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.
Resting Bitch Face, Taylor Byas
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Resting Bitch Face is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.
From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris.
Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times won the Maya Angelou Book Award, the Ohioana Book Award, the CHIRBy Award, and the BCALA Best Poetry Honor.
I Do Know Some Things, Richard Siken
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
Format: Hardcover
It is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one’s life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns’s shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.
Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Lannan Fellowships, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
SOFAR, Elizabeth Bradfield
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
Format: Paperback
In SOFAR, poet-naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield attends our current ecological and historic moment, her decades-long queer love, a life time of work on boats, and her body’s shifting currents with wry yearning and linguistic delight. SOFAR is an acronym for the “sound frequency and ranging channel,” a deep layer of oceanic water that enables sound to travel vast distances, and, drawing upon her deep knowledge and experience of the sea, Bradfield plumbs what can be heard by listening across the vast distances of our lives—within our memories and larger histories, between strangers and beloveds, and to the more-than-human world. Bradfield’s work as a naturalist gives an earned intimacy and nuanced authority to her eco-grief, field observations, and metaphoric leaps as she regards whales, cusk eels, and storm petrels. These are the poems of a woman unafraid of navigating the depths and rip currents she moves through.
Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work, and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. She has co-edited the anthologies Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, 2005-2020 (with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman) and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology and Poetry (with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Sun, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Orion and have been widely anthologized. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her honors also include a Stegner Fellowship and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided, she lives on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and balances her work as a writer with work as a naturalist/field assistant at home and afar.
Games for Children, Keith S. Wilson
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: August 26, 2025
Format: Paperback
Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the memory of Wilson’s grandfather picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.
Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.
Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Wilson’s book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love was recognized by The New York Times as a best new book of poetry. He lives in Chicago.
Mouth, Tracey Knapp
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Mouth are about the world of the mouth and its many satellites. Words, especially. And when you’re lucky, another mouth. The poems address the beautiful failures of language to mean what it says, and to be less than the physical at the end of the day, you are left with only the words in your head, the mouth on your face.
Tracey Knapp works in graphic design and communications in San Francisco. She received graduate degrees in creative writing and English from Boston University and Ohio University, where she taught literature, composition and creative writing. She has received scholarships from The Tin House Writers Workshop and The Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Fund.
Backbone, Meryem Yildiz
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Backbone by Meryem Yildiz stretches from the shores of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal to the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, charting a course through the fractured landscapes of identity and selfhood. Through breathy narratives and compact, distilled moments, Yildiz confronts the weight of trauma and the shifting sands of cultural identity, revealing how these forces shape, and reshape, the body and spirit. As she navigates chronic pain, displacement, and the memories that linger, the speaker asks, “Who am I if I don’t recognize myself?” At the heart of this debut is the deeply intimate bond between the speaker and Clara, a steadfast friend whose presence transcends boundaries and anchors the quest for belonging. Backbone is a testament to the transformative power of human connection and the capacity for renewal amidst the struggles of identity and experience.
Meryem Yildiz is a poet of Turkish and French Canadian descent based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), whose work has been featured in publications across Canada. In 2022, she won The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry as well as the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s carte blanche Prize. With a background in psychology and translation, she draws deeply from the human experience and the complex interplay between language, culture and the psyche. Backbone is her first book.
Frayed Linens, Marilyn Bowering
Publisher: Exile Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Marilyn Bowering casts the poet as a traveler, and Frayed Linens is a poet’ s exorcism of the nightmares that haunt today’ s world. She writes of beauty and resilience within darkness, from the ruins of Greece to the horrors of Mariupol, showing how History echoes itself at every turn. She is accompanied in these poems by ancestral and mythic figures, beloved poets, and the ghosts of her own life-story as the body and spirit – the frayed linens of the title – are worn and renewed over time. From a mother’ s sorcery, to a satyrical abduction, to a Celtic saint’ s interventions, and the stone hands of a gargoyle, the range and energy of Bowering’ s new collection cannot conceal the tenderness that propels it. These are poems of witness, empathy, and compassion, clear-eyed in their confrontation of failure and in the capacity of friendship, love, and will, to retain redemptive power. Cover and interior photographs by Xan Shian.
Marilyn Bowering of Sooke, B.C. has received many awards for her writing (both poetry and fiction) including the Pat Lowther Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and several National Magazine awards. Her work has been short-listed for the Governor General’ s Award and for international awards including the Dublin Impac Award, the Orange Prize, the Sony Award and the Prix Italia. She was a 2008 Fulbright Scholar at New York University and currently teaches at Vancouver Island University. Her most recent books are Green (poetry, with Exile Editions) and What It Takes to Be Human (novel).
On The News that Sagittarius A* Grows Hungrier, Nicola Vulpe
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In late 2019 astronomers discovered that Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy was getting hungrier, consuming nearby matter at a rate never before seen. We humans now dominate every inch of this planet, every ecological niche. We have enslaved every human and every species we find useful, exterminating those we do not—and yet we grow hungrier. We are our own Sagittarius A*.
Scientists and activists tell us we are reaching the tipping point, that if we don’t change our ways immediately, there will be no return. They are mistaken. That was long ago. We have written our tragedy, and we are playing out the final scene. On the News that Sagittarius A* Grows Hungrier is a celebration of what makes us human: love, laughter, desire, thought and sorrow, and it is a lament for this world we have consumed, a letter left from our “insignificant villages … in a barren land where locks are unknown, / because there’s nothing to steal,” so that after we are gone “If anyone should pass, … at least we’ll still have our names.”
Nicola Vulpe was born in Montreal. He completed a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and taught in Spain before settling in Ottawa. His poems and translations have appeared in journals such as Alba, The Antigonish Review, Carousel, The Ex-Puritan, The Manhattan Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Montréal Serai, Slush Pile Magazine, and Stand Magazine. He has also published a novella, The Extraordinary Event of Pia H., who turned to admire a chicken on the Plaza Mayor, and four previous collections of poetry, including, with Guernica, Insult to the Brain and Through the Waspmouth I Drew You, which both received Fred Cogswell Awards for Excellence in Poetry.
Death Does Not End at the Sea, Gbenga Adesina
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Gbenga Adesina’s groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history—a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin—to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant’s brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.
Gbenga Adesina, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University. He received his Masters in Fine Arts from New York University, where he was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He is the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He has won multiple fellowships, and his poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
The Deep Blue of Neptune, Terry Belew
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Deep Blue of Neptune is a striking, meditative collection of poems by Terry Belew, which reminds readers of the necessity of empathy in the midst of uncertain and unsettling times. Set against a rural backdrop, Belew’s poems reside in the everyday––driving on gravel backroads, roaming the aisles of Walmart, and doomscrolling on a smart phone––to highlight the contradictory qualities of existence.
Belew utilizes a variety of forms, familiar and invented, including free verse, sonnets, sestinas, and “wish lists,” to explore his speakers’ inner lives. Often haunted by violence, from car crashes to gunshots, these poems are a reflection of how people must navigate the bleak landscape of the digital age. The Deep Blue of Neptune is a masterfully crafted debut, blending lyricism with wry humor to address the complexities of our relationships with other people, with nature, and with ourselves.
Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri with his wife and two sons. He earned an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and an MA from Missouri State University. His work has appeared in recent issues of Southern Humanities Review, Meridian, Tar River Poetry, The Pinch, and Storm Cellar, among many others.
Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano
Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In her masterful poetry collection Terminal Surreal, Martha Silano confronts the reality of mortality with gorgeous attention to imagery and scene. The book follows a trajectory from early symptoms before diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to full-blown illness and its effects on friends and family, including her children, who appear in poems like “After Dropping My Son Off at College” and “My Nineteen-Year-Old Daughter Is My Personal Assistant.”
With a devoted naturalist’s eye, Silano revels in birds, trees, and flowers in a way that reminds readers we are connected to the world around us. The book touches on the medical, the metaphysical, and even the cosmological (through encounters in medical offices and on a moon of Mars). With Nutter Butters and Lorna Doones, abecedarians and self-elegies, Silano’s singular, feisty, contemporary voice propels these poems of grief and acceptance as they explore the transformational power of art.
Martha Silano (1962–2025) was the author of This One We Call Ours, Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and the forthcoming collection Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems. She was coauthor of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and many anthologies. Diagnosed with ALS in 2023, she lived in Seattle, Washington, until May 2025.
Transubstantiations, Janet Kauffman, Jerome McGann
Publisher: Station Hill Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Transubstantiation is an immense word. Invisible and instantaneous, it is powerful in whatever realm claims it — ecclesiastic, alchemic, or mythical. Or poetical. It crosses boundaries, and shifts instantaneously this to that. Jerome McGann’ s book of poems, Transubstantiations, is a multitudinous, sometimes hilarious, game-playing, tormented, and deeply provocative collection from decades of his writing. It is the plural of his title, the multiple transubstantiations, that link many of the poems, rattle their territories, and provide both the weight and the lift to this book.
Janet Kauffman (born June 10, 1945)[1] is an American novelist, poet, and mixed media artist who has also been a civil rights, environmental, equal rights, peace, and social justice activist. Jerome McGann is a major critic and scholar whose most influential works include The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (both 1983). His more than 25 books include Byron: The Complete Poetical Works in 7 Vols., as well as 4 books of poetry. In 1993, McGann began his online The Rossetti Archive (1993– 2008). He is also the founder of the Applied Research in Patacriticism digital laboratory, which includes such software projects as IVANHOE and NINES. A Fulbright Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of major awards from the Mellon Foundation, the MLA, among many, and has been a professor at the University of Virginia since 1886. Jerome McGann is a major critic and scholar whose most influential works include The Romantic Ideology and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (both 1983). His more than 25 books include Byron: The Complete Poetical Works in 7 Vols., as well as 4 books of poetry. In 1993, McGann began his online The Rossetti Archive (1993– 2008). He is also the founder of the Applied Research in Patacriticism digital laboratory, which includes such software projects as IVANHOE and NINES. A Fulbright Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of major awards from the Mellon Foundation, the MLA, among many, and has been a professor at the University of Virginia since 1886.
City of Dis: A Novel-in-Verse, Randall James Tyrone
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Randall James Tyrone’s debut collection City of Dis is a searing exploration of contemporary existence intertwined with medieval notions of damnation, invoking Dante’s “Inferno” to craft a modern-day epic. Doubling as a novel-in-verse, City of Dis follows the unnamed protagonist as they navigate a cityscape that is both a circle of hell and also the urban sprawl of 21st-century America. Amidst the cacophony of sirens, construction, and hurricanes fueled by climate change, Tyrone weaves a tapestry where pop culture, late-stage capitalism, and the daily struggles imposed by inequities of race and class in this urban inferno collide with arcane theology, existential dread, and something like divine comedy. Through forms ranging from epistolary to litany, Tyrone’s speaker charts every chaotic inch of this dystopian landscape, encountering Dante himself as they confront the personification of Suicide. City of Dis stands not only as a vivid critique of modern society but also as a haunting testament to resilience in the face of spiritual and environmental decay.
Randall James Tyrone holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming. He resides in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in Electric Literature’s Okey-Panky, Oversound Poetry, and Nomadic Press. He has been anthologized in the Bodies Built For A Game Anthology by Prairie Schooner. He has received a scholarship to attend the Tin House Summer Workshop and was awarded the Bentley-Buckman Poetry Fellowship to attend the Writers Week at the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. He was a finalist for the Indiana Review’s ½ K Prize and a finalist for The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. He’s very excited for you.
The Cave, Ryan Vine
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Critics describe The Cave, the long-awaited second collection from award-winning poet Ryan Vine, as “powerful and completely realized,” “profound and enduring,” and “utterly masterful and deeply moving.” The Cave contains haunting meditations on fatherhood, fearless contemplations of place and lineage, clear-eyed examinations of generational trauma, and moves—from narrative to lyric to narrative to lyric—toward a more perfect and complete clarity. The poet Dobby Gibson writes: “The Cave is an unforgettable contribution to the poetry of paterfamilias written from deep inside “love’s austere and lonely offices,” as Robert Hayden put it. These poems are indelible as scars—and just as full of ancient wisdom.”
Ryan Vine is the author of To Keep Him Hidden (Salmon Poetry, 2018), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award; and the chapbooks WARD (TRP, 2021); and Distant Engines (Backwaters Press, 2006), winner of a Weldon Kees Award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. He is Professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.
Frame Inside a Frame, Daniel Lassell
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell explores the boundaries, overlaps, and portals of memory and seeking. Lassell’s collection is wildly surprising at every turn, greeting readers with visceral childhood memories, gritty landscapes of climate collapse, a quirky neighbor transfixed on love, a sexual predator who breaks into homes, a bat that disrupts sleep, a llama that bites off a man’s ear, a dog that eats the family’s Thanksgiving turkey, farmers condemning their machinery to rot in fields, a cow carcass that washes up on a city’s waterfront park, a hooligan feeding possums trash, and pollen everywhere. Taken together, Frame Inside a Frame is a constellation eyed toward the exploration of distance and meanings inherent within distance and proximity.
Daniel Lassell is the author of Spit, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, Ad Spot and The Emptying Earth. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Arkansas International, Colorado Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Bloomington, Indiana.
In This Distance, Brooke Sahni
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In This Distance examines the relationship between distance and desire, the erotic and the ecstatic, pleasure and paradise. Esther Perel, Audre Lorde and the biblical figure of Eve co-exist in this collection, offering their real and imagined insight as the speaker grapples with questions such as: do we need distance in order to maintain desire? Where is paradise? What constitutes an Eden?
Brooke Sahni is the author of Before I Had the Word (TRP, 2021), which won the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Verse Daily, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the high desert mountains of Arizona.
Distributary, Luke Johnson
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Distributary picks up where the speaker from Quiver left off and delves deeper in that speaker’s concerns and fears around fatherhood, cultural violence and his daughter’s illness. It is a book of sirens and ghosts, of time collapse. How many moments tangle and spark in the waking moments of our lives. It houses a grainy melancholia, paradigms of grief. Houses hope.
Luke Johnson’s first book Quiver (TRP, 2023) was named a finalist for the California Book Award and finished finalist for prizes such as the Jake Adam York, The Levis and the Vassar Miller Award. Johnson is the co-author of A Slow Indwelling, a call and response project with the poet Megan Merchant (Harbor Editions). You can read more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.
Wayward Creatures, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
Publisher: Host Publications
Publication Date: August 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
With monstrous joy and tenderness untamed, Wayward Creatures is a collection that spills with the verdant language of excess, inviting us to step into its wild grasses. Here, the colonizer’s language has been overgrown by an ecology of strangeness and possibility—poetry disrupts, rituals, and revolts, rendering queer abolition irresistible.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers poems as portals into a “wilderness of intimacies” where the crip marvelous, the sacred profane, and trans love emerge in an ecstatic throng. With a poetics that resists taxonomy, many voices surge through this collection. They speak us new names, and urge us toward vibrant becomings.
This is deeply necessary, restorative work—kinning marigolds, cicadas, fungi, universes—Wayward Creatures dismantles the myth of separateness, inviting us to allow ourselves to be nourished by this living entanglement, ignited by mutual spark. From the burning map of this lexicon, may we learn “lessons / of fire,” how to “tend a basic flame / & char down the plantation.”
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), Ephemeral (Ecotheo Collective, 2024), Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025), and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric anatomy (Milkweed Editions, forthcoming in 2026). Their art, photography, and writing, have been in a number of community art shows including at the National Queer Arts Festival and Rosebud Gallery in San Francisco, the BGSQD in New York City, and exhibitions across Canada, the United States, and Belgium. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal. A VONA Alum, and 2023 recipient of the 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 non-fiction have been published in American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry among other places. They live in southern California.
Lilacs, Rainer Diana Hamilton
Publisher: Krupskaya Books
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.
Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of God Was Right and The Awful Truth. They write, broadly, about the forms that dreams and art have taken.
Bunting’s Honey, Moya Cannon
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: August 28, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This is a book of wonderings and wanderings. Many of the wanderings are on familiar territory explored on foot, the hills of Wicklow and of the Burren in Co. Clare, the shorelines of Dublin Bay, of North West Donegal, of Galway, Achill and the Aran Islands. Other poems bring us farther afield, to a French village on the banks of the Saô ne, to the Venetian Island of Torcello, to a sacred mountain lake in China. In these poems there is an alertness to the palimpsest of lives, human and non-human, lived in these places and the mystery of each individual life.
Moya Cannon is an Irish poet with six previous collections. In 2021 Carcanet published her Collected Poems. She was born and grew up in Co. Donegal, received a BA in History and Politics from University College, Dublin, and an MPhil in International Relations from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A recipient of the inaugural Brendan Behan Award and of the O’ Shaughnessy Award, she was Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University and in 2004 was elected to Á osdÁ na, the affiliation of Irish creative artists.
Guaracara, Fawzia Muradali Kane
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: August 28, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This book traces the poet’s ancestral Indo-Caribbean legacy, following the history of the cane sugar industry, and growing up in an oil refinery small town in south Trinidad.
Fawzia Muradali Kane is an architect and poet. Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, she came to the UK on a scholarship to study architecture. She now lives in London and is a director of KMK Architects. Her debut poetry collection Tantie Diablesse (Waterloo Press 2011) was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2014, Thamesis Publications produced her long sequence Houses of the Dead as an illustrated pamphlet. Her short story ‘ Anguilla City’ was the 2018 City of Stories winner for Westminster in London. Her prose poem ‘ Eric’ won second prize in 2023’ s National Poetry Competition.
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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.