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.
Afterlight, Caleb Nolen
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Publication Date: July 24, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
“When I wake I’m in ninth grade again,” begins “Reunion,” the first poem in Caleb Nolen’s debut collection Afterlight. These haunting, tender poems revisit the fraught adolescence of a group of boys growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Told through the voice of one of the boys who left and is later looking back, Afterlight navigates the silences left by absent fathers, early deaths, and a God who doesn’t speak. Interwoven throughout are letters to saints and biblical figures: pleas for intercession and understanding that echo the speaker’s search for grace amid violence and loss. By the book’s end, the lost boys and the saints share the same hallowed space, their stories entwined. Written in plain, unsparing language, these poems reveal the tenderness within troubled masculinity and the ache of trying to love what has already vanished.
Caleb Nolen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Bat City Review, Fence, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Offerings for Ordinary Gods, Ali Trotta
Publisher: CLASH Books
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Rooted in archetypes, magick, and myths, this poetry collection takes on real-world issues and feminist constraints, echoing the still-pertinent issues that women face today. Whether it’s a fresh take on the Persephone myth or recasting Medusa’s trite traditional depiction as a villain, these pages unfold with an unflinching look at love, grief, loss, risk, and finding strength when you need it the most.
This collection conjures hope and heartbreak in equal measure—a reminder that life is not meant to be lived neatly. Offerings for Ordinary Gods is a spell for celebrating the self, unleashing the witch in us all.
Ali Trotta is a poet, writer, editor, word nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has been published in Uncanny, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Small Wonders, The Deadlands, Fireside, Enchanted Living, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Nightmare, Mermaids Monthly, The Best of Uncanny Magazine (Subterranean Press), and several of the Rhysling Anthology compilations. She lives in New Jersey with a rescue cat named Thor, who is part Maine Coon and part gremlin.
A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife, Erica Wright
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
Public pools shuttered for storms. Game shows for endangered species. The teeth of a fine snail. A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife began for poet Erica Wright as a response to archival images from the American Museum of Natural History. Imagine discovering so many new species in the 16th century, then losing so many in the 21st. The poems in Wright’s new collection consider the beauty and fragility of ecosystems, some turning inward, to the animalness of the human body. Through pregnancy, loss, and parenthood, these poems respond to the feats of strength called upon by motherhood as well as the mental gymnastics required to start a family in the face of ecological disaster.
Despite these challenges, A Buyer’s Guide to the Afterlife is joyful, often defiantly so. Wright offers us ecopoems, but slant—as quick to banter with God as to praise rainforests.
Erica Wright is the author of nine books, including the essay collection Snake and the poetry collection All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. For more than a decade, she was the Poetry Editor at Guernica Magazine and currently teaches at Bellevue University. She holds degrees from New York University and Columbia University. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with her family.
Wolf Cut: New and Selected Poems, Anna Journey
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Wolf Cut gathers nearly twenty years of work by Anna Journey, one of her generation’s most fearlessly imaginative poets. She brings to her edgy, cinematic poems a raconteur’s sly humor and anecdotal ease as well as intricately braided temporalities. From her early work’s baroque lyricism tinged with the southern gothic to her capacious later poems’ signature meditative charisma, Journey reminds us that mystery and imagination are the luminous thresholds through which our reckonings must pass.
Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She is associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Sensorium Ex: An Opera in Verse, Brenda Shaughnessy
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this story of the scientist DR. MEM and KITSUNE, her nonambulatory, non-speaking son, the pair fight CORP, a mega-company developing the most powerful AI robot ever conceived. What MEM learns is that CORP seeks “To give the robot something real. / What it can fake but not make: / mercy, compassion. Trust and love.” That is, CORP hopes to harvest and own not just their employees’ personal data but their thoughts, memories, and their sensory experiences, in order to build a robot that will contain all that is and ever was human, and replace the need for humans themselves.
This swift drama, which unfolds in a libretto/ script format, with dialogue in Shaughnessy’s accessible and blistering verse, shows how MEM and her coworkers fight to save their individuality from being vacuumed up. A Greek-style chorus reflects on the state of a world where “taking leave of our senses” becomes a serious and quite literal threat, as MEM struggles to fulfill her singular role in fighting the high-tech of corrupt capitalism. At the center of this all-too-relevant speculative drama burns MEM’s most powerful weapon against the forces of AI darkness: a mother’s love.
Brenda Shaughnessy is a poet, mother, daughter, and teacher. She works at Rutgers University-Newark, and lives in West Orange, NJ. She was educated in NYC and Santa Cruz, CA, having grown up in Thousand Oaks, CA after an infancy in Wollaston, MA and Okinawa, where she was born at Kadena Air Base Hospital, United States Air Force, in 1970, to mother Mitsuko Higa, daughter of Yoshimoto Ushi and Higa Denko, of Yomitan.
How to Moth, Hailey Leithauser
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 22, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
How to Moth celebrates the joys and the griefs of a life of loving wine, women, and song. Working in both established forms and musical free verse, Hailey Leithauser takes us from slovenly blondes to tipsy milkmaids to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, from pink peignoirs to beds made from burlap sacks, a salver of oysters to a nun’s unset table, a fried surfer dame to the person from Porlock, and running throughout it all, the undeniable and unyielding urge to take a mad bite of the moon.
Hailey Leithauser is the author of Swoop, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature, and Saint Worm. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Poetry, AGNI, Yale Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry. She lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.
The Loneliest Monk, Richard Chess
Publisher: Orison Books
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback
From aleph to bet, “a” to “b,” a gap. As wide or as narrow as the gap between the loneliest monk and his neighbor, human or Divine. That’s the gap the loneliest monk of Richard Chess’s fifth poetry collection seeks to bridge. Who is the loneliest monk? As Chess writes, he’s a “monk without a monastery,” “a sit without a sangha,” “a minyan of one.” In other words, he lives outside of traditional settings and belongs to no traditional community. Nevertheless, because hunger troubles his every waking hour, he draws on Judaism and other traditions in his search for ultimate connection. In poems characterized by their wit and wisdom, The Loneliest Monk offers us glimpses of a seeker’s life from childhood through early old age.
Richard Chess is the author of four previous books of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. His poems have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is Professor Emeritus at UNC Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. He directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years and he was active in The Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education. He recently completed five years of service as a founding board member of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry.
Melete, Jennifer Lee Tsai
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jennifer Lee Tsai’s first full-length poetry book explores family history, intergenerational trauma, love, loss and belonging through the perspective of a second-generation British Chinese identity. Melete interweaves dual cultures and heritages through narratives of memory, migration and mysticism across Liverpool, China and Hong Kong.
Named after the Boeotian Muse of meditation and contemplation, Melete navigates the boundaries between life and art, personhood and subjectivity, states and places of spiritual transcendence and ecstasies. This expansive book establishes a powerfully distinctive lyric voice in British poetry.
Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, writer and artist. Born in Bebington on the Wirral, she grew up in Liverpool. She has published two pamphlets, Kismet (ignitionpress, 2019) and La Mystérique (Guillemot Press, 2022), with her first full-length poetry book, Melete, published by Bloodaxe in 2026. A fellow of The Complete Works and a Ledbury Poetry Critic, she has received a Northern Writers Award for Poetry and is a winner of the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poets’ Prize. She has worked as a teacher of English to students in universities and colleges as well as within community settings. She is the recipient of an AHRC doctoral scholarship in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and an Artist in Residence at the Bluecoat’s studios through the Wittenham Bursary. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published in publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Telegraph, The TLS and The White Review as well as on BBC Radio 4.
Out of the Unexpected: Poems with Sappho, Nichole Turnbloom
Publisher: Westbrae Literary Press
Publication Date: May, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Out of the Unexpected, Nichole Turnbloom reaches into the fragments of Sappho—poet, musician, teacher, the Tenth Muse—and weaves a luminous dialogue between past and present, voice and silence, myth and memory.
Drawing from lost lines and broken songs, these poems are a testament to what remains, what is remade, and what longs to be spoken. Here, the resonance of Sappho’s lyricism mingles with the raw pulse of modern grief, rage, tenderness, and survival. Through correspondence, reimagining, and reflection, Turnbloom invites readers to step into a timeless conversation—one stitched with longing, beauty, and unyielding truth.
Nichole Turnbloom has an MFA in poetry and been published in Acumen, California Quarterly, The Branches, Garlic Press Lit, Luna Luna Magazine, IWWG’s Anthology Write Forward among other venues. Her work is informed by nearly twenty years pf providing yoga therapy to a wide range of ages and abilities from those affected by trauma and abuse to survivors of cancer. Her work delves into themes of fragmentation to restore strength and resiliency. When not writing or reading she sculpts ceramic and enjoying the natural beauty of Northern California where she lives.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/21 and 7/27 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”
Chapbook Poem: I’ll Never Look This Good Again by Douglas Piccinnini
“[The poem] came out of real pressure: despair, worry, and grief I wanted to hold unflinchingly, alongside the anxiety of becoming a parent… For me the poem became a meditation on all the feeling that surfaces precisely when we’re told to feel only joy.” Read an excerpt from Douglas Piccinnini’s chapbook, House of Bad Memories, along with a few words from the poet.
“She sees herself in carbon, the element that bonds with almost anything- not because it wants to, but because it has empty spaces and things keep showing up to fill them. Notifications. Noise. Needs that never stop arriving.” Read four poems by Joely Williams, our second biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Single Mother Considers the Periodic Table.”
ADHD in a Non-ADHD World: on Undersight by Alison Hurwitz
“[Hurwitz] shares moments of angst and moments of awe. More than that, there are moments of deep recognition. She sees herself in [her sons] and, in fact, receives a later-life ADHD diagnosis of her own.” Read the full chapbook review by new contributor, Nancy Murphy.
“The woman’s head & hair are lavishly dressed. I probably leapt off the logic of the hairdresser being blind and therefore had to work on the head/body/mind rather than just hair as a surface issue of presentation.” Read two poems by Irene Cunningham, our third biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “The Blind Hairdresser.”
Flash Fiction: Nova by Kimmy Chang
“‘Nova’ is a lyrical second-person story about the narrator’s first true encounter with death…the story presents loss not as beautiful in itself, but as the place where beauty begins.” Read the first original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Nova” by Kimmy Chang.
“To fit the nuanced, dimensional experience of dysphoria and transition into narrative…often feels flattening, falsely assured. I wanted to look at this discomfort I felt, to see what was necessary in it.” Read three poems by Joshua Zeitler, our fourth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Cobbling.”