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.
Staying Still, Hieu Minh Nguyen
Publisher: Tin House
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar and Not Here, which went on to win the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Some awards and fellowships Hieu has received include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.
Revelator, Ellie Black
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Chosen by Dorothea Lasky as the winner of the 2026 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Ellie Black’s debut collection, Revelator, glitches and falters, iterates and alludes. This is a book concerned deeply with what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s fantasy. With equal parts humor and horror, this fragmented, oracular collection explores the consequences of the increasingly blurry digital-physical landscape in which we find ourselves and its relationship to power, control, and what we worship. These poems transform shards of language, pop culture, and literature into a tightly wound poetics of excess engaged with an incantatory attention to sound. Famous women, teenage girls, movie characters, and reluctant prophets are victims, villains, and victors, sometimes all at once. Here, boundaries blur between high and low. Angels visit and animatronics come to life. Sylvia Plath, Lee Edelman, and Evil Dead II share space in a single poem. Revelation, this collection proposes, exists at the limits of confessional poetry, religious confession, the dramatic twist, and the divine promise of an apocalyptic ending. Revelator offers up a mirror to how we invent and perform ourselves on stages, on screens, and in our lives.
Ellie Black is a visiting assistant professor in English–creative writing at Hendrix College. She received both a PhD in creative writing (emphasis in memoir/autotheory) and an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi. A 2026 Gregory Djanikian Scholar and a finalist for the 2025 DISQUIET Prize in Poetry, she has had work published in Bennington Review, The Adroit Journal, The Common, Washington Square Review, The Drift, and elsewhere.
Pyrrhic Symphony, Adam O. Davis
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Pyrrhic Symphony, the speaker asks, “Should a poem be the pill or the pharmacy?” And the book replies: Why not both? It ails and wails, blooms and wilts, but always breathes, just as anyone reading this does. Part siren songs, part torch songs, Pyrrhic Symphony sings wry lullabies for apocalypses public, personal, and politic, moving from cruise ships to Krakatoa, from a dentist’s office to a marriage as it explores how love, family, community, and art can function in the face of an increasingly hostile climate. And in lamenting how “all I ever wanted from love / was that it never change,” the feverish speaker goes toe-to-toe with the nurse who watches over him as they encounter and recount a world of late capitalist excess. By turns ecstatic and demonic, tender and terrifying, Pyrrhic Symphony stands as an act of musical witness and cautious hope in this age of corrupted wonder.
Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work has appeared in AGNI, the Believer, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, and in The Best American Poetry. Davis is cocreator and host of the podcast Poetry Goes to the Movies, and of its digital collection for the Poetry Foundation.
Them That Slept: New & Selected Poems, Larissa Szporluk
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
In Them That Slept, Larissa Szporluk gathers three decades of work into a single incandescent arc—poems that braid feminist theology, eros, and myth into a lyric of fierce awakening. Borrowing its title from First Corinthians—“the firstfruits of them that slept”—this collection asks what it means to rise, not into certainty, but into desire, voice, and embodiment. Here, virgins become saints and saints become women of appetite. Daughters speak back to fathers. The sea mothers and devours. Joan of Arc lingers in her cell. Venus tweets. The body is never merely symbolic—it is radiant, wounded, knowing. Szporluk’s women are not passive figures in inherited narratives; they are theologians of touch, architects of longing, midwives of their own transformations.
Across selections from six previous books and a powerful suite of new poems, Szporluk reimagines sacred language as intimate speech. Biblical cadences shimmer against domestic interiors, fields, bedrooms, and storm skies. Eros is not an ornament but a form of knowledge; faith is not obedience but risk. These are poems that refuse to sleep through history. They burn toward revelation— sensual, subversive, and alive.
Larissa Szporluk is the author of six books of poetry, including Dark Sky Question, winner of the Barnard Prize, Isolato (Iowa Book Prize), and Virginals, which won the Burnside Review Press Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grant and received graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia. A former professor of poetry and ongoing mother of three, she now farms in northern Italy.
Sidekick, Naomi Shihab Nye
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Drawing on her family’s deep roots in Palestine, Nye writes with both abiding love and immeasurable heartbreak, offering intimate reflections that illuminate the human cost of conflict. Long a champion of dialogue across borders and divides, she crafts poems that are direct, conversational, and unafraid to confront the systems and structures that perpetuate harm.
Through her signature blend of candor, lyrical grace, and careful attention to everyday lives, Nye offers a collection that urges readers to look more closely, feel more deeply, and imagine a world in which we refuse to turn away from one another.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including five collections of poetry from Boa Editions: Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Nye has received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Texas Writer Award 2024, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, the Arab American National Museum, and the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in San Antonio, TX.
The Cardinals, Amy Speace
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
An award-winning songwriter, championed early by Judy Collins (who has recorded her songs), she is an established presence in the Nashville songwriting scene and has been playing concerts throughout the world for the last twenty years. Her songs have always been celebrated for their poetic lyrics, and during Covid and a break in her touring career, Speace received her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She was mentored by Maggie Smith and clearly comes from the lineage of Smith and Sharon Olds. Speace tackles the internal language of coming together and splitting apart, evoking rivers and birds, the South and the North, weather and racism and family history and it all comes together like birdsong.
The Cardinals is Amy Speace’s debut collection. She is an award-winning Americana folk singer and songwriter discovered by Judy Collins. Her songs have been recorded by Ms. Collins and many others and she has won International Song of the Year from the Americana Music Association (UK). Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Ihe Guardian, Working Mother, and Salon.com. She received her MFA from Spalding University and teaches English at Cumberland University. She resides in Nashville, Tennessee, with her son, Huckleberry, and her dog, Dusty Springfield.
The Next Sky, Sherwin Bitsui
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Pulsing with evocative voice and imagery, Sherwin Bitsui’s The Next Sky ruminates on the past, present, and future, questioning where living things fit into the puzzle of the natural world. Here, blackbirds sigh obsidian and the “land whispers its name.” The air is woven by laughter and breath becomes “a knot of lung steam” hidden behind a rib cage. From fragmented and surreal, to haunted and intimate, the poems in this book-length sequence ebb and flow, washing over readers like a wall of rain—fleeting and resonant. As the ancient collides with the modern and temporal, The Next Sky navigates ideas of culture and identity through explorations of land, place, and nature. “Insisting: Dusk is just skin worn on faces,” Bitsui blurs the line between humans and nature, collapsing what we know of language and time.
Sherwin Bitsui is originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. He is Diné of the Todich’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tl’izilani (Many Goats Clan). He is the author of Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press, 2003), Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). His honors include a Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship and a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship. He is also the recipient of a 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Award. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and joined the faculty at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 2019.
How to Cast a Beautiful Animal, Diana Keren Lee
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
How to Cast a Beautiful Animal is Diana Keren Lee’s debut full-length poetry collection. Witty, perceptive, and emotionally resonant, these poems accompany a struggling actress from childhood to middle age, from Texas to New York, Los Angeles, and South Korea, while tracing the lives of her working-class immigrant parents and the effects of displacement. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s, when Asian American performers were largely confined to outdated roles, through the present moment and into imagined futures, this book features the layered experience of a second-generation Korean American life that resists stereotype and easy narrative.
How to Cast a Beautiful Animal navigates between stage and home, English and Korean, autobiography and invention. Lee examines the loss and recovery of language, the trauma of war and migration, and the shifting terrains of relationships, labor, and art. From the financial crises of the early twenty-first century to moments of joy and creative discovery, this collection balances sharp social observation with lyric intimacy.
Using a wide range of styles and forms, Lee moves beyond immigrant tragedy and the model minority myth to create a multifaceted portrait of family, American dream versus reality, humor, and resilience. With a lens both sweeping and precise, these poems consider the limits, and possibilities, of language while honoring lives and histories often relegated to the margins. How to Cast a Beautiful Animal marks the arrival of a distinctive and compelling new voice in contemporary American poetry.
Diana Keren Lee is the winner of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Pleiades, wildness, and elsewhere.
Celestial Mechanics, Anthony Walton
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
“If only the world were as orderly as Bach, if there were no need for gospel, no need for jazz, no need for the blues.” As Anthony Walton writes, centuries ago, Johannes Kepler observed that the universe was a form of music.
Walton now expands Kepler’s vision to include the music of our lives.
He explores how artists such as Thelonious Monk—born into an America South of “disorder and chaos” made new rules based on African American forms and sounds.
As Walton writes of Monk and bebop jazz:
It made me understand that there was more to music than
resolution, that there were other sorts of beauty. That beauty
could be pain, and balm could be fit to the jagged shadows
of my experience.
This collection offers indelible studies of musical icons: the “whiskey voice” of Etta James, Glenn Gould as “a cosmologist,” Louis Armstrong, “masked in a smile so bright it had to be a grimace,” Miles Davis, “one blue note at a time.”
Throughout, Walton finds cosmic truths in the grit of everyday life—from the third shift on a loading dock to the “dank nubbed platform” of a New York City subway. And there are equally startling moments of clarity when personal, intimate truths are found in physics and the cosmos.
Whether his subject is Sir Isaac Newton or street traffic, Walton is always surprising, with humanity and passion in every line. Celestial Mechanics is more than a book of poetry; it is an “Ars Poetica” for the heart.
Anthony Walton is the author of the acclaimed prose works Mississippi: An American Journey and The End of Respectability. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, and The Library of America. A member of the faculty at Bowdoin College for over three decades, he is a recipient of the Whiting Award and has co-edited landmark anthologies of African American poetry: Every Shut-Eye Ain’t Asleep and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry.
Cloud Builder, Weston Morrow
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington state, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?
Weston Morrow is a former print journalist who teaches writing at the Ohio State University. His poems have appeared in venues such as Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, and Barrelhouse. He grew up around Puget Sound in Washington state and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
The Worrying Rose, Katharine Towers
Publisher: Picador UK
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
Threaded through The Worrying Rose, Katharine Towers’ quiet and meditative fourth collection, are poems referencing Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs cycle, songs for voice and piano which in turn arose from anonymous texts by early Irish scribes and anchorites. These poems distil Towers’ thinking about women, creativity and solitude: there are nuns and female hermits, alongside writers and artists such as Virginia Woolf, Errollyn Wallen and Maggi Hambling whose voices are harnessed by Towers in her explorations of the state of being alone.
The closing sequence of The Worrying Rose is a poetic interaction with the work and life story of Ada Lovelace – mathematician and writer and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Here are poems about maths, horse-riding, skating, and about Lovelace’s fascination with light, rainbows, and the human nervous system. Amongst these are prose ‘riddles’, addressing the various mysterious illnesses that afflicted Lovelace in her short life. The Worrying Rose exemplifies Katharine Towers’ extraordinary musical intelligence, and attests to an almost spiritual attentiveness to the natural world.
Katharine Towers was born in London in 1961 and read Modern Languages at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She has an MA in Writing from Newcastle University. Her pamphlet Slow Time was published by Mews Press in 2005 and her poems have appeared in publications including Mslexia and The North. She lives in the Peak District with her husband and two daughters.
AutoPortrait (as flotsam), Kirsten Kaschock
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback / eBook
In AutoPortrait (as flotsam), Kirsten Kaschock uses the words, lives, and images of other artists as springboards into the self. Arranged almost as a gallery walk, AutoPortrait alternates between masque-like encounters with art and reflective passages engaging memory and desire. Influenced by photographers Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, Kaschock walks a tightrope between vulnerability and artifice—using lines and shapes provided by the many artists referenced here (painters, musicians, and poets) to sketch an impression of a woman artist.
The struggle she chronicles is familiar to any storyteller: an effort to piece together minor episodes to create some semblance of a whole. The question is whether such a project can ever be accomplished. Can the fragments gathered on the shore of memory be tied together, brought to life? Other artists, perhaps especially the abstract expressionists, serve her as both guide and glue. The result is an intimate travelogue—the poet’s own narrow road to an interior where she finds a meditative balance between rage and regret, sorrow and joy.
Kirsten Kaschock is a poet and novelist who writes across several genres. Her background in dance has impacted her work, which addresses intersections between language and body. She is the author of seven poetry books and a speculative novel, Sleight. She has lived in Iowa, New York, Georgia, and Maryland, and currently resides in Northeast Pennsylvania with her partner.
Psalms of Innocence, JoAnne McFarland
Publisher: Green Linden Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Psalms of Innocence bears witness to civil rights activist Malcolm X’s assertion: “The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.” Combining text, painting, collage, and beadwork, the pieces resonate with English Romanticist William Blake’s 1789 magnum opus, Songs of Innocence, where art and poetry also merge. Examining the wrenching, under-recognized history of the lynching of Black women in the United States, and the ongoing epidemic of missing Black women and girls, Psalms of Innocence unearths and honors some of our most vulnerable citizens.
JoAnne McFarland is a multidisciplinary maker. The tenet that fuels her practice across multiple genres is her belief that violence and creativity are opposites. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica, a project space in Gowanus, Brooklyn that focuses on the intersection of literature and visual art. Her recent multimedia collections include American Graphic, winner of the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize for Poetic Innovation from Green Linden Press and the 2023 Experimental Poetry Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society; A Domestic Lookbook and Pullman, published by Grid Books in 2024 and 2023 respectively; and Identifying the Body, published in 2018 by the Word Works. McFarland has artwork in the permanent collections of the Cooper/Hewitt Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Department of State, among many others. Beginning in 2019, McFarland has curated the Sally Project with fellow artist Sasha Chavchavadze. Sally is a community-centered project focused on using art to activate the public memory of women, like Sally Hemings, whose lives have been erased or marginalized.
Minor Destructions, Mark Kyungsoo Bias
Publisher: Gaudy Boy
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Moving between Korea and the United States, Minor Destructions testifies to the fractures of adoption, the intimacies of grief, and, eventually, the recovery of faith. In Mark Kyungsoo Bias’s debut, loss is not an isolated event but an ongoing condition, a residue that stains desire and stifles prayer long after the moment of rupture has passed.
Blending lyric poems, prose passages, and fragments to test what language can hold when inheritance feels unspeakable, the collection insists that meaning is made not through resolution but through what we choose to carry forward. At once intimate and expansive, Minor Destructions is a meditation on how we live with what cannot be repaired—how, despite erasure, silence, and grief, we continue to speak.
Born in Daegu, South Korea, Mark Kyungsoo Bias has been published in AGNI, New England Review, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, The Offing, Hayden Ferry’s Review, PANK, Los Angeles Review, Washington Square Review, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, among other journals. He is also the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Tin House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, and the Asheville Poetry Review.
He has taught at institutions such as the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, Grub Street, and he is the founder of MKB Studios: an online database of creative writing classes with the intent of being financially accessible and logistically convenient. His work has been featured in Literary Hub and Winning Writers, as well as been anthologized in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and AGNI’s digital portfolio for Asian Adoptee diaspora. He holds an MA from the College of New Jersey, and an MFA as well as a Graduate Film Certificate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was a REAL Fellow. He currently lives in Seoul.
Where’s the Poet (Now)?, Ron Singer
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Where’s the Poet (Now)? offers fifty years of New York City seen not through nostalgia or spectacle, but through the accumulated attention of a poet who kept walking, watching, and recording. Singer bridges classical literary tradition with the noise, inequity, absurdity, and beauty of modern urban life. The collection moves fluidly between wit and grief, intimacy and public space, asking what it means to remain both artist and witness inside a city that is constantly remaking itself.
Ron Singer (b. June 12, 1941) holds a B.A. in English from Union College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. After more than four decades as a teacher and working writer, he turned to writing full time in 2008. Singer works fluidly across genres, including poetry (and librettos), fiction, and nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Evergreen Review, The Georgia Review, Grey Sparrow, Poets & Writers, and The Wall Street Journal. His work has been anthologized, set to music, and nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. His books include Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (Africa World Press/Red Sea Press), held in libraries across the U.S. and internationally, and Betty and Estelle (Akorin Books), a sequel to A Voice for My Grandmother. Additional titles have been published by Unsolicited Press.
The Ccawingg of Crows, Catherine Weinzaepflen, Eléna Rivera (Tr)
Publisher: Litmus Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Catherine Weinzaepflen’s The Ccawingg of Crows—translated into English for the first time by Eléna Rivera—is an impressionistic travelogue in the voice of an itinerant poet-artist. It flutters between after-images of landscapes, cities, and artworks, weaving a poetry of invention and adventure.
Catherine Weinzaepflen is a French poet, novelist, and translator. She spent her childhood in Alsace and the Central African Republic. She studied literature in Strasbourg and has lived in Paris since 1977. She made many trips to the Middle East (Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan) which, like Africa, permeates her books. Her most recent books of poetry are: Un précipité (Flammarion, 2025), d’ailleurs (Editions Lanskine, 2024), Le rrawrr des corbeaux (Flammarion, 2018), and avec Ingeborg (Éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2015 (nominated for the Apollinaire prize)). She won the Prix France Culture in 1983 for Portrait et un rêve (Flammarion, 1983), the Bourse de la Fondation Del Duca in 1985, and the Prix Brantôme in 2006 for Orpiment (Éditions des femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 2006). From 1990 to 2000, she regularly stayed in Los Angeles, and from 2010 to 2014 in Sydney. She has published fifteen books of prose and has also translated into French Eugene O’Neill, Tom Raworth, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov, as well as German language writers, Margret Kreidl, Rose Ausländer, and Ingeborg Bachmann. She lives in Paris.
Eléna Rivera is a poet and translator who was born in Mexico City and spent her formative years in Paris. She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize for her translation of Bernard Noël’s The Rest of the Voyage (Graywolf Press, 2011) and is a recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation. She has also translated four of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s books, the most recent being Phantomb (Black Square Editions, 2021), and two chapbooks by Sandra Moussempès (above/ground press, 2017 & 2021). Eléna’s latest books of poetry are Epic Series (Shearsman, 2021) and Scaffolding (Princeton University Press, 2017). She has also received fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the MacDowell Colony.
My Uppalavanna, Pearl Kan
Publisher: Lavender Ink / Diálogos
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
My Uppalavanna takes its title from the legendary Buddhist nun who was enlightened by staring into lamplight as she swept in the evening—and Pearl Kan’s debut collection follows that luminous, domestic gesture into the fullness of contemporary life. Navigating the paradox between spiritual emptiness and the irreducible particulars of the world—lost teeth and dynamited buddhas, pelicans low against the cold sea, a child’s sunrise lifted on butter and milk—these spare, precise poems move between Zen practice, motherhood, and the mystery of everyday perception with utter clarity. Both incantatory and quietly vernacular, My Uppalavanna is an astonishing first collection.
Pearl Kan studied comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is trained as an attorney and practiced for over ten years in environmental and public law. Pearl’s poems have been published in the New York Review of Books and Posit Journal. Her poetry is forthcoming from Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Pearl was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest by Norman Fischer in June 2026 and practices with the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in Santa Cruz, California with her family.
The Fold, Cass Eddington
Publisher: Beautiful Days Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Cass Eddington’s debut collection of poems, The Fold, explores what it means to become a speaking subject as a trans ex-Mormon poet. This isn’t a story of a new Zion, but a story of how Zion entraps you, how escape hatches can be formed through affinities with Outside. A durational performance resulting from a year-and-a-half-long itinerancy and lack of risk aversion, The Fold occupies the edge of risk and play to interrupt attachments to scarcity and survival narratives, instead discovering desire and its forms.
Through The Fold‘s serial work, Eddington seeks to envision conditions for self-sovereignty and interdependence, to experience this physically as a precarious body with other precarious bodies, to co-create new economies. Like pollinators moving from flower to flower, touching surfaces create folds, new forms of belonging, the social and the sensuous becoming the plane of ethical action.
Cass Eddington is an artist, educator, and ecological landscaper originally from Utah. Author of chapbooks Vernal Hurt (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions), they hold a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver and are the founder of Vocational Poetics. Through Re/Visionary Gardens, they co-create gardens in so-called “Denver” where they live with their dog Jupiter, mad and disarmed by the tall grasses.
within-group variance, Leslie McIntosh
Publisher: Changes Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Leslie McIntosh’s brilliant debut within-group variance pushes beyond the limitations of identity politics in pursuit of a “me that is me everywhere.” Through archival fabulation, data theory, diagrams, redactions, and epistles, McIntosh weaves a kaleidoscopic lyric that probes the terrains of Black identity and history, invoking a multidisciplinary network of muses along the way, including Bayard Rustin, Phillis Wheatley Peters, and Charles Gaines. With tenderness and rigor, these poems insist on the multiplicity of the self and the possibilities of language to hold it.
Leslie McIntosh (all pronouns respectfully used) thinks a lot about the relationship between vocal stereotypy, perseveration, cognitive flexibility, negative capability, and reaching for whatever is on the other side of Leslie’s own black interiority. Leslie’s debut volume of poetry, within-group variance, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2025 Changes Book Prize (Changes Press, 2026) and was a finalist for the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2023-2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize. Leslie’s writing has been supported by the Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hawthornden Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Jersey City Arts Council, Millay Arts, The Watering Hole, Zoeglossia, among other distinctions. Leslie’s poems have appeared in Adi Magazine, Beloit PoetryJournal, Foglifter, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, Obsidian, Ploughshares, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, the anthology In The Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy, and widely elsewhere. Leslie has presented literary art across the country as a featured guest at universities, literary festivals, national poetry slams, and other convenings since 2005, but currently calls home a rowhouse on the stolen land of the Munsee Lenape, presently known as Jersey City, NJ, USA.
Orpheus Remains: New and Selected Poems, Clifford Brooks
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
Orpheus Remains: New and Selected Poems is a means of time travel for Clifford Brooks. Here, he offers selected poems from his previous collections The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods in pursuit of confessing his full truth. Vividly reliving more than thirty years of demons that still haunt and angels who continue to lift Brooks out of darkness, these poems show not only personal growth but also the evolution of his craft. As a tribute to survival, every poem is a literal translation of what has been loved, lost, gained, relinquished, and graced by the spaces in between where God prevails. Written in accessible, melodic form, every aspect of the poet’s life is exposed. New poems find Brooks standing firmly in the present with hopeful anticipation for the future, accepting that he alone allowed addiction and insecurities born of autism to obscure his peace. Laying old ghosts aside, these fresh verses reveal a soul on the path to self-acceptance through travel in countries far from home, all while holding fast to his Southern roots. Orpheus Remains offers comfort, connection, and proof that there exists no abyss too deep to extinguish the light of redemption.
Clifford Brooks is a poet, author, educator, broadcaster, and founder of The Southern Collective Experience, a cooperative of writers, musicians, and visual artists. Author of The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Athena Departs, and Old Gods, he is editor of The Blue Mountain Review and host of Dante’s New South.
Black Lake, Emily Skaja
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Format: Paperback
The black lake at the center of Emily Skaja’s brilliant and startling second collection is a watery abyss of grief without bottom, threatening to drag her down into its depths. Her only escape, she believes, is to conceive and carry a child, but multiple miscarriages bring her to the brink of drowning. At the same time, the political and cultural turn of post-Roe America imperils basic human rights as essential health care for women now hangs in doubt
Black Lake documents a desperate desire to create life despite an increasingly inhospitable and unsustainable world. Skaja’s poems are astonishing confrontations with depression, yet they are also marked by a strange and disarming humor—a wry satire of our precarious time and her own despair. This is an unflinching book, a harsh recognition that life goes on with or without the permission of the grieving self. “Who are you to say, / I lost the world?” Skaja asks. “No one. To admit / that you held the world at all?”
Emily Skaja is the author of Brute, which was selected by Joy Harjo as the winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. She lives in Tennessee and teaches at the University of Memphis.
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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.
“After childbirth, my body became a site of criticism rather than something to be celebrated for what it had endured and created. Writing this became a way to confront that experience…” Read three poems by Tanya Tuzeo, our sixth biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “i get Botox.”