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.
Regaining Unconsciousness, Harryette Mullen
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume?
In eleven taut sections written in the eleventh hour of our collective being, these poems address climate change, corporate greed, racist violence, artificial intelligence, the pollution of our oceans, individualism at the cost of mutual wellness, and the consequences of not addressing these pressing issues. Mullen imagines, as we must, our apocalypse, and yet, in an astounding feat, she does so with playfulness and wry referentiality that make these poems surprisingly buoyant, funny, and readable. Our end may be inevitable, Mullen admits, but maybe we begin with gratitude.
Harryette Mullen is the award-winning author of several poetry collections, including Urban Tumbleweed, Recyclopedia, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Joy Is My Middle Name, Sasha Debevec-McKenney
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In her best imitation of a historian, poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney combs through the past. Joy Is My Middle Name is about crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasily through cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism, and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with ease.
This remarkable debut collection showcases Debevec-McKenney’s intimate, assured, conversational voice. Full of stories, character, awkward silences, and actual jokes, Joy Is My Middle Name seamlessly traces the author’s search for herself and examines how she gets in her own way, brings humor and lightness to rock-bottom moments, and considers the shamelessly girly as a serious cultural artifact.
All the while, Debevec-McKenney uses her own life to get revenge on the version of American history we’re taught in school. She brilliantly weaves together the political and the personal, maps the interior onto the exterior, and vice versa. Humble, giddy, ridiculous, bold, deep, empathetic, difficult, ragged, strange, erratic, and lithe, Joy Is My Middle Name is the most open conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner, the buzz of life’s perfect—and not-so-perfect—moments funneled onto the page.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Yale Review. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut.
Saint Consequence, Michael M. Weinstein
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback
What does it mean to inhabit a body—and for that body to inhabit our shared world, in all its complexity? Saint Consequence attempts to mine the gap between a life seen from the outside and the realities of a life lived. Influenced by time spent living in Siberia, Weinstein draws on experiences spanning gender transition, chronic illness, and disability to explore the tensions between public perception and private truth.
Ever wary of the temptation “to make a career of pain,” (Adrienne Rich), these poems instead weave together personal experience and cross-cultural perspectives to invite us to reimagine our place in the world with greater nuance and compassion. Equally a personal reckoning and universal meditation on the complexities of identity, Saint Consequence expands from an examination of one man’s singular experience of embodiment into a broader contemplation of the endless particularities of lives other than our own.
Michael M. Weinstein is a transgender, crip poet, scholar, essayist, and photographer. His writing has appeared in venues such as The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poets.org. A former MFA candidate and Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, he holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard and formerly served as a Fulbright scholar in Siberia. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Earlham College. He lives in Richmond, IN.
Still Desert, Daniel Elias Galicia
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Finalist for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize, Daniel Elias Galicia’s debut collection, Still Desert sings with histories both haunting and enchanting. Artistically and linguistically dynamic, Galicia’s poems weave personal and historical narratives of immigration, assimilation, and Mexican heritage. Still Desert lingers in the spaces between borders and crossings, breathing in rich, tactile environments and raw, complex emotions. With a musical rage and a sacred love, Galicia speaks to unsung lineages and the violences found before, during, and after crossing the border.
Daniel Elias Galicia is the author of the forthcoming collection Still Desert, runner-up for the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Button Poetry, EcoTheo Review, Ruminate Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and more. He is a Pushcart-nominated poet and a recipient of an Editor’s Choice Award (Relief).
Paper Crown, Heather Christle
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Since Heather Christle published her last poetry collection a decade ago, her nonfiction works The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons have found her readers around the world. Paper Crown marks Christle’s exuberant return to her home genre, in which she combines the imagination of her earliest poetry with the personal elements of her more recent prose. These poems conjure moments when the world’s events (a child’s words, early twentieth-century predictions of drone warfare, dinner with friends) align themselves with the odd logic of dreams and serendipity. With tenderness and verve, honesty and curiosity, Paper Crown invites readers to look up from its pages and recognize that the day going on around them could very well be its own poem.
Heather Christle is the author of the literary memoir In the Rhododendrons (2025), The Crying Book (2019), and four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in The Believer, Granta, London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and Poetry.
Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems, m. mick powell
Publisher: One World
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In m. mick powell’s polyphonic, haunting debut, a chorus of voices conjures up intimate pop herstories that have become a part of our collective cultural lore, resurrecting the vivid lives and artistries of iconic women like Aaliyah, Whitney Houston, TLC’s Left Eye, Phyllis Hyman, and Selena Quintanilla to map how the poet’s queer Black girlhood was molded by their memory.
With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while considering the multiple stages, both in private life and performance, that compose the fullness of a starlet’s legacy. How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and friendship, and forever transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate scrutiny and alienation in the limelight, often in the same industry as their abusers? How were their lives and deaths mythologized by those who survived them, and how do these archives establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?
Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and splendid wordplay, Dead Girl Cameo takes us beyond the headlines, innovating a Black feminist poetic that traverses the richly-textured realms of grief, girlhood, love, widowing, femme friendship, and queer fandom.
m. mick powell is a queer Black Cabo Verdean femme, poet, artist, survivor, and Aries. They are an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut and faculty in Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing program. The author of the chapbook threesome in the last Toyota Celica (Host Publications) and a 2024 Torch Literary Arts fellow, mick enjoys spending time with cats, chasing waterfalls, and being in love.
Lost Cities, Valencia Robin
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback
Brimming with music, bursting with flora, the poems in Valencia Robin’s second collection are both a walking tour of local neighborhoods and a journey into space and across time—ways of looking and listening to the past in order to find our best way forward. Engaging with an array of artistic heroes—James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, Pablo Neruda, and Stevie Wonder among them—Robin looks for guidance, grounding, and even hope in spite of the traumas she witnesses and experiences daily. In one striking masterpiece, she gives voice to a prescient childhood icon, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek, who brings the show’s unfulfilled vision of interstellar racial harmony to bear on the killing of black and brown bodies in contemporary America. Whether set in space or down the block in Charlottesville or Milwaukee, the poems in Lost Cities offer us hope amid the heartbreak of a fractured world.
Valencia Robin is a poet and visual artist. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The St. Petersburg Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Kweli, The Cortland Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and the 2014 winner of the Hocking Hills Festival of Poetry Competition. She holds an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia where she currently teaches as a third-year post-MFA fellow.
whitewards, Katarína Kucbelová, Julia Sherwood (Tr.)
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback
Katarína Kucbelová’s whitewards is a haunting and deeply moving sequence of poems that unfolds in a stark, snowbound landscape where winter seems endless. Three unnamed figures struggle to find their way through a snow-covered mountainside, grappling with uncertainty, unspoken fears, and the weight of questions they can barely put into words. Framed as a series of brief fragments and longer passages that use a range of narrative and cinematic techniques, the collection explores themes of identity, survival, and the search for meaning in a time of global crisis—whether political, environmental, or technological. Yet amid the darkness, Kucbelová finds light in storytelling itself, offering it as a form of solace, a way to break through loneliness, and a means to endure. The beauty of her images stimulates and inspires, acting as an antidote to the bleakness of the world. This stunning collection of poems explores identity, survival, and the power that storytelling possesses to bring light even to the bleakest landscapes.
One of Slovakia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, Katarína Kucbelová is the author of two novels and several collections of poetry that have been translated into multiple languages, including The Bonnet. Julia Sherwood is a translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian, and German into English, as well as into Slovak. She co-curates the website SlovakLiterature.com and is the editor of Seagull Books’ Slovak List. Now based in London, she was born and grew up in Bratislava. Peter Sherwood is a translator, scholar, and retired professor of Hungarian Language and Culture. His translations from Hungarian include collections of essays and short stories, as well as several novels, including Krisztina Tóth’s Barcode. Poet, literary scholar, editor, and translator Viliam Nádaskay works at the Institute of Slovak Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is coeditor for the online literary journal plav.sk (Platform for Literature and Research). His poetry collections include A Skipped Connection, Sense-Deprived, and Nosedive, Flickering.
Mulholland Dive, Vanessa Roveto
Publisher: CLASH Books
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.
Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.
Vanessa Roveto is the author of two books of poetry, bodys and a women, and the novella The Valley (a void). She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.
Feller, Denton Loving
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Format: Paperback
Using the natural world as both mirror and lens, the poems in Denton Loving’s third full-length collection of poetry explore themes of connection, longing, and the pursuit of a fully lived life. They celebrate “the light that enters the woods and cleanses the wound.” They seek the sacred order in everything, from the phases of the moon down to the delicate colors of a moth’s wings. And yet, they are not cloistered away from the human struggle–whether with nature, with each other, or with the self. Feller envisions our environment and landscape, not as mere backdrop or ornament but as revelatory forces illuminating the hidden chambers of the self. At once deeply rooted in his Appalachian soil and universally resonant, Feller confirms Loving’s position among those rare poets who transmute a sense of place into profound human truth.
Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collections Crimes Against Birds and Tamp, recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He is a cofounder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Ecotone.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/5 and 8/11 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.