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.
Say Fire, Selma Asotic
Publisher: Archipelago
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
Book Excerpt: Landscape with footprints in ash by Selma Asotić
In a pocket, Asotić finds a brood of planets. In the wind, a cathedral of voice. And in the throat, a thorn bush hums. She slakes her thirst with briny water, and later, tucks a thorn under the tongue. Ready to speak. The poet’s voice is warm with questions, recursions, and doubts. “Do you remember nothing from your life?” she asks, observing the challenge of memory and family history in the wake of the Bosnian War. The poet recalls men returning from war, with bodies no bigger than marbles in a palm. A bullet may pierce through a door and become a peephole. Through it, Asotić can see the myths of war – that shrapnel makes men celestial – or fragments of her own mayhemmed matrilineage. Her lines, blossoming and chimeric, search for a home, and a mother, in peacetime. Her language is alchemized into the corporeal, illumining the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves washing away their gestures.
A Sarajevo-born, bilingual writer, Selma Asotić earned dual BA degrees in English Language and Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Sarajevo, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where she worked closely with Robert Pinsky. She’s interested in poetry and revolution. She’s taught writing to undergraduates at BU and NYU, and ESL to adult learners at community-based organizations in Sarajevo and New York. She’s also worked as a translator and interpreter. Her first book of poetry was published in both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 2022 and was awarded the Stjepan Gulin Prize in 2022 and the Štefica Cvek Prize in 2023.
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, Patricia Smith
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s decorated career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice.
Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in The Intentions of Thunder—reaffirming Smith’s place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.
Patricia Smith is an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 NAACP Image Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist. A Guggenheim Fellow, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, Smith is a creative writing professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former distinguished professor at the City University of New York. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.
Pluck, Adam Hughes
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
A former pastor reckons with fallout when a lifetime of religious practice intersects with a modern life that’s messier than doctrine allows. What happens when old certainties are no longer certain? What is left when we take off the old clothes that used to keep us warm, but no longer fit? Pluck is a book-length meditation on what wrestling with faith, or its inverse, looks like.
In his 5th poetry collection, Adam Hughes uses a conversational approach to share his own all-too-human personal experiences while pulling back layers of his life, loves, and his relationship to the religion that shaped him. “I want to be known perfectly and loved anyway,” is the cry of the author, as is the acceptance of doubt, disbelief, and drift.
A pursuit of authenticity and a coming to terms with doubt, this book is for all of those who are fellow G(g)od wrestlers, doubters, the restless and dissatisfied, for those who are tired of old certainties and structures that have long since broken down around them.
Adam Hughes is a poet, writer, teacher, and performer. Pluck (BOA, 2025) is his fifth full-length poetry collection. Adam has been a pastor, a hospice grief coordinator, a college professor, and is currently a high school English teacher. Hughes lives in Bedford, VA.
Perverts, Kay Gabriel
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
Against the backdrop of the anti-trans panic, Perverts explores desire as a political problem. It asks two questions at the same time: whose desire is understood as dangerously excessive? And—a classic organizer’s question—how do we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want? Synthesizing her own dreams with those of her friends, Kay Gabriel’s Perverts is an exercise in turning private experience into shared consciousness and illicit desire into common cause.
Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. She’s the author of Perverts (2025), Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (2023), and A Queen in Bucks County (2022), all from Nightboat. She’s the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project and lives in New York City.
Interlocutor Goddess, Jasmine Reid
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Reid’s experimental work challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct while reflecting on the trans experiences of a queer Black woman. The poems grapple with oppressive systems of separation and colonial legacies, rejecting extractive, empire-driven paradigms, and gender essentialism. Within her collection, Reid envisions alternative, ethical ways of being, rooted in unity and wholeness and finds kinship with the rhythms and lifeways of the natural world—soil, stars, and water.
Her poetry employs a trans-lyricism, weaving together dual meanings through homonyms, homophones, and portmanteaus to create a layered, fugitive language that resists rigid classifications. At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.
Jasmine Reid is the author of Interlocutor Goddess (Autumn House Press, forthcoming), winner of the 2024 CAAPP Book Prize, and the chapbook, Deus Ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow recipient, she also received fellowships from Cave Canem and Poets House, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Triquarterly, among others. Reid was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is an assistant professor at NYU.
My Perfect Cognate, Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
My Perfect Cognate interrogates the connections and contrasts at the sharp edges of her in-betweens: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico, where the author and her mother were often stopped, interrogated. Written from the depths of severe post-partum depression, Natalie Scenters-Zapico searches for a language that can hold both personal and communal pain. When Spanish and English seem insufficient, she leans on the connection between the two languages: the cognate. Originally a way to document lineage through the mother, the cognate provides a possible bridge of understanding. Yet, for every cognate that works as a mirror reflection, the wave of a border agent’s hand, a stamped passport, a false cognate that works as an expired visa, a rejected biometric scan, a port of entry shut down by violent legislation. Natalie Scenters-Zapico mines the depths of linguistic cognate theory to write poems that go beyond translation and mistranslation. We find hope in a translingual landscape that breaks open borders.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. Her most recent collection is My Perfect Cognate (Copper Canyon Press Spring/Summer 2025). Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize, her work has been supported by the Poetry and Lannan Foundations. She teaches in the undergraduate and MFA Creative Writing Programs at the University of South Florida where she is Director of the Michael Kuperman Memorial Poetry Library.
Strange Vigil, Scott Frey
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Taking its title from Whitman’ s vigil, kept through the night in a field beside a dying soldier, Scott Frey’ s Strange Vigil spans the three years of his daughter’ s life, shortened by a brain injury received during her birth and complicated by intensive medical needs. With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers, this chapbook invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care. Grief and memory echo in the concourse din amid hurried hospital exits and final flights, funerals and all-school assemblies, football games and horror movies, pushing into fraught mixtures of loss and laughter and, ultimately, the wonders that are breath and presence.
Scott Frey is a poet and educator who grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. He and his wife, Meryl, run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses and their families improve their quality of life. His book, Heavy Metal Nursing, won the Tampa Review Prize for poetry. Among other places, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, The Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, New York Quarterly, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the Perkoff Prize for poetry. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.
Out of the Ordinary, Tom Wayman
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The twenty-first century so far feels extraordinary, offering in its first quarter a global pandemic, catastrophic climate events, an unprecedented gap between the super-rich and the rest of us, new shortages in medical services and affordable homes, and more. The poems of Tom Wayman’s new collection, Out of the Ordinary, explore how such extraordinary developments can both arise from, and affect, the ordinary objects, environments and human relationships that surround us.
To probe this traffic between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the poems of Out of the Ordinary go deep, drawing on poetry’s almost-magical ability to discover links between aspects of our lives that otherwise seem far apart. The sections of this collection investigate some responses to this century’s quandaries, the enduring mysteriousness of nature as well as of our historic and cultural worlds, and what we find if we imaginatively enter a carrot seed or a raindrop. Other sections honor a friend lost during the pandemic, struggle with how to deal with such life-altering transitions, and marvel at the strangeness of this century’s literary milieu. “Poets are the janitors of the human heart,” Wayman maintains in a poem of that name, and he indeed demonstrates how poetry can make the ordinary shine brightly even in these turbulent decades.
Tom Wayman’s prolific literary career includes writing more than twenty poetry collections, three collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction and a novel, as well as editing six poetry anthologies. He received British Columbia’s 2022 George Woodcock Award for Lifetime Achievement in the literary arts. In 2015, he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their daily employment. He won the Western Canada Jewish Book Awards prize for fiction in 2016 (for the short story collection, The Shadows We Mistake for Love) and for poetry in 2023 (for Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time). His memoir, The Road to Appledore (or How I Went Back to The Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place), was published in 2024. Wayman lives in Winlaw, B.C.
Startlement: New and Selected Poems, Ada Limón
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Ada Limón wades into potent unknowns—the strangeness of our brief human lives, the ever-changing nature of the universe—and emerges each time with new revelations about our place in the world.
Both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life, this curation embodies Limón’s capacity for “deep attention,” her “power to open us up to the wonder and awe that the world still inspires” (The New York Times). From the chaos of youthful desire, to the waxing of love and loss, to the precarity of our environment, to the stars and beyond, Limón’s poetry bears witness to the arc of all we know with patient lyricism and humble wonder.
Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the editor of the You Are Here anthology and the author of five collections of poems, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She’s also the author of the picture book In Praise of Mystery based on the poem engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper. Limón is a MacArthur Fellow, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a TIME Woman of the Year. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review. She lives in Glen Ellen, California.
procession, Katherena Vermette
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
procession: a line of people moving in the same direction; a formal ceremony or celebration, as in a wedding, a funeral, a religious parade. Bestselling novelist and Governor General’s Award–winning poet katherena vermette’s third collection presents a series of poems reaching into what it means to be (at once) a descendant and a future ancestor, exploring the connections we have with one another and ourselves, amongst friends, and within families and Nations.
In frank, heartfelt poems that move through body sovereignty and ancestral dreams, and from ’80s childhood nostalgia to welcoming one’s own babies, vermette unreels the story of a child, a parent, and soon, an elder, living in a prairie place that has always existed, though it looks much different to her now. This book is about being one small part of a large genealogy. A lineage is a line, and the procession, whether in celebration or in mourning, is ongoing.
Katherna Vermette (she/her/hers) is a Michif (Red River Métis) writer from Treaty 1 territory, the heart of the Métis Nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In 2013, her first book, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Since then, her work has garnered awards and critical accolades across genres. Her latest is the poetry collection, procession (House of Anansi). katherena lives with her family in a cranky old house within skipping distance of the temperamental Red River.
Something Small of How to See a River, Teresa Dzieglewicz
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us and our environment, how whiteness fails to hold itself accountable, how future generations and the land are being failed—and how, in the face of all this, the Standing Rock movement was not a failure. At the heart of this collection is the strength, care, and radical joy of the movement, which shines through and against the violence.
Teresa Dzieglewicz is an educator, poet, and part of the founding team of the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Wóuŋspe (Defenders of the Water School) on the Standing Rock Reservation. She was named a Best New Poet of 2018, as well as the winner of the 2018 Auburn Witness Prize, a 2018 Pushcart Prize, and the 2020 Palette Poetry Prize. Dzieglewicz has been a fellow at New Harmony Writers Workshop, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the NY Mills Arts Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she was recognized with an Academy of American Poets Prize.
Dark Cloud in Isabel Pass, Tom Sexton
Publisher: Loom Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Tom Sexton (1940-2025) offers his final book of new poems ranging from lyrics about life and nature in his longtime home Alaska, reflections on the ancient Chinese poets he admired, and images from his days in Down East Maine later in his life.
Tom Sexton (1940-2025) is the author of 17 other books of poetry including Cummiskey Alley: New and Selected Lowell Poems, Li Bai Rides a Dolphin Home, A Ladder of Cranes, I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets, and For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Tom was a founding editor of the highly regarded and nationally distributed Alaska Quarterly Review. In 1995, the Alaska State Council on the Arts appointed him to serve a term as Poet Laureate of the state. Tom lived in Anchorage with his wife, Sharyn.
Wolves in Shells, Kimberly Ann Priest
Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Wolves in Shells is a modern monomyth telling the story of a woman navigating homelessness, trauma, and memories as she attempts to leave a violent partner. Reflecting on her familial heritage, this survivor grapples with the way she, the women of her history, and her daughter have been conditioned to accommodate the demands of the male ego and predation. Reflective, clear-eyed, and incisive, the poems of Wolves in Shells feature O-Six, a wolf born into the rewilding territory of Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s who serves as a metaphor for women who must cope with violence and survive on their own. Drawing from Gaston Bachelard’s quote “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones,” the narrative considers how survival requires a balance of protectiveness, risk, trust, and escape.
Kimberly Ann Priest is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. She is the author of the poetry books Slaughter the One Bird and tether and lung.
In Plenty’s Woods, Brendan Galvin
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Plenty’s Woods, a final collection of poems by Brendan Galvin, returns to many settings and subjects that fascinated him: the natural world, particularly the birds around his home off Cape Cod in Truro, Massachusetts; the attractions and dangers of the seashore; his Irish heritage, including its rich language and folk culture; and the pleasures of domestic life. He explores the natural order in dialogue—sometimes playful, sometimes grave—with a personal realm of love, mortality, and the history embedded in the language we exchange.
Whether describing the birdlife he sees even during wintertime, speculating on the voices heard by sleeping sailors at sea, or writing a love poem he cannot read to his departed wife, Galvin remains a poet of consummate skill and powerful emotion who works the narrative lyric with great precision of attention, flexibility of tone, and expressivity of figure.
Prior to his death in 2023, Brendan Galvin published nineteen books of poetry, including Habitat: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award. Among his many additional honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Fig Thief, Gabriella Belfiglio
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
These poems rise out of the page and take you by the hand. Belfiglio explores the raw truth of an immigrant family across generations, from the point of view of a child moving into womanhood. Her journey steers us from rural Sicily to urban America. In a combination of grounding narrative and sensory lyrical writing this book delivers a deft eye for finding meaning in the commonplace. It is a heartfelt path of defining oneself at the intersection of queerness, ethnicity, and spirituality. Belfiglio examines identity through the lenses of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and feminism, always bringing one in deeper, allowing them to connect to their own unique voyage. This vulnerable and grounded story will help readers enhance what is most important—letting their own truth shine.
Gabriella M. Belfiglio is an Italian-American, queer, artist, poet, mother, and activist. She was awarded a Saltonstall residency and has won awards from Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest and The W.B. Yeats Society. Her writing has been published in numerous anthologies and journals.
Headlines, Michael Fraser
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Headlines is a poetry collection based on current media headlines surrounding black people and our existing notions of “blackness”. The headlines present an accurate contemporary view into the current zeitgeist of “blackness”. Media headlines are revealing historical and sociological artifacts that provide insights into any society. I utilize media headlines to analyze our current notions regarding “blackness” and all it entails. Writing poems derived from headlines is certainly an interesting undertaking because although I am writing poems based on our current experiences, there are common historical threads that consistently become entrenched in the various headlines. Contemporary preconceptions of blackness seem to have difficulty dislodging themselves from past notions and narratives.
Michael Fraser is published in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 and 2018. He has won numerous awards, including Freefall Magazine’s 2014 and 2015 poetry contests, the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize, the 2018 Gwendolyn Macewen Poetry Competition, and the 2022 Lesley Strutt Poetry Prize. Headlines is his sixth poetry collection.
Breaking a Mare, Christina Thatcher
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: October 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Breaking a Mare is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces. They ask what it means to be good in the face of physical, emotional and ecological threat.
Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher’ s Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more.
Bathing on the Roof, Tracey Rhys
Publisher: Parthian Books
Publication Date: October 2, 2025
Format: Paperback
Act-of-God-turned-celebrity diva, Flood likes to make an impression. She wakes up on the wrong side of bed, makes a Severn Bridge of herself, parties with lightning, pouts for the paparazzi and drowns far more than she means to. Explored through the lens of the media and fame, these poems imagine how Mother Nature might respond to humanity’ s interference, were she as flawed and determined as humanity itself. The collection also contains a series of poems that reclaim the Biblical Bathsheba as an everywoman of the ages, creating a collage of female experience in all its sensual complexity. Whether finding herself living on the streets, arriving in the Garden of Eden, giving birth, swallowing her tongue or shopping in Beverley Hills, Bathsheba negotiates the edgy boundaries of her relationships with men while navigating the confines of her body.
Tracey Rhys is a Bridgend-based writer, originally from the Rhondda. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Planet, The Lonely Crowd, Ink, Sweat & Tears, A470, Yer Ower Voices: Dialect Poetry from Wales, Lipstick Eyebrows and more. Listed for various competitions including the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition, her first pamphlet Teaching a Bird to Sing was a judge’ s favourite in the Michael Marks Award.
Dancing in the Cosmos: New and Selected Poems, 1973–2024, Floyd Skloot
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 3, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dancing in the Cosmos contains work selected by Floyd Skloot from his nine previous poetry collections as well as a group of new poems written in the last decade, including an exploration of his life since the onset of Parkinson’s disease.
At the heart of the book is a consideration of illness and love, science and grit, and clarity of purpose when chaos rules. Much of Skloot’s writing reflects the experience of becoming disabled in 1988 from viral-born brain damage, as he shows how full engagement in life and the world is not only possible but essential when life takes unexpected turns and when illness seems to derail all progress. His poems make use of poetry’s traditional forms and structures, along with its contemporary freedoms, its range of linguistic and rhythmic possibilities, and its capacity for fighting its way again and again toward the necessary strength that enables endurance, and even celebration.
Floyd Skloot is a poet, novelist, and creative nonfiction writer. His work has appeared in many literary journals and received three Pushcart Prizes, a PEN USA Literary Award, and numerous other honors. In 2010, Poets & Writers featured him on a list of “fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world.” He lives in Oregon with his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg.
Turncoat, Molly Bendall
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through the poems in Turncoat, Molly Bendall’s sixth collection, the speaker and other figures dwell under the ever-present eye of surveillance by unspecified authorities. Mistrust and dread become part of the fabric of their lives, as they never know who may be a turncoat—a person who disguises her allegiances and traffics in betrayal. These poems employ an invented paranoid syntax meant to evade oppressive surveillance. A series of intimate and darkly humorous incidents press the speaker to continually adapt to unseen—or even nonexistent—dangers. Haunted by a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about whether old friendships may have been compromised, or if spaces could disappear overnight, Bendall’s poems coax the reader to step across boundaries and snares, alternating between episodes of interrogation and flight.
Molly Bendall is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Watchful and Under the Quick. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA., Rodrigo Toscano
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This four-part collection of poetic fables engages the emerging field of global-poetics through Hispano-Americano lenses. Amid global crises between states, and cultural destabilization manifesting across mass popular culture and literature, WHITMAN. CANNONBALL. PUEBLA. sets out to invigorate conversation about how the United States might adapt to a wider hemispheric consciousness. Toscano’s poems present a cultural landscape where the Anglo-capitalist outlook is tempered—if not subsumed—by a Greater Americas “Salamanca Humanism,” which was the basis for the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The book is divided into four sections that develop the idea of a Greater Americas as hinging on negotiation between Anglo and Hispano values, consider a potential catastrophic Anglo-American imperialism, imagine life in a Post-Empire crisis, and compose allegories about the historical consciousness of a people oversaturated with media.
Rodrigo Toscano is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Cut Point and The Charm & The Dread. His poetry has been published in Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Yale Review, and Fence, among others.
Everyone I Love, Alive, Jason Bayani
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
With this collection of poems, Jason Bayani leans into traditions of lyric, song, and prayer to cultivate life while existing within a time of empire and societal collapse. Everyone I Love, Alive wrestles with form to summon both the living and the dead. Bayani’s rich language calls us to experience a connection to cultural heritage and, even during times of oppression, to find the compassion and awareness needed to drive change. These poems show how not only our love and desires—but also our rage and resistance—can be the very things that keep us alive.
Jason Bayani is the author of Locus and Amulet, and his work has been published in World Literature Today, Poem-a-day, Diode Editions, the Offing, and others. He is the co-executive director of Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian-Pacific American arts organization in the country.
Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974–2024, John Yau
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: October 6, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
This collection brings together work from half a century of writing by John Yau. Preoccupied with forms and musical structures, Yau’s work includes sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, and lists, as well as invented forms. Employing both strict and open-ended frameworks, Yau creates multi-faceted poems that can shift abruptly from humor to outrage and consider topics including Chinese American identity, school shootings, invented countries, and haunted memories. Some poems are grounded in an autobiographical voice, while others take on the voices of other characters, including contemporary artists and a fictional Chinese private eye.
Spanning the vast diversity of Yau’s forms and subjects, the poems in Diary of Small Discontents add up to an unapologetically original collection.
John Yau is a poet, art critic, fiction writer, and publisher whose recent books include Tell it Slant, Genghis Chan on Drums, and Please Wait by the Coat Room: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art. He founded Black Square Editions and cofounded the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, and Academy of American Poets, among others. He is professor emeritus at Rutgers University and lives in Beacon, New York.
Moon as Salted Lemon, Clayre Benzadón
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
Clayre Benzadón’s multilingual poetry utilizes language and formal experimentation to interrogate the limits of language, gender, and culture. Benzadón places special focus on the phenomenological body and the somatic practices of poetry.
Expansive in its themes, Moon as Salted Lemon, explores sex, the queer body, popular culture, history, and Sephardic Jewish identity using both personal experience and expansive historical research which transforms a section of the book into documentary poetics of the history of Jewish people in Spain.
Overall, this book is about the intersections that exist in the world, that perhaps nothing is a binary. Nonbinary Identity is, in fact, the core.
Moon as Salted Lemon, winner of Driftwood Press’s Editor’s Pick Prize, is a tight, current, and expansive collection which will challenge and inspire poetry readers of all kinds. It is particularly well-suited to those interested in gender, experimentation, and history.
Clayre Benzadón (she / they) is a queer (bi /pan) Sephardic-Ashkenazi poet, educator, and activist. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith”, was published by SurVision Books in 2019. Her manuscript Moon as Salted Lemon was recently named an honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s 2025 Emerging Writer’s Fellowship. She has been published in places including Jet Fuel Review, Libre, and SWWIM.
Sergeant Dark, Henry Hughes
Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: September 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
Henry Hughes’ fifth book of poems carries us to the edge of the war in Ukraine and deep into Antarctica. These poems take us out shark fishing and bird watching, and into the bar and bedroom. They offer honest, humorous and hard looks at everyday life-love, marriage, parenting, money, religion, sports and politics-celebrating the joys and admitting the failures.
“Hughes’ poems are conscious of the destruction and ‘heady wastes’ we humans make,” writes Annie Lighthart, but “they will not let go of the truth at the other end of the line-that the world is still vividly living and vividly loved.”
Henry Hughes completed a Ph.D. in American Literature from Purdue University and is a professor of literature and writing at Western Oregon University. He is the author of four collections of poetry, one the winner of the 2004 Oregon Book Award and another was a a finalist for the 2011 Oregon Book Award. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Queen’s Quarterly, North American Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Seattle Review, and Harvard Review where his book reviews regularly appear. He has also published a fishing memoir as well as multiple poems and essays related to fishing.
The Character Actor Convention, Guy Elston
Publisher: The Porcupine’s Quill
Publication Date: September 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A pumpkin writes a letter to his father. A sheep recalls a revolution, and love. Hydrogen pens a tell all exposé of Oxygen. The Stick Insect Orders His Tomb. Napoleon counts waves and cheats at cards. A sunflower seeks answers – why sun? A crow considers children in this cruel, spiky world. And all the while, character actors gather for the endless convention…
Guy Elston’s debut is a curious smorgasbord of personas, voices and (un)natural perspectives. Through impossible encounters and strange viewpoints an insistent, ever-shifting ‘I’ questions its relation to itself. Wist, wit, and obsession rise like tides, are forgotten, and start fresh. Authenticity is always just round the corner.
The Character Actor Convention is not urgent, timely or topical. It’s something else.
Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK. After various jobs, journeys and other lifetimes he surfaced in Toronto in 2020. He has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam. Since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. Guy lives in Toronto and can be found at poetry events. He’s a member of the Meet the Presses collective and is a first reader for Untethered magazine.
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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.