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.
Dwelling, Allison Joseph
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: August 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
Dwelling is the latest collection from Allison Joseph, whose wise words, narrative passion, and lyrical intensity have made her a fan favorite with audiences of all ages. In Dwelling, Joseph is concerned with the inevitable search for home—as a woman, as a person of color, and as a poet. Her poems take on subjects from the serious and sublime to the humorous and ironic. Whatever her subject, Joseph is humane, humble, hilarious, and high-spirited. This poet goes wherever her imagination thrives—dwelling among us and beyond us.
Allison Joseph is a faculty member at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021, PBTS Best Book Award winner), Any Proper Weave (Kelsay Books, 2022), Speak and Spell (Glass Lyre Press, 2022), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018). Confessions of a Barefaced Woman won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. She was named Illinois Author of the Year for 2022 by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of beloved poet and editor Jon Tribble. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.
The Future of an Illusion, Rush Rankin
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Publication Date: August 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Future of an Illusion is a gorgeous collection, delving into the essentials of life and death in a voice that is both intimate and ethereal. The refrains woven into the poems are subtly haunting. The depth of feeling swells into striking philosophical observations. Entwining strands of narrative, lyric, and meditation, The Future of an Illusion feels completely at home in its own idiom, moving not in opposition to poetic conventions, but on another plane.
In addition to one book on aesthetics, In Theory, Rush Rankin has published three books of poetry: Pascal’s Other Wager (2006), Bene-Diction (winner of The Vassar Miller Prize, 2003), and The Failure of Grief. Here’s a few of the many magazines in which the author has appeared: New American Writing, Antioch Review, Paris Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, Pleiades, Mudfish, Gargoyle, Confrontation, and Hotel America. The poet’s academic degrees are from Duke University, The University of North Carolina, and The Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa. He has taught English at Virginia Tech, the U. of Iowa, the U. of Missouri at Columbia, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the U. of Missouri at Kansas City.
Yellow Flower Gills Me Whole, Sid Ghosh
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: August 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth-shaking wit, he creates startling new worlds in only a handful of words. As a nonspeaking autistic writer with Down syndrome who must navigate immense sensorimotor complexity, his short poems are both muscular and agile, displaying a dexterity replete with vertiginous grace: “Spinning I harness / poetry of the Earth. // The Sufi dances / in me to dare me // to scare your loud / soul to ensnare // my fearful mind to / bare some misery / to bear some truth.”
Ghosh writes beyond his years and from a perspective steeped in queer and fractaled sensibilities. As one who is “simply privy to a new road,” he renders neurodiverse thought patterns as truly divine. The poems that result bristle with wisdom, divergence, and the “generosity of deep rivers.” Unprecedented in its genius and composition, this collection of poems is sure to leave readers wide-eyed and breathless.
Sid Ghosh is a levitator of language, meandering through the rivers of Down Syndrome, gilling himself through poetry. He is the author of two chapbooks: Give a Book and Proceedings of the Full Moon Rotary Club. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Shedding Season, Jane Morton
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: August 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
A kitchen hums with flies. Grackles fill the branches of a tree. A bruise blooms over skin. In Shedding Season, nature threatens to overwhelm those who would keep it in check. Instead, Morton explores what it means to refuse the language of dominance, to recognize oneself as a small part of an impossibly complex ecosystem. From this vantage, insect legs form a chorus and violence is worked like a bow against an instrument, attempting beauty. In turn, a house becomes a trap, a family a threat, and the notion of salvation something you can drown in. In these poems, a broken narrative follows cycles of violence and ecological degradation across generations, illuminating the ways in which our relationships— with others, our environments, and ourselves— define us even as we define them.
With language, image, and narrative always in flux, these poems inhabit the grey areas between desire and disgust, safety and survival. In constant search of breaking points, Morton interrogates the impermanence of identity: how many times can something evolve before it becomes something else?
Jane Morton’s chapbook Snake Lore won the Black River Chapbook Competition and was published by Black Lawrence Press. Her individual poems and short stories have been published widely in literary journals including Gulf Coast, West Branch, Boulevard, Passages North, and Ninth Letter. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was Online Editor for Black Warrior Review. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Morton currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama.
Reveille, Liza Hudock
Publisher: Flood Editions
Publication Date: August 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
“Here is a world in which the dead mother’s angel arrives in the ‘clean, bright mouths’ of the dogs, in which ‘mycelium adorns the roots like a lace glove.’ Elegy or ode, personal history or menagerie—these pithy poems are as elegant and wise as they are whimsical. It’s as if each line rides the razor-thin balance between inevitability and surprise. ‘White wisp in the corner of my eye. / I try to look at it directly and it’s gone.’ I really love these poems. They make me feel more alive. Liza Hudock’s Reveille is a standout debut.”—Sally Keith
Liza Hudock lives in Detroit, Michigan. A veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, she received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Reveille is her first collection of poems.
Bodies Found in Various Places, Elvira Hernández, Daniel Borzutzky (tr.), Alec Schumacher (tr.)
Publisher: Cardboard House Press
Publication Date: August 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
Elvira Hernández has occupied a marginal position in the Chilean poetic scene for decades, her quiet but mordant voice looking inward and outward, ironizing the circumstances of life that have brought us to this critical point in society. As recently as 2018, her work has become more visible after receiving the Jorge Teillier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Prize (Chile 2024). With this belated recognition of her work has come an interest in studying her unique poetic language, with new critical books forthcoming from Spanish and Latin American publishers. Bodies Found in Various Places collects poems written from 1981-2016, providing readers with a curation of texts that show why Hernández is one of the most vital Latin American poets writing today.
Elvira Hernández, pseudonym of María Teresa Adriasola, is a Chilean poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important voices of contemporary poetry in the Southern Cone and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. Some of her most important works include: ¡Arre! Halley ¡Arre! (Giddy up, Halley!)(1986), La bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag) (1991), Santiago Waria (1992), and Pájaros desde mi ventana (Birds From My Window) (2018). She is the recipient of the Jorge Tellier National Poetry Award (2018), the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award (2018), and the National Literature Award (Chile 2024).
Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and Spanish-language translator from Chicago. His most recent books are The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (2024), and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human, received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translations are Cecilia Vicuña’s The Deer Book (2024); and Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the American Literary Translator’s Association’s 2017 National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún.
Alec Schumacher is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. His research interests are Latin American poetry, translation, and avant-garde poetics. His publications have been focused on Chilean poets Juan Luis Martínez and Elvira Hernández. His translations include works by Jorge Arbeleche, Elvira Hernández, and Luis Correa-Díaz. In 2019, he published The Chilean Flag, a translation of Elvira Hernández’s book which was nominated for the National Translation Award in Poetry 2020 by The American Literary Translators.
Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor, Michael Leong
Publisher: Black Square Editions
Publication Date: August 25, 2025
Format: Paperback
Dear Vase Already Shattered Against the Fragile Floor is the third volume in a projected pentalogy that draws on literary collage, formal constraint, and rhetorical complication to concentrate, transform, and re-release the contingencies of chaos. The first two volumes Cutting Time with a Knife (2012) and Words on Edge (2018) are also from Black Square Editions. An experiment in what Leong calls a “disorientalist poetics,” Dear Vase is haunted by three disparate figures from East Asian cultural history, two real and one imagined: Tang Dynasty poet Li Po (701-762), landscape painter Jeong Seon (1676-1759), and “Hiroshima poet” Araki Yasusada (1907-1972), a yellowface fabrication. In the face of various Orientalisms—including the lures of “auto-Orientalism,” “meta-Orientalism,” and “re-Orientalism”—Leong’s surrealist poetry wagers upon an ethics and aesthetics of disorientation.
Michael Leong teaches poetry at Kenyon College.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/19 and 8/25 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.