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.
Night Watch, Kevin Young
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young’s new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives. After starting in the bayous of his family’s Louisiana, Young journeys to further states of mind in “All Souls,” evoking “The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers.” Another central sequence, “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” is spoken by Millie-Christine McCoy, the famous conjoined African American “Carolina Twins.” Born into enslavement, stolen, and then displayed by P. T. Barnum and others, the twins later toured the world as free women, their alto and soprano voices harmonizing their own way. Young’s poem explores their evolving philosophical selfhood and pluralities: “As one we sang, /we spake— / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.”
In “Darkling,” a cycle of poems inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Young expands and embroiders the circles of Hell, drawing a cosmology of both loneliness and accompaniment, where “the dead don’t know / what to do / with themselves.” Young writes of grief and hope as familiar yet surprising states: “It’s like a language, / loss—,” he writes, “learnt only / by living—there—.” Evoking the history of poetry, from the darkling thrush to the darkling plain, Young is defiant and playful on the way through purgatory to a kind of paradise. When he goes, he warns, “don’t dare sing Amazing Grace”—that “National / Anthem of Suffering.” Instead, he suggests, “When I Fly Away, / Don’t dare hold no vigil . . . Just burn the whole / Town on down.”
This collection will stand as one of Young’s best—his voice shaping sorrow with music, wisdom, heartache, and wit.
Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and is the editor of ten other anthologies, including African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song.
The Years of Blood, Adedayo Agarau
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this unflinching debut collection, Adedayo Agarau confronts the harrowing reality of ritual killings and child abductions that have terrorized Nigeria from the turbulent pre-democratic era to the present day. Set against the backdrop of rural Ibadan, The Years of Blood plunges readers into the depths of collective trauma where “memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air.”
These poems bear witness to unspeakable atrocities through dreamlike landscapes and surreal imagery that resist rational explanation. Memory is as vital as it is ungraspable. As the painful poem “the abduction” puts it, “memory forsakes the body at the point where fear fills the body like air.” Or, in “Lilac,” where “the debris of memory / becomes the fog before you.” Agarau’s lyrical language—at once rich and broken—captures both the violence witnessed and the guilt of survival through repetitions of words, phrases, and motifs.
As both survivor and émigré to the US, Agarau explores “the weight of disappearance [that] hangs heavy over memory,” the ongoing trauma that cannot be shed, and the search for healing across continents. His poems attempt to wrest language out of terror’s domain, asking: “How many ways can the poet craft an elegy?”
Above and beyond its art, The Years of Blood is essential reading for those interested in African literature, postcolonial studies, and the intersection of personal and political history and global literature. In its unyielding approach to its subject matter, this volume is a crucial interlocutor to conversations on trauma, grief, loss, absence, migration, loneliness, and African spiritualism.
Adedayo Agarau is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ’25, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2024 Ruth Lilly- Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name and The Arrival of Rain. For more information, visit www.adedayoagarau.com.
About Time, David Duchovny
Publisher: Akashic Books
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
David Duchovny’s seventh published—and first poetic—work covers a range of intimate themes and topics, including love, the loss of love, parenting, Duchovny’s own parents (in particular his father, who looms large throughout the work), alienation, and other emotional quandaries. Fans of Duchovny’s fiction will recognize the insightful and clever play of words that, in this new form, distill to an emotionally impactful portrayal of what the author holds most dear.
David Duchovny is an award-winning actor, director, New York Times best-selling author, and singer-songwriter. With an acting career spanning more than three decades, Duchovny is a two-time Golden Globe winner and four-time Emmy nominee. His novels include Truly Like Lightning, Holy Cow, The Reservoir (novella), Miss Subways, and Bucky F*cking Dent which Duchovny adapted into the film Reverse the Curse. The film, directed by Duchovny, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. As a musician, Duchovny has released three studio albums: Hell or Highwater, Every Third Thought, and Gestureland. He is the host of the podcast Fail Better.
Joy in the Belly of a Riot: Poems, Prayers, Memories, and Meditations, Barbara Fant
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world.,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing . . . it became my way to pray.”
Rebirth, renewal, and healing are the heart of Joy in the Belly of a Riot. Fant’s monumental collection is a continuation of her lifelong project of using poetry as prayer; this is healing-informed poetry to restore herself, her community, and the world. Exquisitely lyrical and boldly resonant, Fant’s poems excavate the nightmares of a childhood marked by poverty, violence, racism, and the loss of countless loved ones. Suffering seemed endemic to neighborhoods like hers, and yet, in Fant’s own words, “I keep trying to write about the trauma, but the joy won’t let me.”
Steeped in a rich Black Christian tradition and drawing on Scripture for artistic inspiration, Fant’s verse offers solace and guidance for all, from the devout to the skeptical. In these poems Fant demands that we see her, and her community, throug more than our grief. As she closes this profound collection, Fant gently preaches that we choose life and reminds us that “wholeness is our birthright.”
Joy in the Belly of a Riot is a healing balm in times of sustained uncertainty and a rock upon which we can build and sustain a foundation of joy. Fant’s essential message demands to be heard, now more than ever.
Barbara Fant is an acclaimed poet who has been writing and performing for over fifteen years. She has competed in nine National Poetry Slam competitions and placed 8th out of 96 poets in the 2017 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is the author of two poetry collections: Paint, Inside Out (2010) from Penmanship Books and Mouths of Garden (2022) from Sundress Publications. Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. Additionally, she has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa.
NMLCT, Paul Vermeersch
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Fables and fairytales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists.
These poems — all precisely 16 lines long, identically formed as though mass-produced — are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. They hold up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.
An Orange, A Syllable, Gillian Sze
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This prosimetrical work is a meditation on motherhood, language, and art. The central speaker witnesses the earliest utterances of her child and launches into a poetic inquiry of words themselves, asking, How to measure one’s mouth by its words? The speaker seeks an answer amidst the language that surrounds her — words misspoken, mispronounced, remembered, unwritten — and, in doing so, struggles with signification and significance.
Each prose poem in the five-part collection darts between the many meanings of “fit” — as in “a sudden burst of emotion” or “to be the right size and shape,” and the archaic “fytte” (a section of a poem). A text becomes an open mouth, a square day of a calendar, or a bare fragment of a narrative. The final section of the book is an intimate and ekphrastic engagement with the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. Drawn to Hammershøi’s paintings of the empty rooms of his apartment, the speaker recognizes a familiar space of art’s insistence.
Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry books and picture books. Her book of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives in Montreal, QC, where she teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.
a chronology of blood, Teo Shannon
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A stunning debut collection by a gifted poet, a chronology of blood explores major traumas in the author’s life. Autobiographical in nature, the book is broken into three sections that each deal with a trauma the author has endured, and it explores a range of themes including gun violence, conversion therapy, misuse of drugs, addiction, and domestic violence. But balancing the anger, harm, and pain is hope: above all Shannon is a survivor, learning to incorporate these experiences into a life filled with healing and lived on his own terms.
Teo Shannon is a cofounder and a co-EIC of the literary journal Cotton Xenomorph. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He currently lives in Michigan.
small lives, Gary Jackson
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
small lives renders a graphic novel in verse form. Jackson creates his own metropolis, featuring original and remixed superheroes who are othered for more than just their skin and are subsequently and simultaneously celebrated, destroyed, and desired, illustrating what it means to reside in a country’s brutal imagination.
Gary Jackson is an associate professor of creative writing at the College of Charleston. He is also the author of Missing You, Metropolis, which was the winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
The Color of Peace, Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this stunning collection, international bestselling author Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai turns her poetic lens to the lasting impacts of war, the strength of family bonds, and the enduring search for peace and reconciliation. Through intimate poems and essays, she masterfully connects the personal with the political, bringing to life the stories of those who have lived through conflict, separation, and reunion.
Drawing from her experiences growing up in post-war Vietnam and her work bridging cultures as a writer and translator, Quế Mai crafts verses that speak to both specific moments in history and universal human experiences. From the haunting “Tears of Quảng Trị” to the tender “My Father’s Bàng Tree,” each piece reveals layers of meaning about family, memory, and healing.
The collection moves seamlessly between poetry and prose, offering readers a comprehensive view of Vietnam’s past and present through the eyes of someone who has lived its complex history. With the same lyrical power that made “The Mountains Sing” and “Dust Child” international bestsellers, Quế Mai shows us how the wounds of war can be healed through storytelling, understanding, and compassion.
Born into the Red Delta of Northern Việt Nam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai grew up in the Mekong Delta, Southern Việt Nam. She is an award-winning writer in both Vietnamese and English and the author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Her books include The Secret of Hoa Sen, The Mountains Sing, and Dust Child.
A Winter Triangle, Marcella Durand
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Informed by mystery, chaos, order and writing as container, A Winter Triangle explores poetic space and form amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or “points,” like its namesake asterism, this collection is inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s idea of composing poetry from the “senseless splendor” of the skies, as well as the designs for automata by twelfth-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.
Inventing a new poetic form, the septentrional, which trembles in its own process of becoming throughout the length of the book, Marcella Durand questions the potential of poetry in the face of artificial intelligence, climate change, and political turbulence in which language is often twisted into the opposite of its own meaning. By counting the seven syllables of the septentrional and opening spaces (caesura) within the poetic line to provide breath and rejuvenation amid exhausting world events, these poems resituate poetry as an alternate space in which to reimagine the given forms of constellations and how we imagine order out of seeming chaos. Thus the question is opened as to whether the poet may ever make sense of the “senseless splendor” of the skies, or simply convey them as they are through poetry, holding the infinite within the finite, for a time.
Durand reads the “dustlike” script of the calligraphic galleon, a ship created entirely out of words, as art and struggles to understand the burning dog/wolf star that stands between law and lawlessness. Is there actual connection between stars in the constellations we have invented? Can we find room for composition within the broken loops of infinity? At the point between old and new, bow and arrow, chaos and order, A Winter Triangle asks us to face the overwhelm of change—self-inflicted, invented, planetary, and real.
Marcella Durand is the author of several volumes of poetry including, most recently, To husband is to tender. A recipient of the 2021 C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, she is also the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry.
Something for the Dark, Randy Lundy
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns the poem to our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-, leads inevitably to heartbreak.
As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.
Award-winning poet Randy Lundy is a Cree, Irish, and Norwegian member of the Barren Lands First Nation, Brochet, Manitoba. Born in Thompson, Manitoba, he lived most of his life in Saskatchewan before recently taking a teaching position at University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Onement Won, Prageeta Sharma
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Inspired by Barnett Newman’s Onement series as well as many texts including the Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, Goethe’s Faust, and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, these poems explore the concept of oneness in Hinduism, Abstract Expressionism, and selfhood in an attempt at “onement with lyric certainty,” a way through ideas of prosody to a clearer sense of what is needed in freedom, suffering, and art-making. The result is a stunning work that invokes ancient wisdom into an understanding of self-care that is fiercely anticolonial and anticapitalist, while holding space for suffering as a site of transformation for us individually and collectively.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books 2019), Undergloom, Infamous Landscapes, The Opening Question, which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College in Washington.
Wildness Before Something Sublime, Leila Chatti
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Leila Chatti’s Wildness Before Something Sublime confronts a world defined by dualities—love and loss, wonder and despair, the gift of “sunflowers / by the roadside” and the pain of losing a pregnancy. “Night Poems,” written on the brink of sleep, travel the dream world and the subconscious mind to unearth the unfiltered self, to understand identity, desire, and the body. Other poems become acts of divination, calling on God and the Muse, calling on the voices of beloved women poets—Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, C.D. Wright—to comb through the dark. Chatti expertly grapples with the pain of what a body should but cannot do. Under the shifting weight of this grief, poems fragment, become ruptures of language, experimentations, refractions, a kaleidoscope of recurring sound and image. Snow, light, milk, clouds, silence. Behind every positive image, the shadow of its opposite, an echo of emotion. As Chatti bridges the gap between dream and language, the external and internal, a new world emerges—a world in which darkness is reclaimed.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and four chapbooks. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program.
Severalty, Laura Da’
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Severalty begins in a garden and moves through ancestral and contemporary hometowns that shimmer between wholeness and severing. Poems consider illness, resurrection, tribal sovereignty, and language.
Severalty begins in a garden and moves through ancestral and contemporary hometowns that shimmer between wholeness and severing. In these poems, river currents tick with the intrusion of the clock’s lavish precincts. From powerfully compressed lyrical fragments to pulsing narrative sequences, Severalty shifts perspectives to examine devastation and healing, transience and seasonality, loss and resurrection.
With clear roots in her first two books of poetry, Tributaries and Instruments of the True Measure, this volume joins the author’s poetic trilogy with a deeply personal accounting of history, community, and selfhood.
Weaving the past and present into a stunning tapestry, this collection is a powerful testament to Indigenous endurance and creativity, offering readers a deeply insightful and necessary work.
Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, an American Book Award winner, and Instruments of the True Measure, a Washington State Book Award winner.
Flight Plan, M. Soledad Caballero
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Flight Plan charts the trajectories of bodies and birds, navigating the dynamic interplay of past, present, and what happens in the in-between. These lyrical poems map the aftermaths of cancer, the varied routes of migration, and the geographies of memory. They document stories of love and its legacies, personal, familial, and national. They reject reductive diagnoses and soar and hunt with birds of prey. In this inventive collection, cancer transforms the body, art ignites healing, and faith is a restless vexation. M. Soledad Caballero urges us to remember that women’s aging bodies are evocative, that disease is a hungry creature, and that the interstices of blood and flesh are universes teeming with possibility.
M. Soledad Caballero, professor of English and co-chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Allegheny College, is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow. Her collection I Was a Bell (Red Hen Press, 2021) won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. I Was a Bell was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year and a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. She is an avid TV watcher and a terrible birder. She splits her time between Pittsburgh and Meadville, Pennsylvania.
Thinking with Trees, Jason Allen-Paisant
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh perspective it offers on the relationship of the African diaspora to place and the natural world.
In this, his debut collection of poems, he recalls an idyllic boyhood in his native Jamaica, where the roots of guango and yam vines burrow deep into the bauxite soil. Walking with his grandmother to reach the yam fields she worked, he envisions how “the muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.” Transplanted to England, where he lives and works now, he describes lovely rambles in entirely different landscapes. But Allen-Paisant’s experience in the dense woodlands around Leeds is complex—unleashed dogs are welcome, and Black men are found suspect. “Try to imagine daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring,” he writes, in a radical response to Wordsworth’s pastoral.
Subversive in its excavation of an imperialist past and wonderfully generous in its exploration of alternative worldviews, Thinking with Trees represents the arrival in North America of poems that expand roots and leaves into something deeper, richer, less compromising.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, Thinking with Trees and Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the United Kingdom’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023—the Forward Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize. He is also a Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things, Nikki Giovanni
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
For decades, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has been at the forefront of American culture. The New Book is a towering work of protest against the divisions of our time, leavened with moments of joy and reflection about her indelible legacy, her family history, and the small pleasures of her richly lived life.
In The New Book, Nikki Giovanni slashes at the ridiculousness of our cultural and political climate: “We have no secrets/since the world shrunk/and the icebergs melted/and all the year books/are digitized./… and we press Like/or No Like/as if it mattered.”
She remembers 2020 and its cataclysmic reckoning with police brutality and white supremacy: “I do understand that republicans/Are cowards and so are those nazis/Cheering/And those kkk we now call police killing/Not to mention father and sons chasing unarmed Black men/and running their cars into crowds/Pretending they are brave or something/They are not only cowards/And nazis but evil fools/And who go to bed white/Wake up American/And hate themselves for having/To share this earth/They will not overcome/And we will not love them.”
But also in the same poem: “But what does 2020 mean to me/A chance to learn to open oysters/Talk to my friends/Catch up on my reading/Tell myself I am going to dust the house/Lie about it/…Enjoy my own company not to mention football/And remember there will be tomorrow/Because there will be/And evil will go and good will come/I am Black/We have seen much worse.”
With this collection, which includes brief letters and short prose from her life as well as poetry, Giovanni reaffirms her place as a giant of literature, a canny truth-teller, an indispensable radical orator, and one of America’s preeminent cultural critics. It is a book to be savored, and shared.
Nikki Giovanni (1943–2024), poet, activist, mother, grandmother, and educator, grew up in Tennessee and Ohio and graduated with honors from Fisk University in Nashville. The author of over thirty books, she was also the recipient of seven NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry, the Frost Medal, as well as thirty-one honorary degrees and an Emmy Award. She garnered her most unusual honor in 2007 when a South American bat species—Micronycteris giovanniae—was named in celebration of her. A devoted teacher and honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., she spent thirty-five years as University Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Fugue Body, Bridget Huh
Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: September 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
“I did not know there was a sound / silence made as it laps at the body’ s shore,” observes Bridget Huh in her debut collection, Fugue Body— a book in which the body becomes a site of inquiry: a compositional space of melody, counterpoint, and theme. In surprising and intricately orchestrated poems that range from the lyric to the essayistic, Huh meditates on linguistic and racial identity, considers generational differences in an immigrant context, and recounts the life of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. In doing so, she renders the music of a restless, relentless mind with remarkable candour and beauty. “ I want all the violins to shimmer,” writes Huh, “ I want them to stand for impermanence.”
Bridget Huh is an MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell University. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, PRISM International, The Ex-Puritan and Canthius. Huh grew up in Toronto and is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award.
Dressing in the Dark, Kathleen Flenniken
Publisher: Lynx House Press
Publication Date: September, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems in Kathleen Flenniken’s new collection move in and out of memory, imagination, and present time with a sure voice alive to meaning and the layered and complex unity that is a human life. Her speaker suffers the loss of a breast; the poems plot her recovery, calling forth her lost mother and her child self. They ask: is any given moment the pure experience of that moment, and what does it mean that the answer is no? These beautifully structured and voiced poems, with the generosity typical of all her work, answer: it means we are blessed.
Boys Behind Glass, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 8, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Boys Behind Glass is a cheeky documentary of contemporary masculinity through the lens of matchmaking, pop culture, scientific “progress” and female gaze. This third collection from Jennifer Sperry Steinorth continues a trajectory of genre-bending poetry, this time in collaboration with artist Jenny Walton, whose documentary series Match/Enemy creates a visual algorithm of her experience on OKCupid and explores how men-seeking-women represent themselves via anonymity. In the first half of the book, watercolor portraits of single men are paired with irreverent “sonnets” gazing into the mind of a fictional woman looking at the men, looking for love. The second half is a maximalist kaleidoscope, masquerading as elaborate end notes, a diagnostic of loneliness through a wiki-esque labyrinth of technology and iconography. The culmination is a carousal of sex, selfies, heroes, and techies, what we long for & the many ways we hide.
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Boys Behind Glass, A Wake with Nine Shades, and Her Read, A Graphic Poem, recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Fred Whitehead Award and a Foreword Reviews Bronze Prize in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared at The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, and TriQuarterly. She has been awarded grants & fellowships from the University of Michigan, Yale, Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers and elsewhere. She lectures at the University of Michigan and is at work on a biography of C.D. Wright.
Washington D.C. artist Jenny Walton holds an MFA from American University. Her work has been critically reviewed and shown in New York, Miami, Boston, Seattle and Italy. Her awards include grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.
The Desert at Dusk, Tahar Bekri, Peter Thompson (tr.)
Publisher: Contra Mundum Press
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
This poetry by a prominent Tunisian writer is, in part, an exile’s nostalgic evocation of his birthplace and childhood. In both form and content it suggests the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry. It is a re-imagining of a particular form—the ancient odes to the desert. Along with this it is something very new: imagery, muscular and bright, that indicts radical, violent Islamists. Their perversion of Islam is reflected in the image of a sullied and suffering desert—the desert at dusk.
The Downsides, N/A Oparah
Publisher: Futurepoem
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Downsides is an exploration of fear, doubt, and worry as the guides and love languages they are and can be. Distilling and objectifying the harder parts of life, Oparah’s second book is a reflection on the ways loss happens and stains. It permits and extends mourning—dismissing silver linings, “at least,” and hope as ways out of the present. The Downsides is about remaining exactly where you are, looking at that space, and letting the body feel and name all the ways it is real. It is a conscious, intentional meditation on the heavy, burdensome things we are asked to forget, forgive, move on from, keep, and protect.
Ngozi “N/A” Oparah, PhD is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer. She has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat, Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco, and HANGAR. Ngozi currently serves as a lecturer on the MASc in Creative Health at UCL and facilitates storytelling and writing workshops worldwide. She is an assistant fiction editor for Foglifter Literary Magazine and the founder of TELLMORE, a multimedia storytelling and design project. Her first novella, Thick Skin, was published by Kernpunkt Press in 2021.
The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation, Isabel Sobral Campos
Publisher: Futurepoem
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation is a book-length poem-memoir reflecting on Portuguese colonization of African countries and its place within the imperial and colonial forces that have shaped global history for the past 500 years. Drawing on the writings of Amílcar Cabral and others, as well as interviews with family members about life under Salazar’s dictatorship, it weaves together scholarly sources, familial narratives, and memories, exploring nationalistic myths, Portugal’s violent colonial history, and the author’s experiences growing up in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution.
Isabel Sobral Campos is the author of The Optogram of the Mind Is a Carnation, selected for the Futurepoem 2023 Other Futures Award, as well as two other full-length poetry manuscripts. She has published several chapbooks, and her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Black Sun Lit, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her poems have also been included in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World. In 2024, her collaborative translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON was published by Ugly Duckling Presse. She co-founded and edits Sputnik & Fizzle Press with her sister and lives in Cambridge, MA.
My Ardent Love for the Pencil, Vi Khi Nao
Publisher: Malarkey Books
Publication Date: September 6, 2025
Format: Paperback
What is it to exist in such a way that life, love, and literature are linked so tightly that no difference remains? In this tight novella-like poems, where the sentences seem to follow no order but a silky libidinal pulsation and the narrator’s beloved is literally a pencil, hybrid poet-writer-artist Vi Khi Nao tells us how—and tells us, too, of the stakes that attend such an existence especially when confronting the sharp edges of illness or systemic neglect. Friendships are ended and begun. Lovers are met and left. Family rhythms wax and wane. A beloved mentor diligently tries to school the author in the literary establishment’s worldly protocols. And literature continues through it all, an evil sun whose dark light enlivens as much as it destroys.
Vi Khi Nao’s silky, liminal, novella-like poems dissolve the boundaries between photography, love, and literature, merging them into a single, pulsing reality—where a pencil is a lover, friendships and family flicker like matchsticks in a typhoon, and literature hacks up dry ink like a body straining against emphysema.
A Congregation of Alligators, Grayson Thompson
Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
Publication Date: September 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
A two-lane Florida roadway opened in 1968. Now a superhighway, Alligator Alley, quickly became a dangerous place for tired people driving to (or from) the outline of home. A reckoning of which came first, the person or the dinosaur, straddling becoming. Grayson arrived to this book at the collision, and meant every word. Found each answer at the corner of rebellion and tenderness. Was afraid of the dark the entire time and still is. A self-described sand-bodied Florida boy, A Congregation of Alligators explores what happens when the stories we’ve been told about ourselves, as old as the beginning and taught to us so true that they feel prehistoric, were put to rest.
Grayson Thompson is a Black, Jamaican-American, queer trans cowboy poet moonlighting as a therapist. A mouthful, Grayson is winner of Write Bloody’s 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and Foglifter Press’ 2024 Start A Riot! Chapbook Prize for Sand Bodied Florida Boy. He’s been featured in Cathexis Northwest, Cleaver, Poetry Online, and other homes for poetry. During the 2024 AWP Conference, Grayson opened for the amazing Donika Kelly with Chicago’s Exhibit B. Grayson is a TA for Buddy Wakefield’s Writer’s Anonymous, supporting emerging and established word assemblers.
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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.