreverence and irony, cowardice, and courage, condolences and pure clear words.
In doing so, he also lays out a theory of poetry, a philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual treatise that values object matter over subject matter. These poems approach understanding by image and rhythm, by light and shadow, and by means of encountering motorcycles and mushrooms and silos. While these poems often assume the authoritative and axiomatic tone of a guide book or set of instructions, they are at odds with easy explanation and drudgery.
Mike Carlson is the author of Cement Guitar, which won the Juniper Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Letters, Seneca Review, Spillway, and others. He is a teacher at P.S. 107 in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Which Walks, Laura Moriarty
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Documenting (and interrogating) the poet’s daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Gender is also a central concern in this intensely feminist work. Moriarty’s book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author’s visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break. Here she succeeds in existing—even thriving—in today’s strange, often terrifying, world.
Laura Moriarty grew up in Cape Cod and northern California. She studied at Sacramento State University and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry and two novels. Moriarty served as archive director for the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University. She has taught at Naropa University, the Otis Art Institute, and Mills College. Her honors include a Poetry Center Book Award, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry, a New Langton Arts Award, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She lives in Northern California.
The Appalachian Sea, Steve Scafidi
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 3, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Steve Scafidi’s The Appalachian Sea explores the eponymous place of mountains and story, of rivers and magic, as well as of mortality, where people work and live and die. What began as an homage to the American painter Miles Cleveland Goodwin became a celebration of the spectral qualities of place and home. The artist’s gothic imagery of haints and dark orchards haunts the book, wherein the Shenandoah wends, old farmers toil, and ghosts wander a land where change comes on like a flood. There is no escape from this spilling river, the “Appalachian sea,” yet for a while we get by and survive. These poems sing of the temporary persistence that makes what surrounds us beloved and strange.
Steve Scafidi is the author of the poetry collections Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, For Love of Common Words, The Cabinetmaker’s Window, and To the Bramble and the Briar. He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.
Eke, Wahidam Tambee
Publisher: Gaudy Boy
Publication Date: July 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
What does the feeling of holding your words and thoughts back—stuck and struck in a state of percolation, a plasma state of signification—feel like? What does it look like for ambivalence and divergence to converge during the moment of articulation, when all word-opportunities collide at once, like wildly unspooling threads, like heavy raindrops on a glass surface racing from one fork to the next?
A collection of visual aberrations that fumble and stammer, and that concede that a closure in expression can never be achieved, the poems of Eke ache towards both painful and opportune expression.
Wahidah Tambee graduated with degrees in psychology and creative writing from Nanyang Technological University.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/1 and 7/7 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: The Blessed Knot by Li-Young Lee
“A well-made poem is a knot, but not a tangle. The well-made knot of a poem can disentangle readers from illusion, to free them from confusion. Poetry is a form of disillusionment.” Read the July Chapbook Poem by Li-Young Lee along with words from the poet.
“This work is an archive of my attempts to become more familiar with who I am, and why I am here, to immerse myself in these ancient spiritual questions…” Check out five poems and five images by Laynie Browne along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Creating Space by Lisa Sewell
“Yoga, the walks, and the writing became a daily exercise in paying attention—to the world, to the bodies in the world around me and to my own body…” Read the Excerpt Poem of the Month for July 2025 by Lisa Sewell along with words from the poet.
“My poetry tries to examine … the difference between the lives we live inside ourselves and the lives we expose to other people.” Read five poems by William Doreski along with a few words from the poet.
July ’25: Poetry Readers Wanted
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about PCR’s Summer poetry and new poetry reader opportunities brought by our growing original poetry submissions.