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.
Safe Rooms, Rae Armantrout
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Acclaimed author Rae Armantrout’s remarkable new collection Safe Rooms, explores the undercurrents of modern life with an unflinching eye on human nature, social malaise, and the unsettling ways in which we attempt to protect ourselves from a world that continually undermines our sense of safety. As the title poem says: “your thoughts /roar and echo//around you—originating/god knows where.// You try to plug your ears/but you are an ear/ that can’t stop listening.” Through poems that examine our darker impulses—our tendencies to self-destruct, to grapple with envy, and to navigate the intricate web of family dynamics—Armantrout captures the complex, often contradictory ways in which we search for meaning and connection. Her work holds a mirror to the forces shaping us, both intimate and vast, showing that the so-called “safe rooms” we construct are fragile, temporary shelters, not havens from the chaos that surrounds us.
Rae Armantrout is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Professor Emerita of Writing at UC San Diego. Her collection Versed won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.
The Miraculous Mistake, Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Esther Cameron (Tr)
Publisher: Sheep Meadow Press
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
Hamutal Bar-Yosef’s lyrics lead into the heart’s (and history’s) difficult thickets: the familial pull of a vanished bourgeois home in prewar Poland (a longing suckled at the poet’s aggrieved mother’s breast) or the lost communitarian belonging of an early kibbutz (supplanted by a proprietary capitalist). Bar-Yosef’s humane embrace of both the historical and personal makes grief one of her great subjects. The early death of a brother in war, a son dead by suicide, and family members murdered in the Shoah color her life and choices in ways that are understood only partially and after-the-fact. Familial love and estrangement appear retrospectivelyas one (“What It Was About”) or prospectively apart (“My Name Goes Before Me”) and invariably layered and complex (“What I’ll Say to My Mother,” “The Cute Little Baby”). Poems celebrate a woman’s desire and pleasure, registering them most sharply when lost (“Ode to Love,” “Quite Suddenly”). Poems about the losses and anxieties of old age form a sequence unlike any other to be found in contemporary poetry: bracing, honest, and useful. Hearing the voice that “says no more / than necessary to the blind man” as he gets on and off a bus, allowing him dignity and control, is akin to reaching the end of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Filling Station”: “Somebody loves us all.” Like Constantine Cavafy and Wislawa Szymborska, she allows a glimpse of holy solidarity, of a time, perhaps some 500 years in the future, where there will be no need for steel doors and bomb shelters.
Hamutal Bar-Yosef is the author of seventeen poetry collections, several volumes of short stories, and a novel. Her poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages, with book-length editions appearing in Russian, English, Hungarian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. Her works in English translation include Night, Morning: Poems, The Ladder: Poems, The Wall, The Wealthy, and I Found Him on the Internet.
Esther Cameron‘s publications include Fortitude and Western Art and Jewish Presence in the Work of Paul Celan, as well as seven volumes of poetry and prose in Hebrew. She is the founding editor of The Deronda Review, a literary journal devoted to poetry and cultural dialogue.
Heartmoor, Mihaela Moscaliuc
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
The legacy of Decree 770—Romania’s notorious anti-abortion law—lingers in this collection’s engagement with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy. Heartmoor moves through the textures of daily life—mushrooms, medicinal herbs, chocolate, family, death—and into the charged, liminal spaces where the political and personal converge. Again and again, these poems remind us that touch and connection, rituals, acts of kindness and intimacy, might be, after all, the only kind of home to which we can moor our hearts, regardless of which country we inhabit—or which inhabits us.
Mihaela Moscaliuc was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Heartmoor (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2026), Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems (Knopf, 2025) and Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes; two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; a Fulbright fellowship; two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, and residency fellowships from Hawthornden Foundation (Italy), Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. Moscaliuc directs the M.A. Program in English at Monmouth University (New Jersey), where she teaches creative writing and literature.
Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Format: Paperback
Here is a book of many hearts, a revolutionary tide pool, a mycelial space and sensorium where our neural pathways are “always shared, collective, and entangled.” In this “more-than-human lyric,” heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers the ampersand, a mode of encounter that unfixes the reader. This form—a lyric prose poem beginning, midsentence, with an ampersand—accesses the intimacies of a life shaped by perpetual “and-ing.” These ampersands move by associative leap, synesthetic braid, and inter-species blur to revel in everything that makes us more than singular subjects.
Neuroqueering poetics, rhodes writes toward deft and loving excess: spillage, echolalia, stutter, loop, and non-linear detour, refiguring what the lyric can be and what the body can do. These poems revolt against all forms of supremacy, inviting us into unexpected kinship with animal, mineral, vegetal, and heavenly bodies, each replete with its own languages, temporalities, histories, and worlds.
Tending an everyday eroticism with its “heart at the sleeve, in the palm,” Ampersand Organ is unafraid to feel, to feel again, to feel feeling wherever it’s wildly felt. Here is a radiant, divergent, emergent field guide for how we might all shiver and shimmer into the and and and . . .
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a writer, artist, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Ephemeral, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, and Wayward Creatures. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal; and editor/curator of the Anomalous Press column, Wild-Wired: Neuroqueer and Neurodivergent Poetics. A VONA Alum and recipient of the 2023 Creative Capital Award, they have received poetry fellowships from Zoeglossia, CantoMundo, Radar Productions, and Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Their poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in American Poetry Review, The Normal School, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alocasia, Poetry, and Waxwing, among other places. They live in unceded Acjachemen and Tongva lands, otherwise known as southern California.
The Fifth Season, Cori Howard
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Publication Date: August 13, 2026
Format: Paperback
In The Fifth Season, award-winning journalist, essayist and poet Cori Howard explores the seasons of a woman’ s life, from marriage and motherhood to divorce, what she aptly names “ disaster dating” and reinvention. Through the arc of midlife, these poems offer a map back to the self and a return to longing and new freedoms. In poetry that is raw, honest and personal, Howard carries the reader through the thresholds of her life, illuminating the experiences of womanhood and the questions we ask ourselves during times of transition and reimagination.
Cori Howard is an award-winning journalist, essayist and poet based in Vancouver, BC. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications across the US, Canada and the UK, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail, among many others. This is her first collection of poetry. Her previous books include Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell the Truth about Motherhood.
Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price
Publisher: TriQuarterly
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Grief is a rodeo filled with ghost clowns. In Bisquick: An American Seance, C. Russell Price explores spiritualism and the fetishization of the Midwest cowboy aesthetic, creating a vibrant world inhabited by three unforgettable characters: the speaker, a traumatized eco-anarchist working through grief; Ghost Cowboy, a ghost dream boyfriend hell-bent on hunting predators of the poor; and Bisquick, a blue ghost horse who just wants to dance. This spectral trio boogies, copulates, and fights against a system that ghosted them long before the demise of their physical bodies, determined to stay saddled to their dreams. Price gallops through the widths of time, the geography of the United States, the spectral plane, and the leather BDSM scene as they attempt to answer this provocative collection’s central question: If the dead could talk, wouldn’t they have something better to say?
C. Russell Price is the author of oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems and Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other. They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center and work with the Anarchist Review of Books. They are a Lambda Fellow, a Ragdale Fellow, and two-time Lit 50 honoree. Price landscapes in Chicago.
Slipstream, Diana Cao
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
Winner of the Berkshire Prize, Slipstream is a bracing, intimate, and formally adventurous debut that moves with equal grace through personal memory, inherited history, myth, and the ambient technologies of contemporary life. Diana Cao’s poems braid ancient Chinese legend, family migration, illness, love, and grief with moon landers, algorithms, privacy policies, and online ritual, creating a lyric field where the ancestral and the digital speak fluently to one another. The book is formally restless and assured. Sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, fables, and linked sequences feel conversational rather than ornate, their intelligence worn lightly, their music precise and unforced. Throughout, Cao writes with a clarity that never flattens complexity: humor and vulnerability coexist with philosophical rigor. Tenderness is sharpened, not softened, by attention to politics, history, and care.
What emerges is a voice attuned to relational life in all its registers—daughterhood, friendship, desire, citizenship, species—asking how to live, love, and remain lucid inside systems that both sustain and estrange us. Slipstream is a book of uncommon range and emotional intelligence, one that feels fully of this moment while remaining in deep, living conversation with the past.
Diana Cao is the author of the chapbook Relational. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Just Buffalo Literary Center.
Motherhead, Nicole Zwolinski
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
Motherhead is a love song to mothers. In Zwolinski’s first full-length poetry collection, she barely scrapes the surface of all things motherhood, but the writing peels back the skin to reveal the nerves and the often-unseen experiences of motherhood. In a world saturated with the joy and beauty of being a mother, Motherhead pulls the curtain aside for the nitty gritty reality of it. This exposes the utter strength and resilience of mothers – they truly are the unsung heroes of our society. Motherhead is encouragement for mothers in the depth of it all. It’s a balm for those suffering from: mom-guilt, feeling touched-out, exhausted from pressure to bounce back, the constant ticker-tape of to-do lists running like a soundtrack, and so much more. Motherhead isn’t a guidebook, but the poetry packages up mothering and delivers it with a bow.
Nicole Zwolinski earned her BA in Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) in Minnesota. Nicole has two chapbooks published through independent Jacksonville literary presses – Happy Tapir and City Bus Print. She has poems published in several literary magazines and anthologies. Currently, she resides in Florida with her family.
The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost, David Ebenbach
Publisher: Broadstone Books
Publication Date: August 15, 2026
Format: Paperback
David Ebenbach’s latest collection, The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost, is a clever exploration of the larger human forces behind AI. Like the “hungry ghost” which can never be satisfied, “… AI is the culmination/of the human project.” In that way, the poems are less about technology and more a self-reflective commentary on the human condition. That intention is made apparent by the titles of the poems, which give AI impossible attributes, but that’s the point of these brilliant poems. Occasional short nature poems are dispersed throughout the manuscript, reminding us of AI’s limitations and the ways in which wonder is something only we can experience. This book is amazing. —Marjory Wentworth, former poet laureate of South Carolina
David Ebenbach writes. He’s been writing ever since he was a kid, when he kept his whole family awake by banging away on an enormous manual typewriter, and he’s never wanted to stop. The author of books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, his work has picked up awards along the way, including the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and more. Born and raised in the great city of Philadelphia, these days David does most of his writing in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family— because he uses a laptop now, he doesn’t keep them awake with his typing—and where he works at Georgetown University, promoting inclusive, student-centered teaching at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, and teaching creative writing and literature at the Center for Jewish Civilization and creativity through the Master’s in Learning, Design, and Technology Program.
Listen, Kid: Selected & New Poems 2010-2026, Bryan Borland
Publisher: Sibling Rivalry Press
Publication Date: August 13, 2026
Format: Hardcover / Paperback
Listen, Kid gathers sixteen years of Bryan Borland’s poetry into one sweeping, intimate, and fiercely human collection. Moving across love, lust, faith, grief, queer boyhood, marriage, family lineage, and the ghosts that shape a life, these poems trace the evolution of a Southern gay poet who refuses to look away from the hard things and refuses to write without tenderness.
Borland’s Sibling Rivalry Press was the first press of any size to win Lambda Literary Awards in both Gay Poetry and in Lesbian Poetry. He was also the first to publish chapbooks by writers such as Ocean Vuong, whose love note to Sibling Rivalry Press opens this collection, and Kaveh Akbar. His work is deeply intertwined with Sibling Rivalry Press, and his publishing journey is frequently referenced within the poems of Listen, Kid.
Borland’s work spans the mythic and the personal: altar boys and backseat boys, brothers living and lost, the ache of rural adolescence, the bright terror of first desire, the complexities of relationships, the politics of survival, and the long, startling work of growing into one’s own body. Whether writing elegy or erotic memory, biblical remix or road-trip confession, he approaches every subject with clarity, vulnerability, humor, and reverence.
This is a book about becoming again and again, and about the people, places, and loves that make survival not only possible but luminous. Borland writes to the younger self who doesn’t yet know how the story will turn out, and to the reader who needs to hear it: you belong, you endure, you matter.
Listen, Kid is a landmark collection from a poet and publisher whose work has shaped and sustained a generation of queer readers and writers.
Bryan Borland is founding publisher of Sibling Rivalry Press and founding editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry. His most recent books include Brotherful (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2025), a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the chapbook, Crow in the Desert (Queer Punk Collective, 2025). Previous titles include the chapbook, Tourist (2018), and three full-length collections of poems: My Life as Adam (2010), Less Fortunate Pirates: Poems from the First Year Without My Father (2012), and DIG (2016), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry and a Stonewall Honor Book in Literature as selected by the American Library Association. He is a Catalyze Fellow, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, and a winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Emerging Writer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/11 and 8/17 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.”
Excerpt: “On the puzzle still inside my head” by Truong Tran
“I am trying to excavate memories. I am trying to negotiate the difficult realities of existing as a brown man in this country and within the consciousness of white America.” Read an excerpt from Truong Tran’s forthcoming book from City Lights, How to Exi(s)t: A Poet’s Memoir.
“These poems try to make sense of how I arrived at a life that probably seems well thought-out, but has been one reactionary choice after another.” Read three poems by A.R. Dugan, our fifth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Sleeptalking.”
Original Fiction: Muse by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha
“What I tried to trace was the underside. How watching someone closely for long enough becomes a substitute for approaching them.” Read the second original fiction piece of the Summer 2026 issue, “Muse” by Somtoo Celestine Ezioha.