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.
Dreams for Earth, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
In her debut poetry collection, Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi chronicles experiences from quarantining in Dallas, to being the sole Black person in an Oregon ecovillage, to building relationships with land and water on Vancouver Island. Through climate collapse and genocide, love and parenthood and ocean song, these poems confront and confound, calling in a deep sense of care for the Earth and for one another. In a world where some pull the trigger, some look away, some try to stop the gun—Hirsi asks: Which one are you?
Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi is a Black mother who spends time with forests and waters on land of the T’Sou-ke Nation. Her work strives to instigate action in service to world-building, social change, and collaboration. Her poems live in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, MAYDAY, Torch, Rise Up Review, and other portals. She is a fellow of the Pink Door Writing Retreat, the Anaphora Arts Writing Residency, and In Surreal Life. She is the author of the chapbooks EVERYTHING GOOD IS DYING and Moon Woman.
Lifting the Island, David Eggleton
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
This collection is a kind of lyrical word map of the South Pacific, built up through a lush epic catalog of flora, fauna, and artifacts. The poems are frequently infused with a wry humor—and while they often eschew both narrative and personal epiphany, they make intensely detailed, vigorous observations of place and landscape that are curious, sparkling, and sometimes hilarious.
Linguistically agile, this book’s stanzas bring together the lyrical and the slangy, celebrating the local vernaculars of New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia. Many of its poems work as cascading streams of image; of pronouncements; of dramatic tonal shifts almost line by line; and with dense, daring metaphor clusters that entertain as well as illuminate.
David Eggleton has published eleven poetry collections as well as several chapbooks and a number of other books. A poet, writer, critic, and performer, he has also released recordings of his poetry set to music by a variety of musicians and composers. He is the former editor of New Zealand’s leading literary journal, Landfall, and the current editor of Landfall Review Online. His poetry collection, The Conch Trumpet, won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2016. Also in 2016, he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. In 2018 he held the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawai‘i. He was the official New Zealand Poet Laureate from August 2019 to August 2022. He currently lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Hindsight, Rosanna Warren
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Hardcover
Hindsight arises from a tormented time in our country’s history. Some poems contemplate the shocks of the COVID-19 assault. Others consider our nation, which is torn to pieces politically. The poems in this collection attempt to find a language to describe the breakage.
But political fracture occurs because of more fundamental dislocations: for this book, most crucially, spiritual. A search for forms of the sacred drives the whole collection. It’s a book of questions, not answers. In places, it struggles with the Christian story of sacrifice and crucifixion: a heretical attempt to make sense of suffering and of aggression. “Offices” and “Concerning ceremonies” borrow Christian liturgy to chart an experience of learning compassion. Each poem asks some version of the driving question from “Dead Flowers”: “What can be made of all this / grief.” Other poems turn to Judaism and Buddhism to see what wisdom they offer.
Beneath theology pulses the private life. These poems look into a personal past and try to weigh the moral meaning of experience. In “Hindsight,” the speaker discovers, “I could have / seen you better, I / know that now.” Who have we been as we struggled to grow up? Whom have we hurt? What does it mean to be conscious?
Hindsight elegantly embraces life writ large—larger than we are, sometimes violent, sometimes harshly beautiful—as ongoing instruction, in turn leaving the reader with a lyrical compass for orientation in our troubled moment.
Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.
Where Heaven Sinks, María Esquinca
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
María Esquinca delivers a searing collection of poems that traverse borders—both physical and emotional. Set against the backdrop of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, these experimental works weave fragmented verses, striking imagery, and bold typography to confront the brutal realities of immigration and identity. With the precision of a journalist and the heart of a storyteller, Esquinca exposes injustice while celebrating resilience and hope. Her work is shaped by the intersection of cultures, histories, and experiences found in the US-Mexico borderlands. Each poem is a tribute to those who have endured and a call to challenge the systems that oppress. Where Heaven Sinks is a love letter, a memorial for those lost, and a testament to the transformative power of language.
María Esquinca is a Xicana fronteriza and an abolitionist. She was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She received her MFA from the University of Miami. Her poetry has appeared in Waxwing, Michigan Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, Best New Poets, and more.
Distinguished Office of Echoes, Lisa Olstein
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Hardcover
A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Each sequence uses an antique reference book as its source text: an 1865 study of marine invertebrates becomes an exploration of physical death and the disorientation of sudden loss; an 1865 proto-medical textbook journeys into the eerie dislocations of illness; and a 1905 primer on ancient Greek history investigates human and geologic time, time of war versus the time of rivers. Olstein brings a combination of reverence and irreverence, wit and tenderness to these archival texts—their taxonomies and lexicons, assumptions and elisions—casting a feminist gaze on outdated histories while discovering new intimacies in their midst. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.
Lisa Olstein is the author of six poetry collections and two books of nonfiction. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Lannan Residency Fellowship, Hayden Carruth Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. She is a member of the poetry faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.
Adaptations, VA Smith
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
Adaptation as trope, science, and story is a throughline in this collection. Its title nods both to accommodations to change as well as correcting/resisting a variety of existential, environmental, and historical toxins. In free verse and fixed forms, and in a variety of styles and idioms, a central speaker acts as a Greek/pop chorus, singing songs about an imperiled natural world as well as the tragi-comic adaptations of human being. The collection concludes with a Mobius strip series, “ On Evolutionary Adaptability: A Cthulucene, Sonnet Crown.” These final poems ask the reader to participate in a decentered human, activist planetary repair rather than adapt to the sufferings of climate-driven doom.
A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith’s work has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Third Wednesday, After Happy Hour Review and SWIMM. Her first two books, Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters, were published by Kelsay Books in 2022 and 2023, respectively. A former Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence awardee at Penn State University as a former Professor of Teaching in the Department of English, VA later founded Chancellor Writing Services.
Level Watch, Mary Ardery
Publisher: June Road Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery’s visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.
Mary Ardery’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.
The Garbage Poems, Anna Swanson
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: September 29, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Created entirely out of words found on trash collected at local swimming holes, Anna Swanson’s garbage poems reclaim hyperbolic corporate marketing-speak for the expression of physical pleasure, queerness, and vulnerability. Written in the years following a head injury, this book traces the connections experienced in the fiercely embodied act of swimming with a chronically ill body. Paired with tender watercolor illustrations of the source garbage by award-winning artist April White, these poems refuse to conform to an illness-and-cure narrative and instead become a vibrant archive of the process of piecing together a voice back together from fragments, an urgent study of the deeply political nature of joy.
Anna Swanson (she/her) is a queer writer and librarian. Her first book of poetry, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010), won the Gerald Lampert Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has been widely published in journals and appears in anthologies including Best Canadian Poetry, Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, and Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She recently completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives in St. John’s on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland), where she works as a poetry editor for Riddle Fence Magazine. Her special interests include collective liberation and wild swimming in all seasons.
Spilt, Jordan Stempleman
Publisher: Green Linden Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
Spilt captures the experience of living between the domestic and the absurd, the lyrical and the narrative, oscillating between these states as a reflection of day-to-day existence. The poems explore both pandemic and non-pandemic experiences of separation and quarantine, blending whimsy, deadpan humor, stark realism, and pure fantasy. Each poem stands isolated as its own distinct world (or word), slightly out of sync with our reality of excess and overwhelming information. The poems in Spilt leak and escape, striving to connect with one another and with us, gathering socially, often stretching lines and language to their limits before pulling them back again.
Jordan Stempleman is the author of ten books of poetry, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). He also serves as the editor for The Continental Review, Windfall Room, and Sprung Formal. Since 2011, he has organized the Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to his editorial work, Stempleman is an associate professor in the Liberal Arts Department and the Creative Writing Program at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Monk Fruit, Edward Salem
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
Edward Salem is a poet who knows the void but refuses its totalizing darkness, choosing instead to light matches in its depths. Salem reveals, then expands, worlds with each poem. From Detroit to Gaza, the Big Bang to whatever calamity comes next, he reports from far ahead of the curve, beyond the current cosmic crunch with “poise and peculiarity” (Ottessa Moshfegh). A thrilling debut collection and punk treatise, Monk Fruit bypasses ideology, finds a side door, and rearranges the furniture.
Edward Salem’s second poetry collection, Intifadas (2026), was selected for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He is also the author of Monk Fruit (2025). Salem won the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and BOMB’s 2021 Fiction Contest. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides safe-haven fellowships to writers and artists in exile who have been persecuted for their work.
A Kind of Amnesty Given the Mind, Dicko King
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
Dicko King’s A Kind of Amnesty Given the Mind chronicles the transformation of the young Mikey Mulkerrin as he navigates the historically Irish Catholic neighborhood of South Boston, a story that culminates in Mikey’ s remaking as Southie’ s venerable Archangel. A novelette in verse, King’ s third collection exists in a middle ground between narrative structure and non-linear, lyrical energies. At once a playscript and a poetic epic, enacted in the associative realms that King has created and lived in, A Kind of Amnesty Given the Mind reveals the complex relationships that take shape in a single neighborhood— between family and friends, gods and mere humans— whose residents cannot escape the generational influences that forged them, for better or worse.
Dicko King was born at the old Carney Hospital in South Boston, and raised in St. Margaret’ s parish in Dorchester during the last of the grand and mythical eras presided over by tribes of feral children— when adventures could be had beyond the watchful eyes of a mother or father, and despite strictures and wounds inflicted by priest or nun. His first poetry book, Doggerland: Ancestral Poems, was a finalist for the Louise Bogan Award and won the Off the Grid Poetry Prize. His second book is Bird Years (Mayapple Press, 2017).
Eccolo, Hal Coase
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: September 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Hal Coase has a gift for catching the rhythms of speech and exchange, and an eye for a telling image. His book’ s Italian title, Eccolo, meaning ‘ Here he is’ , or ‘ Here it is’ , captures his work’ s immediacy, and the poems’ revelatory quality.
These are poems and sequences which relish the ways in which we (try to) communicate and know one another, emulating the techniques and effect of some of the mid-century New York School and Roman poets he admires. Coase’ s writing – as playwright, translator, critic and poet – aspires to be both beautiful and conscientious. Eccolo: Poems is an auspicious debut.
Hal Coase was born in Surrey and grew up in the Black Country. His poetry has been published by Carcanet in New Poetries VII (2020) and Prototype in Prototype 5 (2023). In 2018, he was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’ s Prize. In 2024, he received the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John’ s College, Cambridge. He lives in Rome.
Red Carpet, Steve Malmude
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: September 25, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
While the place and year of Steve Malmude’s birth (Manhattan, 1940) nominally stamp him as a second-generation poet of the New York School, his hieratic, almost ideogrammatic poems, made slowly and carefully – sometimes over many years – are utterly distinct from those of his peers. With substantial selections from his books – all but ten of Malmude’s previously published poems are included here – Red Carpet also gathers unpublished early work (the opening sonnet was written in 1958, when Malmude’s guiding star was Robert Lowell) along with poems written after he relocated to Limerick, Maine, in 2002.
Steve Malmude was born in Manhattan in 1940. He has published three books and two pamphlets of poems. He lives with his wife, Christine, in Limerick, Maine.
Trying x Trying, Dora Malech
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: September 23, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of “trying” as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private spheres and interrogate the words we use to make sense of uncertainty and belief.
With sharp lyricism and restless energy, Malech transforms language into prayer and protest. Sound bends, meanings shift, and repetition becomes a revelation as she traces the tensions between individual and collective experience. Trying × Trying is an enlightening meditation on persistence, reminding us that even in fractured times, poetry finds a way forward.
Dora Malech is a poet and associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of The Hopkins Review. Her most recent book of poetry is Flourish, and her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/23 and 9/29 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: The Blessed Knot by Li-Young Lee
“A well-made poem is a knot, but not a tangle. The well-made knot of a poem can disentangle readers from illusion, to free them from confusion. Poetry is a form of disillusionment.” Read the July Chapbook Poem by Li-Young Lee along with words from the poet.
“This work is an archive of my attempts to become more familiar with who I am, and why I am here, to immerse myself in these ancient spiritual questions…” Check out five poems and five images by Laynie Browne along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Creating Space by Lisa Sewell
“Yoga, the walks, and the writing became a daily exercise in paying attention—to the world, to the bodies in the world around me and to my own body…” Read the Excerpt Poem of the Month for July 2025 by Lisa Sewell along with words from the poet.
“My poetry tries to examine … the difference between the lives we live inside ourselves and the lives we expose to other people.” Read five poems by William Doreski along with a few words from the poet.
July ’25: Poetry Readers Wanted
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about PCR’s Summer poetry and new poetry reader opportunities brought by our growing original poetry submissions.
Four Poems by allison whittenberg
“I grew up as a film buff and I loved reading Hollywood Babylon. Over the years, I have learned to separate the truth from the myths.” Read four poems by allison whittenberg along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: August Peaches by Winshen Liu
“I wanted to sit with a particular end-of-summer indulgence, where a host has saved specialty foods to welcome visiting friends and family–fancy chocolate, favorite sodas, a certain snack.” Read a poem from Winshen Liu’s chapbook Paper Money along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Cheesecake Factory by Max McDonough
“This poem lives in the weirdness of the suburban mall spaces a lot of us grew up visiting (or loitering in!), places that feel like they could be anywhere and nowhere at once.” Read a poem from Max McDonough’s chapbook along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Meyer
“Love had made me stronger in a lot of ways, but also showed me the weakest parts of myself that were left crystallized for him to see. This was much like wood morphing into rock during the petrification process.” Read three poems by Alexandra Meyer along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers
“Anchored by sensory detail, the poem journeys between childhood safety and adult experience in a canyon town shaped by rivers and monsoons. … This poem is a meditation on time, tastes, and tenderness of memory.” Read three poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers along with words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: The Seventh Age of Shakespeare’s Father by Scott LaMascus
“This poem hit me hard last winter, sitting a moment near my late father, as our family was trying to absorb the meaning of his ALS diagnosis … I wondered, if ‘all the world’s a stage,’ what role had I just been assigned?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Landscape with footprints in ash by Selma Asotić
“When I want to sound smart, I say things like: a poet is one who leaves. When I accept that I’m not very smart, mostly just perplexed and a little scared, I write poems about ghosts and circle farms.” Read a poem from Asotić’s new book, Say Fire, along with words from the poet.
“All of my encounters with the U.S. healthcare system follow the protocols of the ridiculous. This poem, couched in the conventions of the contemporary sonnet, explores my latest, decisive encounter with a doctor’s office.” Read three poems by Robin Arble along with words from the poet.
September ’25: Best of the Net Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s Best of the Net 2026 anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to the nominated poems.
Verses of Mourning: in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram
“[Ram] presents a revealing and heartbreaking collection that asks the reader to think about what they remember the most about those they have lost.” Read Alex Carrigan’s full review.
“This poem reckons with our capitalist, product-driven society to ask people why disabled stories are only relevant if they portray the ‘other’ overcoming trauma to become abled people’s inspiration porn.” Read three poems by Makena Metz along with words from the poet.