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.
The Other Love, Henri Cole
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: July 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Other Love is most of all a reflection on aging and the passing of time. It is here that the struggle between form and chaos is most poignantly palpable in Henri Cole’s ravishing new book.
The Other Love is also a way of seeing the world, an attitude more than an emotion, a love of things and people as they are, and of being open to the beauty and mysteries of the world, despite a constant awareness of violence, particularly an American violence. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück wrote, “Here indeed is a triumphant achievement from a consummate artist.”
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published numerous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium, Kim Simonsen, Randi Ward (Tr.)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: July 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The rhetorical title of this collection posits the crisis that is underway. Simonsen asks: as a species among species, all composed of the matter of the universe, how has our compulsion to classify everything hierarchically estranged us from ourselves, each other, and Earth’s ecosystems? Simonsen challenges our anthropocentric pursuit of knowledge, exploring humankind’s relationship with itself as an element of the natural world. What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium follows the struggles of its narrator as he reckons with intensifying estrangement from his fellow organisms, gradually turning to the greater kinship of matter to find continuity, connection, and solace.
Kim Simonsen is a Faroese writer. He is the author of seven books, as well as numerous essays and academic articles. In 2014, Simonsen won the Faroese National Award for his poetry collection What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium. His newest poetry collection is currently nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award in 2024.
Randi Ward is a poet, translator, lyricist, and photographer from West Virginia. She earned her MA in Cultural Studies from the University of the Faroe Islands and has twice won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Prize.
Avidya, Vidyan Ravinthiran
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in this collection emerged from journeys of great personal significance, and out of a migrant sensibility tied to three different countries: Sri Lanka, the UK and the USA. Sensuous, droll, yearning, they consider otherwise forgotten (ignored, repressed, erased) events.
In 2017, Vidyan Ravinthiran travelled to the north of Sri Lanka where his parents grew up – it finally felt safe – visiting war-torn Tamil areas overwritten by a tourist focus on the sun-spoiled South. In 2020, he, his wife and their one-year-old moved from Britain to the United States, months before the pandemic hit and the travel ban separated them for almost two years from family overseas.
Avidya is a political and a spiritual collection, whose multiple poetic forms, open and closed, are shaped by myth and philosophy, and by Sri Lankan as well as global crises. It is also a book about the forms of both strength and fear that parents pass on to their children.
Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, England, to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers’ Award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Vidyan Ravinthiran is co-editor with Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett of the anthology Out of Sri Lanka (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. After teaching at the universities of Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham in the UK, he now teaches at Harvard in the US. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015), winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir (W.W. Norton, US; Icon Books, UK, 2024).
Beast, Pascale Petit
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: June 24, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Mythic and familial beasts roam the swamps and moors of Pascale Petit’s Beast, a collection that ranges from the Camargue of Provence, the limestone Causses and gorges of the Languedoc, Indian tiger forests, the Amazon rainforest, to her home by Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.
Some of these remote places are vestiges of earth’s pristine habitats, while other wildernesses are encaged in cellars of Paris, along with the world’s last species. Their essence is evoked in lithe and luxurious lines sometimes compressed as a trapped animal. An estranged father reappears as a hunter, while Maman is an orb spider or a grand piano; both are predators. And there are earthly beasts – wild horses and bulls, lammergeiers, bee-eaters and catfish, remnants of a vanishing natural world.
Beast asks if survival is possible in an abusive family and on an abused home planet, with trials such as climate change, childhood trauma and war. These poems face difficult challenges and insist that making art is an act of love and hope, and there are joyful lyrics celebrating the ineffable beauty of endangered species.
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh, and Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl (2020), won an RSL Literature Matters Award while in progress, and a poem from the book won the 2020 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the English language poetry category shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2021. Her seventh collection Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 and the Laurel Prize 2020, and was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2018. She has published six previous poetry collections, four of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, most recently, her sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). A portfolio of poems from that book won the 2013 Manchester Poetry Prize. In 2018 she was appointed as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was the chair of the judges for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her novel Hummingbird Father is published by Salt in 2024. Her books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Serbian and French. She is widely travelled in the Peruvian and Venezuelan Amazon, China, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mexico and India. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, published by Seren in 2010 (UK) and Black Lawrence Press in 2011 (US), was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Two of her previous books, The Zoo Father and The Huntress, were also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets.
One River: New and Selected Poems, Ricardo Sternberg
Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Selected from Ricardo Sternberg’ s four collections, along with astonishing new poems, One River is a major event. A poet who, according to one reviewer, “ has divined the secret connections between the words,” Sternberg’s voice is unlike any other: witty, earthy, exuberant, inventive. His poems also forgo conventional subjects. Alchemists, mermaids, angels, and “ jongleur” grasshoppers share space with all manner of eccentrics: a trapeze artist, a pilot who navigates by smell, a millionaire who sneaks into heaven disguised as a camel. At the heart of Sternberg’ s practice is prestidigitation: the sleight of hand that inheres in effortless turns of phrase, brisk syntax, and bold forms. “Leave it to me,” he says to his muse, “ to come up with something / that while not highfalutin, / carries a whiff of the sublime.” Charismatic and original, Sternberg’ s enduring work is captured in all of its extraordinary range in this new book.
Ricardo Sternberg‘s previous books include The Invention of Honey, Map of Dreams, Bamboo Church, and Some Dance. He is also the author of a book on the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. His poetry has been widely published on both sides of the border in journals such as Descant, The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry (Chicago) and Ploughshares. He lives in Toronto.
Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, James Cagney
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Japanese word ‘koan’ is a seemingly unanswerable riddle used by practitioners of Zen Buddhism to trigger spiritual enlightenment and understanding. Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive is a vibrant, genre-busting collection of voices, observations and memories that trigger nostalgia of a lost time, lost neighborhood, lost city.
James Cagney masterfully weaves together monologues, documentary-style narratives, and keen observations, offering a profound glimpse into the lives and stories that shape this unique community and beyond. From direct door-to-door salesmen and flirtatious phlebotomists to rotary telephones and an appreciation of clotheslines, each poem serves as a window into the heart of the Bay Area, capturing the raw beauty, struggles, and curious triumphs of its people. Cagney’s words resonate with authenticity and depth, making this collection a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the rich tapestry of urban life.
Ghetto Koans is a journey through the soul of a community, told with unparalleled honesty and grace.
Oakland native James Cagney is a poet and Cave Canem Fellow. He has appeared as a featured artist at Museum of The African Diaspora (MOAD SF), The DeYoung Museum and the Oakland Museum, as well as the Winter Warmer Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland, Miko Kuro’s Midnight Tea: Midnight In Mumbai (2012), Celebration of the Word with Maya Angelou (2001), Four Brothers Featuring Will Power, and Ritual Theater 2000. He read for established series Moondrop Productions, Lyrics and Dirges, and in Sacramento, Ca, the Mahogany Urban Poetry Series and for both Litquake and Beast-Crawl.
Blood Atlas, Luke Morgan
Publisher: Arlen House
Publication Date: July 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Join award-winning Irish poet Luke Morgan on an odyssey through lineage, legacy and language, journeying from lands as far as Kathmandu to the poet’s homeplace of Oughterard, County Galway. Blood Atlas is an exploration not only of the world we inhabit, but the universe inside the human body.
Luke Morgan is the winner of the 2025 Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. He is the author of Honest Walls and Beast.
Prayer Holding Night: New & Selected Works, Lupe Mendez
Publisher: TCU Press
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Hardcover
The poems in this collection span a 20 year writing career (2005 – 2025) in which Mendez has worked to speak on issues and everyday experiences. The poems here cover his view on travel and art, historical events and disasters and even a response to Texas politics with a series of never before seen blackout poems. Mendez began his career as a performance poet, cutting his teeth on stages near and far across the Texas landscape and these poems capture all the moments with care and understanding.
Originally from Galveston, TX, Lupe Mendez (Writer//Educator//Activist) is the author WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA (Willow Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founder of Tintero Projects which works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. Lupe earned his Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Texas @ El Paso and his work can been seen in print and online formats including the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, the Texas Review, the L.A. Review of Books, Split This Rock, Poetry Magazine and Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets. Mendez is the 2022 – 2023 Texas Poet Laureate.
Workshop of Silence, Jean D’Amérique, Conor Bracken (Tr.)
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Workshop of Silence, a book of poems by the Haitian writer Jean D’Amérique, was published in France by Cheyne éditeur in 2020. Across all of D’Amérique’s work, and especially in this third collection, he bridges the political and the personal, the aggrieved and the hopeful, the local and the global. The first three poems of Workshop offer a helpful overture. The first describes where the speaker’s poems come from (“gnaw[ed] nights sprung from guts”); the second imagines a world where tenderness alone can pay for groceries; and the third laments the inattention of “developed nations” toward places like Aleppo and Gaza, which are “married by force to the evening of bones.” Hope and horror, impatience and dreamy languor trade places throughout the book, as D’Amérique asks how poetry can be made of and resist silence, and how poems can be products of and inspirations toward hope and resistance even in the face of overwhelming, and sometimes violent, indifference.
Jean D’Amérique (b. 1994 in Côte-de-Fer, Haiti) is a poet, playwright, and novelist. He splits his time between Paris, Brussels, and Port-au-Prince. He has published several collections of poetry: Petite fleur du ghetto (Atelier Jeudi Soir), recipient of a special mention from the Prix René Philoctète; Nul chemin dans la peau que saignante étreinte (Cheyne), Prix de Poésie de la Vocation; Atelier du silence (Cheyne); and Rhapsodie rouge (Cheyne). Author of several plays, he has received the Prix Jean-Jacques Lerrant des Journées de Lyon des Auteurs de Théâtre for Cathédrale des cochons (Éditions Théâtrales) and the 2021 Prix RFI Théâtre for Opéra poussière. His first novel, Soleil à coudre, was published by Actes Sud and in English translation by Other Press.
Conor Bracken (b. 1987 in Boston, USA) is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press) and The Enemy of My Enemy Is Me (Diode Editions). He is also the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center) and Jean D’Amérique’s No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse), which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His work has received support from the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf, the Frost Place, Inprint, Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He lives in Ohio, where he is an assistant professor of liberal arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Nursery Rhymes in Black, Latorial Faison
Publisher: University of Alaska Press
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Nursery Rhymes in Black is a poetic recollection of race, roots, culture, and identity. Paying homage to the memory and work of elders and ancestors, Latorial Faison remembers her own matriarch, mother, grandmother—the rich memories of having grown up in rural, historic Southampton County, Virginia. These poignant poems mark significant moments and tell the lives of the people along the author’s journey through the post-segregation Jim Crow South.
The collection highlights family, overcoming adversity, and endurance from the Black female perspective and celebrates the individuals and experiences that shape life and have catapulted the author into a unique existence. Narrative poems give voice to the Black Southern girlhood experience of being saved, nurtured, inspired, and even challenged by plight and circumstance. Strengthened by her experiences, Faison provides power, courage, and wisdom that resonate deeply. These poems walk in naked truth on a lyrical, musical tightrope as each brings wisdom and honesty in the intimacy of arranged words. Faison takes readers along the development of her own identity, considering stories of unsung heroes, the hands that feed us, the ancestors and traditions that form us, and the challenging ways that race, history, education, and culture intersect. With this spiritually moving collection, Faison joins all poets and writers who have come to prolifically amplify Black voices, to tell Black stories, to continue the Black literary tradition we have been gifted.
Latorial Faison is an American poet, author, veteran military spouse, mother, and assistant professor of English and creative writing. Her writing continues the African American literary tradition and explores the intersections of the Black experience in terms of race, culture, and identity. Faison’s poetry and creative nonfiction have been published extensively in literary outlets, such as Callaloo, Obsidian: Literature & Art in the African Diaspora, Aunt Chloe, Stonecoast Review, Artemis Journal, Prairie Schooner, West Trestle Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Southern Women’s Review, About Place Journal, Deep South Magazine, and others. She is the author of The Missed Education of the Negro: An Examination of the Black Segregated Experience in Southampton County, Virginia 1950–1970, Mother to Son, I Am Woman, Love Poems, and the trilogy collection 28 Days of Poetry Celebrating Black History. A Tom Howard Poetry Prize recipient and Pushcart nominee, Faison has also been awarded fellowships from Furious Flower Poetry Center, Virginia Humanities, Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the Hudson Valley Writers Center. She currently serves on the faculty of Virginia State University.
lode, Gillian Allnutt
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: July 22, 2025
Format: Paperback
The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability – economic, cultural, spiritual – of Britain’s postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book. That sense of stability ended with the Covid pandemic, which Gillian Allnutt lived through in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book.
The poems in the book’s third part, Earth-hoard, are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world now threatened as never before.
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. Before that, she read Philosophy and English at Cambridge, and then spent the next 17 years living mostly in London. From 1983 to 1988 she was poetry editor of City Limits magazine. Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospective How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections, both from Bloodaxe, are indwelling (2013) and wake (2018), to be followed by lode (2025). She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988).
Estate Sale, Dan Murphy
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Publication Date: July 31, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
A former tradesman, Dan Murphy teaches creative writing and literature in Greater Boston. His individual poems have appeared in national and international literary journals. He lives with his wife, their two daughters, and a dog on a modest “estate.”
Pattern-book, Éireann Lorsung
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: July 31, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jon McGregor writes: ‘ In these wonderful, breath-stopping and heart-enlarging poems, É ireann Lorsung asks only that we pay close attention – to the text, to the world, to the way the world becomes note by note the text – while she pays close attention alongside us. These are poems conducted at ground level, at walking pace, attentive to the changing of the light, of the seasons, of the certainties we thought we were growing up with. Here are poems about the American Midwest, the English midlands, the low country of Flanders; about flax, fieldfares, rivers, fathers and brothers, lovers, fabrics, sewing, sowing, grammar, bicycles, umbrellas, rain and snow, fading light, damp houses, tea, gardens, glass jars, distance, language, breath, touch, and the strangeness of metaphor. These are poems to attend to, return to, and share with the community of readers who either already adore É ireann Lorsung’ s work or are about to discover it.’
Threaded through with filaments of others’ poems, Pattern-book’ s sonnets, couplets, quatrains and invented forms draw on family life, art history, grief, time and the natural world.
É ireann Lorsung was born and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She works and teaches in a field of images, objects, movement and texts. Her collections include Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century (Milkweed Editions). She moved to Ireland in 2022 to teach writing at University College Dublin.
Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic, Jeffrey Pethybridge
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Force Drift recall Gilles Deleuze’s insight that art “is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces.” Through the formal range of this dynamic sequence, Pethybridge achieves something like a synthesis of Deleuze’s opposition whereby the invention of poetic form becomes the very means of capturing, registering forces: “a reckoning lyric.”
The task of reckoning renders visible the violence of the state that lies at the heart of the matter precisely because the state intends to conceal or justify its brutality through the invocation of emergency powers, as well as the state of exception, or how the state disappears persons in its network of black site prisons. As the political scientist Darius Rejali has demonstrated, it is in fact democracies that have refined “invisible tortures” such as sensory deprivation, stress-positions, and the waterboard.
Working at the intersection of documentary poetics and theories of the epic, Pethybridge recommits poetry to a responsibility for a description of history. As a poet-researcher, he asks: “what would be possible…if listening / were the leading-form of being.” Driven by argument, abstraction, and assemblage, the poems in Force Drift address themselves to the irreparable, the “traumaeffect,” within the war on terror’s record of atrocity. Force Drift is a cri de coeur, political critique, and essay in the epic.
Against the world-destroying violence of the US torture program, Force Drifts juxtaposes a catalog of energies, forms, and genres. It is abolitionist, citational, architectural, chromatic, and replete with visual poetries ranging from the arabasques of tzahibs to erasures to extreme measures of leading and kerning. Even when its language is reduced to the pure transcription of pain––”aiai aiai aiai”––Force Drift is committed to aliveness and embodiment as “final treaty of the person,” as conscience and counterworld to the history as catastrophe of US imperialism, “irrefutable as the sun to the eye.”
Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, curator, and sound artist; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise, which was selected as one of the ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where he is director of the Summer Writing Program. In 2025 he’ll serve as the curator of Enclave, a transdisciplinary poetry festival held in Mexico City each year.
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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.
Four Poems by allison whittenberg
“I grew up as a film buff and I loved reading Hollywood Babylon. Over the years, I have learned to separate the truth from the myths.” Read four poems by allison whittenberg along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: August Peaches by Winshen Liu
“I wanted to sit with a particular end-of-summer indulgence, where a host has saved specialty foods to welcome visiting friends and family–fancy chocolate, favorite sodas, a certain snack.” Read a poem from Winshen Liu’s chapbook Paper Money along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Cheesecake Factory by Max McDonough
“This poem lives in the weirdness of the suburban mall spaces a lot of us grew up visiting (or loitering in!), places that feel like they could be anywhere and nowhere at once.” Read a poem from Max McDonough’s chapbook along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Meyer
“Love had made me stronger in a lot of ways, but also showed me the weakest parts of myself that were left crystallized for him to see. This was much like wood morphing into rock during the petrification process.” Read three poems by Alexandra Meyer along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers
“Anchored by sensory detail, the poem journeys between childhood safety and adult experience in a canyon town shaped by rivers and monsoons. … This poem is a meditation on time, tastes, and tenderness of memory.” Read three poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers along with words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: The Seventh Age of Shakespeare’s Father by Scott LaMascus
“This poem hit me hard last winter, sitting a moment near my late father, as our family was trying to absorb the meaning of his ALS diagnosis … I wondered, if ‘all the world’s a stage,’ what role had I just been assigned?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Landscape with footprints in ash by Selma Asotić
“When I want to sound smart, I say things like: a poet is one who leaves. When I accept that I’m not very smart, mostly just perplexed and a little scared, I write poems about ghosts and circle farms.” Read a poem from Asotić’s new book, Say Fire, along with words from the poet.
“All of my encounters with the U.S. healthcare system follow the protocols of the ridiculous. This poem, couched in the conventions of the contemporary sonnet, explores my latest, decisive encounter with a doctor’s office.” Read three poems by Robin Arble along with words from the poet.
September ’25: Best of the Net Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s Best of the Net 2026 anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to the nominated poems.
Verses of Mourning: in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram
“[Ram] presents a revealing and heartbreaking collection that asks the reader to think about what they remember the most about those they have lost.” Read Alex Carrigan’s full review.
“This poem reckons with our capitalist, product-driven society to ask people why disabled stories are only relevant if they portray the ‘other’ overcoming trauma to become abled people’s inspiration porn.” Read three poems by Makena Metz along with words from the poet.