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.
The Smallest Mistake We Call Human, Isaac Pickell
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback
Isaac Pickell writes from the middle of things: the tensions between Blackness and Jewishness, between loss and inheritance, between being seen and being claimed. But these poems don’t search for wholeness so much as they honor the seams—the complicated, unresolved places that keep our lives together.
Grief runs through. Much of it is personal: parents aging, partners wavering, friends dying, old selves discarded. But some of it is inherited—grief for everything America never let become possible, for the history that shaped us but won’t hold us, for language that never quite fits. Haunted by economics like redlining, eviction, and scarcity, the book also confronts the grief of precarity.
This is not a book of coming to terms, it’s a book that sits beside you while you try to live with what you know. It asks how we carry loss, how we recognize love, and how we move forward when we’re still not sure where we stand. The Smallest Mistake We Call Human is a sharp, tender meditation on identity, family, and the contradictions that make us.
Isaac Pickell is a Black and Jewish poet, PhD student, and adjunct instructor in Detroit, Michigan. A Cave Canem Fellow and graduate of Miami University’s Creative Writing MFA, he is the author of The Smallest Mistake We Call Human, It’s not over once you figure it out, and two chapbooks. Isaac has taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.
Green Runs Through It, Greg Miller
Publisher: Sheep Meadow Press
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback
Greg Miller’s best book yet, Green Runs Through It moves against the contemporary American grain. Compressed, knotty, and direct, the poems invoke friendship, family, history, and intimacy’s many forms. Grief registers love strong as death. Poems defy boundaries between life and death, the clear and the inexplicable. Narratives, meditations, dream visions, and lyric songs confront the frailties of the body and mind, his voice finding solace in the natural world and a felt interconnectedness between human beings. Memory challenges and is challenged while embracing a confounding totality.
Greg Miller is a professor emeritus of English at Millsaps College. His prior books include Iron Wheel, Rib Cage, Watch, and Then Here and Now: New and Selected Poems.
Titanfall, Noah Soltau
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Titanfall explores grief and relationships, becoming and dying. The book navigates questions of identity, mortality, and politics in places tinged by the mythical and theological. In the “Christ-haunted” tradition of Flannery O’Connor’s South, the speaker of the poems guides the reader on a hero’s journey out of Appalachia and into a metaphysical wildland where choices and personalities have cosmic consequences. Grounded in American and German literary traditions and steeped in popular culture and world events, these poems are by turns harrowing, hopeful, and darkly humorous.
Noah Soltau teaches about art, literature, and society to the mostly willing. He is managing editor of The Red Branch Review. His manuscript, Titanfall, was shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Prize, and recent work appears in Cutleaf, storySouth, and elsewhere. Raised in Chattanooga, educated in the South and Germany, he lives with his wife and two daughters in East Tennessee.
Animal Psalm, DeAnna Stephens
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this collection, love reveals itself at the thresholds of forests, at the frayed edges of language and heritage, reminding readers that the backbone of love is the assurance of the senses-current of creek, texture of quartz, flavors of late summer-the ever-presence of the natural world. In their exploration of the complexity of familial and romantic bonds and cultural identity, these poems reveal the significance of myth in articulating loss and longing.
DeAnna Stephens‘s work has appeared in Cherry Tree, Pedestal Magazine, Feminist Studies, and other journals. In 2024, her poetry was a semifinalist for the Scotti Merrill Award for Poetry, and in 2023, her work won the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry. She was the 2019 recipient of the Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Contest. Her poetry has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and in 2022, she was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. She is the author of Heliotaxis from Main Street Rag. Stephens resides on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau where she teaches writing at Roane State Community College.
Yiewsley, Daljit Nagra
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: August 18, 2026
Format: Hardcover / eBook
This autobiographical collection explores Daljit Nagra’s experiences growing up in the white, working-class suburban town of Yiewsley close to Heathrow airport in Outer London, from the 1960s to 80s. As Britain transitions from a postwar manufacturing economy to the Thatcher period and the computer age, we see a young boy navigating childhood friendships and mishaps.
The poems bring to life a bustling house filled with relatives from India who arrived, legally or otherwise, in the UK: “devout realists – already, and always, knuckled into work”. They also offer powerful insight into the makings of the writer: the “messy English” at home fusing with Bollywood ballads, Top of the Pops and hymns at school, to develop a voice entirely his own.
Daljit Nagra has published five books of poetry with Faber, including the Forward Prize-winning Look We Have Coming to Dover! He is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, former Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, on the Society of Authors Council and presenter of Radio 4 Extra’s Poetry Extra.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/18 and 8/24 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.”