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.
Tree of Knowledge, Victoria Chang
Publisher: Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet’s street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet and becomes the locus from which the rest of the collection spirals. It refracts across works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, whose painting series lends the collection its title and who becomes a model for engaging with the world. At the core of the collection, the long poem “Eureka” examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the eponymous California town. Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang’s crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images—trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase—that resurface like apparitions.
Victoria Chang has written several books of poetry, including With My Back to the World and The Trees Witness Everything, and a nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. Her poetry collection OBIT was named a New York Times Notable Book; received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award; was long-listed for the National Book Award; and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. With My Back to the World received the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry and was short-listed for the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the California Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Chang has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.
The pedestrian, Valerie Hsiung
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Emerging from the dark ecology between lullaby and ghost story, The pedestrian meanders down a labyrinth of divinatory time where crimes demand a more defective detective. To conjure the source of this text’s trauma, the poet becomes a ritual detective, tracing the wound by its shadow. Meaning emerges through distortion and echo—courting what cannot be seen head-on to create a haunted grammar of grief. An ill pastoral of displacement, The pedestrian turns domestic spaces into underworlds, the body of the exiled child into a prophetic threshold—it listens as much as it speaks, attuned to forces beyond itself.
Valerie Hsiung writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Her work dissolves the borders of poetry, prose, and philosophy into a single listening body, drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry. She is the author of eight books, including The Naif and The only name we can call it now is not its only name. She was born in Ohio and now lives in Colorado.
The Dance, Christian Wiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer—perhaps none—do so with his urgency and eloquence. In his seventh book of poetry, The Dance, Wiman is at the height of his powers. These searching, sharp, wide-ranging poems are a testament to the staying power of a poetic voice we will be reading for years to come.
Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Once in the West, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Survival Is a Style—all published by FSG. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School.
Party Line, Kyle Carrero Lopez
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Kyle Carrero Lopez’s electrifying debut collection centers three interconnected forces: social life, US-Cuba relations, and the lives of Black people in the US and Cuba. Through familial, satirical, and geopolitical lenses, Party Line considers how countries—and people—wield power over those they deem Other.
The collection features a series meditating on tensions embedded in party spaces. Carrero Lopez challenges assumptions that these spaces are escapist or apolitical, revealing the unexpected ways in which the personal mirrors the political. His work expands bridges between US and Cuban art by developing an urgent poetics around the material conditions of the US embargo and challenging whitewashed images of Cuban Americans in the US imagination.
Alternating between humor and lyric severity, playfulness and political critique, these poems negotiate contradiction with linguistic dexterity and critical consciousness, proving that political poetry can be both serious and joyously alive.
Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of the chapbook Muscle Memory, winner of the 2020 [PANK] Book Contest. He has an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow, and he is a Cave Canem Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn.
70,000, Lenna Jawdat
Publisher: Central Avenue Poetry
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians.
In response to this loss of cultural and intellectual heritage, Lenna Jawdat began handwriting the numbers one to 70,000, choosing to imagine each number as a book. Trained as a trauma therapist, she documented the emotional and physical experience of this ritual, tracing the grief, reverence, and endurance that surfaced through the process. This full-color book unfolds through three interwoven threads: the numbers themselves, reflections on the act of writing, and a personal and familial poetic narrative expressed in both image and verse. Together, they form a fragmented yet powerful archive—blending poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage.
70,000 is an embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience. What begins as a personal act of witnessing becomes a collective gesture toward remembrance, continuity, and the possibility of healing.
Lenna Jawdat is a poet, writer, and psychotherapist of Palestinian and Iraqi descent. Her writing, which explores trauma, identity and resilience, has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, The Margins, Passenger’s Journal, Rogue Agent, among others, and in the 2025 Haymarket Anthology Heaven Looks Like Us. She was a 2021 Best of the Net nominee for her poem “Ode to the Psoas,” a 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts summer resident, and has attended Tin House Workshop for poetry and creative nonfiction. She is also co-organizer of the poetry vigil series In Water and Light. Lenna received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 2024. She lives in DC with her partner and two cats.
Daughter of the Mountains: poems of heartbreak & homecoming, Fatimah Asghar
Publisher: One World
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Exiled from ancestral homelands, how can one find a place for themself in the world? In this stunning sophomore collection, the acclaimed poet Fatimah Asghar unweaves residual grief to reckon with their relationship to Allah, long-estranged but deeply loved kin, the landscape of their ancestors, and love itself.
In meditative poems, Daughter of the Mountains grapples with multiple facets of fulfillment, betrayal, love, loss, and longing, illustrating how place, lineage, and environment inform the practice of spirituality and vice versa. With wisps of humor, imagery that is as beautiful as it is startling, and powerfully disruptive formal invention, this is an intimately lyrical and explosive collection.
Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come for Us, is a poet, filmmaker, educator, and performer. They are the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. They also were a co-producer on Ms. Marvel for Disney + and wrote the episode “Time And Again.” Along with Safia Elhillo, they are the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender-nonconforming, and/or trans.
Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments, Franz Wright
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
“My death is in the second drawer,” writes Franz Wright. “While you’re standing there, would you mind getting me one?” It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, “I won’t have written any of it. / I will have back the rights / of anonymity,” and there is nothing left that anyone can take from him.
Wright’s significant themes shine forth: radical acceptance of his own pain, mental illness, and loss; his belief in the poem’s ability to rhyme with the mysteries of our worldly suffering; his nearly surreal vision of Christian grace. But most powerful for readers will be the tender force of his imagery—the “green vesperal rain at the screen,” the “long Jeffersonian / $2-bill- / tinted twilight”—and, as he invites us to join him in his nicatorium, the smoking-porch of recovering addicts, the joy of finding this black-humorous voice still alive on the page to meet us.
Franz Wright‘s many poetry collections include F, God’s
Silence, and Wheeling Motel. His collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and he was also the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Fellowship, among other honors. Wright died in 2015.
THALASSA, Leena Aboutaleb
Publisher: Game Over Books
Publication Date: July 7, 2026
Format: Paperback
Leena Aboutaleb’s debut collection is a magnetic mourning, suspended in the threads of time. Lush and poignant, THALASSA is a love song of misery and grief, tracing the poet’s steps as she dives into the Underworld in search for her brother. THALASSA is a map, moving between temporalities and worlds, from past and present to seen and unseen realms. “Like teethbones, I fail to forget you,” Aboutaleb bemoans, “I knew you. I knew you.” Dreamlike, Aboutaleb’s elegy lights the passage of despair and hope as the poet collapses the ephemeral threshold between the dead and living. Grief is a sea, and Aboutaleb shows us how to build a boat to find a way home.
Leena Aboutaleb is an Egyptian and Palestinian writer who asks you to commit to the Palestinian liberation struggle. She is the author of THALASSA forthcoming with Game Over Books. Her pamphlet, Expeditions of Projection, was released in 2023 (VIBE). Her film, ‘Oracle,’ co-produced with Youssef ElNahas debuted in Venice, 2025. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow, a Kundiman fellow and Tin House scholar.
Watching Television in a Love Motel, Haro Lee
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Publication Date: July 9, 2026
Format: Paperback
In this unforgettable first book of poetry by Haro Lee, television – like love – binds us, liberates us; inspires, infuriates and illuminates us. Watching Television in a Love Motel is a poetic chronicle of Haro’s time in Aotearoa, South Korea and the United States of America. In four parts – ‘Daytime Television,’ ‘Primetime Television,’ ‘Late Night Television,’ and ‘Graveyard Slot’ – she looks at her past, family and self with the help of the unwavering cultural force that is TV. Big subjects are caught in its glow: God, drugs, love, anti-motherhood, intergenerational trauma, loneliness, failure, and 3am existential anxiety. The final section is a love letter to a dying neighborhood in Seoul. Set against the heartache of a rapidly developing nation, this is the story of one girl and her life with a beloved grandmother.
Haro Lee was born in the Year of the Rat in Tamaki Makaurau. Her work has been published in The Spinoff, Michigan Quarterly Review and Poetry Northwest, among others. Watching Television in a Love Motel is her first book.
Salt Quilt, Airini Beautrais
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
Publication Date: July 9, 2026
Format: Paperback
A new poetry collection from award-winning writer Airini Beautrais. Salt Quilt is a portrait of an uneasy stretch of time. The poet looks back at various episodes of her life and then far ahead, to other lives and ways of seeing. She sheds cynicism, celebrates some constraints and rejects others, and keeps rewriting the endings. Poetry has saved her more than once.
Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her debut work of fiction, Bug Week, won Aotearoa New Zealand’ s top fiction award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize, at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Secret Heart (2006), which won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (2024). In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. She lives in Whanganui.
Everything Everyday: A Year of Empty Promises, Hannah Lavery
Publisher: Polygon
Publication Date: July 9, 2026
Format: Paperback
Everything Everyday is a poetic journal of the year that charts winter through to autumn in a richly textured sequence of diary-poems, lyric fragments and a crown of sonnets.
Each month’s entry weaves together mythic figures – Tahlequah the mourning orca, Brigid’s mountain dance, Sister Icarus’s fragile flight and Beira’s shore vigils – with the unfolding chronicle of contemporary grief and protest. Readers move from January’s frozen harbour and political flashpoints into spring’s ritual planting of ‘lemon-drop’ seeds, summer’s drum-driven rallies and smoky vigils, and autumn’s oil-slick swans and ash-borne snowdrops. The collection’s formal innovations mirror its thematic urgency: bracketed interjections pulse like heartbeats, dated stanzas resonate like journal entries, and the season-by-season structure creates a mythic ledger of solidarity and hope. Lavery’s work becomes both witness and archive—where personal confession and public ritual converge in an unflinching testament to collective mourning, unbroken resilience, and the ember of promise that refuses to cool.
Each poem is an unflinching exploration of memory and identity in an era defined by both loss and possibility. Bold, uncompromising, and deeply resonant, Everything Everyday invites you to confront the delicate art of living—and loving—in a world that is as beautiful as it is unpredictable.
Hannah Lavery is an award-winning poet and playwright. Her pamphlet, Finding Seaglass, was published by Stewed Rhubarb and her poem, “Scotland You’re No Mine,” was selected as one Scotland’s Best Poems for 2019. The Drift, her highly acclaimed autobiographical lyric play toured Scotland as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Season 2019 and in 2020, she was selected by Owen Sheers’ as one of his Ten Writers Asking Questions That Will Shape Our Future for the International Literature Showcase, a project from the National Writing Centre and the British Council. Her second lyric play Lament for Sheku Bayoh premiered at Edinburgh International Festival in 2021. She was also appointed Edinburgh Makar in November 2021 for a three year term. She is an associate artist with the National Theatre of Scotland and one of the winners of the Peggy Ramsay/Film4 Award 2022.
Luminescence in Season, Colleen Alles
Publisher: Meadowlark Press
Publication Date: July 9, 2026
Format: Paperback
The poems in Luminescence in Season pause to consider the wonders of everyday interactions: a summer wedding, a neighbor’s wandering dog, a trip to the public museum to see the carousel in motion. Anchored by the triptych poem, “Travelogue” and rendered in three parts, these poems take the reader from the depths of black moss to the shallow water at the surface where life’s true ecstasies can be found.
Colleen Alles is a writer, former librarian & teacher, and Michigan girl for life. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Michigan State University (2005) and her MLIS from Wayne State University (2015). Her debut short fiction collection, Close to a Flame, was a 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist; it was also named one of Lit Hub’s 100 Notable Small Press Books (2025). Her novella, Incident at Twin Lakes Resort, won the Etchings Press 2025 novella competition; The Very Terrible Drowning of Bryan Price (coming in 2026) was longlisted by Regal House Publishing for its Fugere Book Prize for Finely Crafted Novellas (2023). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Red Cedar Review, Tar River Poetry, The Write Michigan Anthology, The Michigan Poet, and other places.
Colleen is co-editor for fiction with Barren Magazine and is currently pursuing her MFA at Spalding University. Her house is chaotic with young children and a hound, so don’t be shocked to encounter poems about chaotic houses, small children, or hounds. Colleen writes, runs, reads, and worries she wouldn’t make sense outside the Midwest.
Water. Witness. Word., Marianne Worthington
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: June 23, 2026
Format: Paperback
Water. Witness. Word. is a meditation on loves and griefs of many shapes: place, family, and shared visions of a world fading away. The speakers in this stunning, formally diverse collection consider the relationships between humans and the natural world, between injustice, identity, and power. Marianne Worthington’s unique voice powerfully expresses a love of place that isn’t always lovable, the challenges of chronic illness, and the beauty of the natural world even when exploited and in peril.
Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Swing, Southern Humanities Review, and Zone 3, among other places. She cofounded and co-edited Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia (2009-2024). Her work has been supported by Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship. She has co-edited two anthologies for the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. A retired college professor, she grew up in East Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in Southeastern Kentucky.
Degenerate Era of An Expanding Universe, Jennifer Polson Peterson
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: June 9, 2026
Format: Paperback
Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe is a book about apocalypses large and small. The poems in this meditative debut collection explore economic and climatological trends toward dissolution, and how these forces seep into the domestic sphere. Whether exploring the constellations of family dynamics or observing natural and human disasters, Jennifer Polson Peterson reflects on “the newly unmade world” that nonetheless urges us to continue rebuilding.
Jennifer Polson Peterson is the author of Degenerate Era of an Expanding Universe (Belle Point Press, 2026) and Must Resemble Leisure (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022). She serves as the 2024-28 Poet Laureate of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In 2025 she was named a Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Threepenny Review, The Laurel Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Image, The Southern Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly. Her poems have been adapted for performance by choir and orchestra, featured on Poetry Daily, and nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She teaches writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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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.”