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.
Penitential Cries, Susan Howe
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In four parts, Susan Howe’s new book opens with the arresting long prose poem “Penitential Cries,” followed by a group of word-collages “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in “the evening of life,” Howe quotes Thomas Wyatt: My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She says: “I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven,” the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, “I want to express my pilgrim’s progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It’s getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming.”
Susan Howe has won the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, and the Griffin Award. She is the author of such seminal works as Debths, That This, The Midnight, My Emily Dickinson, The Quarry, and The Birthmark.
Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Blue Opening, Chet’la Sebree’s brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins—of illness, of language, of the universe—as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.
With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is “unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith.”
Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
GREEN OF ALL HEADS, Aracelis Girmay
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural — flowers, speech — to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “— i am learning to lift — my voice — like a flower — in — a field of flowers —” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.
Aracelis Girmay is a Whiting Award-winning poet, editor, essayist, and educator at Stanford University. Her books have been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Connecticut Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. Girmay lives in Berkeley, CA.
Circumtrauma, Jumoke Verissimo
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Everyone carries a piece of the war within them: what happens when we neglect to consider each individual’s story? The Nigerian-Biafra War (1967–70) erupted when the southeastern region of Nigeria, known as Biafra, declared independence. It was a major conflict; however, this war remains largely absent from official historical accounts. While victims have passed down their experiences across generations, the official silence and the dominance of narratives from larger ethnic groups have perpetuated stereotypes that diminish the suffering of some victims. The differing narratives that are absent from history books continue to divide and polarize social groups within Nigeria and beyond.
Weaving together cut-ups and redactions from personal narratives, historical accounts, and reflections on the enduring impact of war, and with raw language and searing imagery, the poems in Circumtrauma grapple with loss, resilience, and the search for healing amidst the fractures of deep-seated divisions.
This collection compels readers to confront the profound and often-silenced complexities of history, the intergenerational weight of inherited suffering, and the urgent need to acknowledge the diverse experiences and perspectives of all those impacted by the tragedy of war. It is a testament to the enduring power of art to bear witness to the human condition, offering a path towards healing and reconciliation.
Jumoke Verissimo is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. She is the author of two well-recognized collections: i am memory and The Birth of Illusion, both published in Nigeria and nominated for different awards, including the Nigerian Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, A Small Silence, received critical acclaim and was nominated for several awards, including the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Her writing explores traumatic re/constructions of everyday life and its intersection with gender, focusing on themes of love, loss, and hope. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells: Part 1: Scraping Lungs Like Hide, Tawahum Bige
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
These poems are a stark plunge—an answer to how voice emerges for a young Two Spirit growing up in so-called “Surrey, BC,” far from his Łutselk’e Dene territories. The fundamental thrum in which vocal cords produce sound to whisper, cry, holler and laugh—these inner workings are made corporeal through moments of growth from childhood to young adulthood to show how the seeds sprouted for someone who needed to learn to express to find their path.
Tawahum Bige is a Łutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree poet. Their Scorpio-moon-ass poems expose growth, resistance and persistence as a hopeless Two Spirit Nonbinary sadboy on occupied Turtle Island. With a B.A. in creative writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Bige has performed at countless festivals and had poems featured in numerous publications. His land protection work against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion led him to face incarceration in 2020. Bige’s debut poetry collection, Cut to Fortress, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2022. They reside on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory (Vancouver, BC).
Lullaby for the Grieving, Ashley M. Jones
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her fourth poetry collection, Jones studies the multifaceted nature of grief: the personal grief of losing her father, and the political grief tied to Black Southern identity. How does one find a path through the deep sorrow of losing a parent? What wonders of Blackness have to be suppressed to make way for “progress”?
Journeying through landscapes of Alabama, the Middle Passage and Underground Railroad, interior spaces of loss and love, and her father’s garden, Jones constructs both an elegy for her father and a celebration of the sacred exuberance and audacity of life. Featuring poems from her tenure as Alabama’s first Black and youngest Poet Laureate, Lullaby for the Grieving finds calm in unimaginable storms and attempts to listen for the sounds of healing.
Ashley M. Jones served as the first Black and youngest Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2022-2026. She is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Reparations Now!, longlisted for the PEN Voelker Poetry Award. Jones and her work have been featured by Poetry, Good Morning America, the BBC, the New York Times and other publications. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is currently a PhD student in English at Old Dominion University. She is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.
All the Possible Bodies, Iain Haley Pollock
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Pollock’s third collection is an emotionally candid and intimate portrait of our varied identities as Americans: the ways we treat one another, the value we assign to each others’ lives, and the persistent internal conflict that tugs between our desires and greater duty.
With clarity of storytelling, musicality of lyric, and crisp language and image, these poems ask: How do we make peace with our hypocrisy and complicity in a social order that harms us all? Can and should we?
Singular in its telling and universal in feeling, All the Possible Bodies seeks to answer these questions through its examination of the complicated emotional and spiritual states characteristic of contemporary American life.
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018), and All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, 2025). His poems have appeared in publications ranging from American Poetry Review to The New York Times Magazine. Pollock has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He serves as Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.
Stigmata, Scott Jackshaw
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Stigmata are ruinous encounters between traumatic and historical memory. They transfigure the cult of the wound into a mystic frenzy of sex, grief, and noise. Drawing inspiration from a broad archive of texts and practices – apophatic theology, body horror, gardening, queer theory, classic films, poststructuralism, and bad sex – Stigmata forms a counterhistory of the wound, an experiment in fractured memoir and misplaced anatomy that weaponizes the confessional mode, wrenching it from self-narration to approach a violence that breaks language and bodies apart. Stigmata fuses the “high” to the “low” – the “sacred” of theory and theology to the “profane” of leaking and lust. The result is a treacherous adventure through the cross-currents of sexual deviancy and religion, helped along by a bitter sense of humour, to the limits of faith and body.
Scott Jackshaw is a poet, scholar, and editor from Edmonton, Alberta. Their poetry and prose have appeared in journals including The Capilano Review, CV2, and Jacket2. They hold a PhD in English from Brown University.
The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones, Achy Obejas
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
These 44 prose poems, artful yet accessible, presented in both Spanish and English versions, immerse us in the boy kingdom that Achy Obejas inhabits with her two sons. They move from the wild and divine spirit of boyhood to the everyday rhythms of family life—mac’n’cheese, television, sick days home from school.
Achy carries multiple identities: she is Cuban American, lesbian, and Jewish. She captures the universality of motherhood while also illuminating the uniqueness of her queer, multilingual, multicultural family: the way her elder son looks as her as if she’s “dancing with the dead” when she speaks Spanish; the way her boys prefer mac’n’cheese to tostones; the day her elder son comes home from school disquieted, then finally spills it: “A couple of boys yelled at him: Your moms are queer!”
The collection is divided into four parts. The first part focuses primarily on Achy’s sons, and subsequent parts branch out into stories of her parents, her roots in Cuba, and her divorce.
Achy Obejas is a Cuban American writer, translator, and activist whose work focuses on personal and national identity. Her creative work has won two Lambda Awards and her journalism has won a shared Pulitzer Prize. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
All the Words I Can Remember Are Poems, Michelle Peñaloza
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems challenges colonized ideas of history and truth, particularly in relation to Filipinx/a/o history and its colonization by the United States. Engaging with archival materials and playing with the sounds of remembered words and their unique associations, Michelle Peñaloza confronts violent and ironic tensions within historical narratives, subverting erasure and creating her own cultural fluency that speaks to growing up in diaspora and the complexities of identity, motherhood, and the transmission of love across generations. The expression and reception of love between parent and child, particularly Filipinx/a mothers and daughters, becomes its own translation, a generational game of telephone across time and space. In conversation with the history of US imperialism and the broader implications of colonization, this book embraces the impotence of revision, the power of the always-reaching—what wisdom and connection we find there.
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of All The Words I Can Remember Are Poems, winner of the 2024 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize and two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes. Some of her honors include the Frederick Bock Prize from the Poetry Foundation and grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Community Foundation of Mendocino County, Upstate Creative Corps, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Literary Arts, and PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Artists). The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in Covelo, California.
The Book of Z, Rahat Kurd
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Book of Z reconsiders mystical possibilities – above all, longing for divine union – found by poets within scriptural language. For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – “the wife of Aziz” in the Qur’an – and her passion for Yusuf has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical “wife of Potiphar” she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Rahat Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.
Rahat Kurd, a writer and editor based in Vancouver, BC, draws on multilingual poetics and is especially interested in the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Cosmophilia, her first poetry collection, was published in 2015 by Talonbooks, who in 2021 published The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters, a hybrid correspondence/poetry exchange between Vancouver and Kashmir with poet Sumayya Syed. Kurd’s most recent essay, “Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali,” was published in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (trace press).
At Beckett’s Grave, Robin Durnford
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
that moment / when nothing happens, you want it all to come / back to get you, even the hard stuff — Our increasingly nihilistic age is marked by profound sorrow. We are grieving institutions, art forms, the natural world, our communities – even our very humanity. We are overwhelmed by lives lost to war, violence, genocide, poverty, natural disasters, and disease. We live with the knowledge that a random occurrence could bring an absurd end to any life at any time. In At Beckett’s Grave Robin Durnford gazes at the granite slab marking the resting place of the Irish playwright. In the middle of the ornate tombstones of an overgrown cemetery in Paris, Durnford finds a powerful metaphor in Samuel Beckett – the artist, the exile, the anti-fascist who joined the French resistance. Beckett’s work – and the stark memory of his life – cuts through grandiose self-regard with a razor-sharp message: there is no final meaning. Yet we move forward, regardless. It turns out that the pause — the stage direction central to so many of Beckett’s plays — may be the answer. Grief for an absent loved one never truly ends. Grief itself will never end. Yet, the poetic pause creates space for grief to breathe. During that lingering breath, abiding sorrow carves a path toward hope, one word, one poem, at a time.
Robin Durnford teaches English literature at John Abbott College and is the author of A Lovely Gutting.
Pandora’s Kitchen, Ron Koertge
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Hardcover
The subjects in Ron Koertge’s poems include Hades’ unhappy wife Persephone, Nancy Drew, and Dracula’s Wives. He has located Jane Austen at the mall, comforted the sun itself, and celebrated a winning day at the races. In an early poem, he extols his chosen vocation by saying this: “It’s so great to be a poet. I’m basically self-employed with nobody to please but myself.” Yet pleasing his many fans is at the top of his Things-To-Do list. That is why poets from Billy Collins to B. H. Fairchild have called his poems masterful, quirky, deliciously sly, inventive and surprisingly sweet.
Ron Koertge, taught at Pasadena City College for thirty-seven years. A prolific writer, he has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Some of his most recent books are Fever (Red Hen Press 2006), Indigo (Red Hen Press 2009), The Ogre’s Wife (Red Hen Press 2013), and Vampire Planet (Red Hen Press 2015). He is the recipient of grants from the NEA and the California Arts Council and has poems in two volumes of Best American Poetry (1999 and 2005). A recent Pushcart Prize winner, he is also the author of “Negative Space,” the prose poem upon which the stop-motion film by the same name was based and was shortlisted for an Oscar in Animated Short Films in 2018. He resides in South Pasadena, California.
Contrapposto, Lori Lucas
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Contrapposto, Lori Lucas invites people into a world where art, music, and life converge in dazzling harmony. This follow-up to her celebrated debut, Chiaroscuro, is a collection rich in emotion and brimming with insight. Through vivid imagery and lyrical storytelling, Lucas takes you on an evocative journey across cities like Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Barcelona, weaving universal themes of love, friendship, and wonder into poems that resonate deeply.
From meditations on iconic paintings to melodies that linger long after the music ends, Contrapposto is a celebration of the beauty and complexity of the human experience. Perfect for art lovers, music enthusiasts, and poetry aficionados, this collection is an invitation to laugh, cry, and marvel at the world.
Whether one is seeking inspiration or a moment of quiet reflection, these poems speak to the heart, making Contrapposto a timeless companion for anyone who treasures the magic of words.
Lori Lucas is a lover of art, music, and literature and a longtime teacher of Shakespeare. Her published work includes her poetry book Chiaroscuro and poems featured in Haven by Kelly Duffield. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, and a former resident of Brussels, Belgium, she now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
For This and Other Cruelties, Youna Kwak
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Publication Date: September 22, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.
The shadow of mothering has never been given a richer, fuller, more debased vision than in Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties. Kwak casts a cold eye on the splendid and cruel intransigence of maternal paradoxes in all their impossible double binds, monstrous pleasures, and profane mystifications. Shifting between lyric and prose poems, this collection throws slanted light on the ineffability of our deepest attachments, envisioning a world where mother is “a creature whose only enemy could be human.” Kwak brings us face to face with the irreconcilable facts of being mother, mothered, and alive.
Youna Kwak is author of sur vie, and has been published in Po&sie, The Los Angeles Review, The Hopkins Review, Chicago Review, The Offing, La Traductière, Oversound, jubilat, Boston Review, and Action, Spectacle. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Compulsory Figures, John Barton
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Publication Date: September 19, 2025
Format: Paperback
Who are the people who mark our lives? Must we know them personally or is influence also exerted from the distant past, the grave, or even from the pages of a book? Devastated by the sudden death of one of his sisters in 2015, award-winning poet John Barton, over the decade since, felt moved to answer these and other questions for himself in Compulsory Figures, his thirteenth collection of poems.
John Barton’s twelve previous collections of poetry include Lost Family: A Memoir, a nominee for the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. Coeditor of the landmark anthology, Seminal: Canada’ s Gay Male Poets, he also wrote a book of essays, We Are Not Avatars: Essays, Memoirs, Manifestos and was the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2023. A three-time winner of the Archibald Lampman Award as well as a recipient of a National Magazine Award and a CBC Literary Award, he was made a lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2021.
Aunonomic Reasoning, Will Alexander
Publisher: Black Sun Lit
Publication Date: September 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Precipitous philosophies. Synaptic-nerve narrations. Syntactic spirals. Hyper-coiled horizons. Will Alexander’s mental range has arrived. An anomalous scripting of the word “automatic,” Aunonomic Reasoning is a whirlwind of lingual torrents triggered by creative mishearing that at once exposes the occupations of orthodox surrealism, summons a voice for the scathed populace of imperial affliction, and forges new paths of phonetic potentiality to mend semantic injury. Pushing prosaic margins beyond their boundaries, these texts take on the etymological condition of the essay as “attempt” with iridescent siege, prepositional frenzy, paratactic provocation, noetic disreckoning, and a critical demand to dismantle: all of which signatures of Alexander’s unilateral poetic innovations.
Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and musician. He has published over forty books in a variety of genres and has earned many honors and awards including a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also exhibited his artwork in group and solo shows. His publications include Charismatic Spirals (ISOLARII, 2024), The Coming Mental Range (Litmus Press, 2023), Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021/Granta, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Divine Blue Light (City Lights, 2022), The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), Across the Vapor Gulf (New Directions, 2017), and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009). He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California and has lived his entire life in Los Angeles.
Attending Void, Jason Morris
Publisher: Lithic Press
Publication Date: September 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
Latest collection of poems from Jason Morris. These poems incorporate scientific understandings of the world and yet, want more. Morris lets his inclination for the abstract enter the conversation in a conscious search for something deeper, lighter, higher; these poems go where any insight may be found. You can’t get the news from poems but the work in this book may turn you into a river looking forward to the next bend. Morris muses on the ephemerality of life in a straightforward way, but you never know when his eyes may turn to lead, when his teeth may become emeralds, when his face may turn into a tree, when his poems might make you pick up a pen.
Jason Morris was born in Vermont. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks, including, Hologram (Two Way Mirror Books, 2025); Low Life (Bird & Beckett Books, 2021); Different Darknesses (FMSBW, 2019); Levon Helm (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018); and Spirits and Anchors (Auguste Presse, 2010). In addition to poetry, he has written essays on Clark Coolidge’s Crystal Text and Bernadette Mayer’s interest in Nathaniel Hawthorne. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their child.
Miniatures, Carsten René Nielsen, David Keplinger (Tr)
Publisher: Plamen Press
Publication Date: September 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Miniatures is a collection of short poems by Carsten René Nielsen accompanied by illustrations from Mette Norrie that meet at the crossroads of the seen and unseen, blending whimsy and absurdity into a sequence of brief, wonder-driven experiences. Drawing from the 20th century European legacies of Max Jacob, Jean Arp, and Benjamin Péret, and the later American poetry of Charles Simic and Mark Strand, Nielsen invites readers into strange yet strangely familiar spaces—where trees grow from cracked plates, readers use hand mirrors instead of magnifying glasses, and snow has been assigned its own ministry. Mastering spare yet highly controlled language, Keplinger’s translation preserves the lyricism of the original, allowing each poem to stand alone while collectively creating a fragmented, surreal vision of reality. Each miniature is a poetic fragment, often only a few lines long, but rich in metaphor and suggestion. Some pieces read like parables infused with satire and humor, while others resemble dreams. Mette Norrie’s illustrations naturally extend the book’s visual and perceptual scope, enlarging the reader’s grasp of what is real, where it encounters what is imaginable.
Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen is the author of several poetry collections, including two books of children’s poetry. His works published in English include the prose poems The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (New Issues, 2007), House Inspections (BOA Editions, 2011), and Forty-One Objects (Bitter Oleander Press, 2019), all translated by the American poet David Keplinger. He received the prestigious Michael Stunge Poetry Prize and The Danish Ministry of Culture’s Children’s Book Award. His poetry has also has also been published in other countries such as Germany, India, the Netherlands, Italy and Canada. Nielsen lives on the island of Samsø in Denmark.
American poet and literary translator David Keplinger is the author of eight books of poetry, including Ice (Milkweed Editions, 2023), The World to Come (Conduit Books, 2021), and Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which won the 2019 Rilke Prize. He is the translator of several books of poetry from Danish and German. His translation of Carsten René Nielsen’s collection of poems, Forty-One Objects was a finalist for the 2020 National Translation Award. He is the recipient of the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
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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.