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.
GRIME, Thea Matthews
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
GRIME is the underbelly of the city and the dirt found in the human psyche. These poems explore the dichotomous gravity of despair and desire, apathy and protest, defeat and survival. They trace San Francisco’s skyline to encapsulate being born and raised in a metropolis that has grown increasingly strange to its native citizens, even as it serves as a mnemonic for past trauma and death.
Part elegy, part call to resistance, GRIME chronicles Matthews’ childhood growing up in the Tenderloin, amidst the glamour and allure of its drug-fueled street life and the squalor of its poverty and addiction, even as the poems veer off from the autobiographical into portraits and dramatic monologues, on the one hand, and experiments with traditional forms like ghazals and pantoums, on the other. The poems hold grit and anguish in one breath, marrying an unflinching eye to a rare formal assurance. As austerity pushes the margins of each page, in poem after poem, the setting shifts, the characters assume different names, yet every moment interlocks to expose the grime of living in the city.
Yet GRIME is also a story of triumph and resiliency in the face of insurmountable odds, an assertion of the power of poetry in wrestling with grief, addiction, and calamity. It seeks moments of healing based on interpersonal connection and faith. GRIME is a poetics of survival and defiance.
Thea Matthews is a poet of African and Indigenous Mexican descent originally from San Francisco, CA. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a BA in sociology from UC Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in the Obsidian Lit & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Massachusetts Review, Alta Journal, The New Republic, and others. Her first book, Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Lit Press), was chosen for Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry of 2020. In 2023, she was poet in residence at the Museum of African Diaspora, and programming curator at UC Berkeley’s Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. She teaches creative writing, is an editor, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards, Brian Gyamfi
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
What God in the Kingdom of Bastards is a poetic exploration of grief, memory, Blackness, and the haunting legacy of familial trauma by way of colonialism, told through the lens of two brothers: Lot, the elder, who is flesh and alive, and Frank, the younger, a ghost navigating his post-suicide existence. Their relationship anchors the collection, weaving themes of love, loss, and the arduous reconciliation between the living and the dead. Combining vivid imagery with fragmented, conversational tones of prayers, laments, and whispered confessions that are surreal and lyrical, Gyamfi delves into the ways trauma—both personal and systemic—permeates family, faith, and identity.
Brian Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship, and two Hopwood Awards. His libretto The Ants Are Illuminated was commissioned by Overtone Industries for their Original Vision opera. A finalist for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Poetry International Prize, his writing has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Guernica, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry. Gyamfi lives in Washington, DC.
The Same Man, Bobby Elliott
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
A one-of-a-kind debut that asks what we owe those we love, The Same Man is an aching chronicle of the early days of parenthood and the wounds of the past. Haunted by memory and powered by the demands and joys of new life, Elliott’s poems wrestle with the father-son relationship at their core and the deep, unspoken harms that shape us. A relentless effort toward expression and autonomy, The Same Man is a reckoning and a balm, a rallying call and a father’s song of devotion.
Bobby Elliott‘s debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.
Cipota, Chelsea Guevara
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Chelsea Guevara’s Cipota breathes a lineage into a song—making music of ancestral memory: dirges of heartbreak and generational trauma, anthems of rage and reclamation, ballads of love and homecoming. Guevara’s voice enchants as she delves into history, ancestry, and the self—reaching for a lineage that has been battered by strife and strangled by colonialism. She moves through place and memory with deft skill and earnest humanity. Cipota examines the grief of culture lost, of a home you’ve been separated from, one that doesn’t truly feel like yours. Cipota is a beating heart that demands to be heard. You will be rapt from start to finish.
Chelsea Guevara is a U.S.-Salvadorian poet from Utah. In 2024, she won the Womxn of the World International Poetry Slam, becoming the first Salvadoran and the first Utahn to earn a national individual slam title. Current student in the University of Arizona’s Latin American Studies graduate program, her academic research informs her creative work centering culture, history, and identity. Chelsea’s microchapbook Somewhere Over the Border was a finalist for the 2023 Gunpowder Press Alta California Chapbook Prize. Her work is on Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, and Mapping Literary Utah.
The Idea of an Entire Life, Billy-Ray Belcourt
Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Queer Indigenous poet Billy-Ray Belcourt offers up a powerful meditation on the present as a space where the past and a still-possible utopia collide. Rigorous in research and thought yet accessible in language and imagery, this collection weaves lyric verse, sonnets, field notes, and fragments to examine the delicate facets of queer Indigeneity.
Belcourt contends with the afterlife of what he calls “the long twentieth century,” a period marked by assaults on Indigenous life, and his people’s enduring resistance. The poems, sometimes heartbreaking, other times sly and humorous, are marked by the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of both grief and awe.
His third book of poetry and sixth across genres, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s The Idea of an Entire Life leaves readers with a vision for queer Indigenous life as it is shaped by a violent history—and yet pulled toward a more flourishing future.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in northwest Alberta, Canada. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of six books, three poetry and three prose. He has won the Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, This Wound is a World, and has been nominated twice for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award. Belcourt serves the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production, edits poetry for Hazlitt, and is the founder of oteh nikan, an online magazine of LGBTQ2S+ Indigenous writing.
Accidents After Happening, Robert Priest
Publisher: a misFit book
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
The accidents of Priest’s collection are definitely not all “happy.” They move through a full range of human emotions: dread, grief, anger, ecstasy, lust, and empathy. Plus some magic levity. This is poetry you will want to recite aloud: lyrical love poems, sonnets, satires, ghazals, curses, and bitter invective. These are not snobby poems — they want and welcome readers who love euphony, who enjoy tasteful eroticism, who rage at injustice. People who grieve and gush — smart people who think critically and form their own opinions. And for those with a taste for “brevity forever.” Accidents After Happening also contains a whole new catalog of Priest’s aphorisms, proverbs, maxims, and sayings — the kind of work that recently prompted Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood to take to Twitter and praise Priest’s “snappy, funny, spot-on micro poems — plus much more.”
Priest is a people’s poet who believes that humanity harbors a deep and ancient biological need for the spirit and time-binding experiences of the incantatory and shamanistic and that these can only be acquired through the poetic outlook. His words have been quoted in the Farmers’ Almanac, posted in the Toronto transit system, sung in churches, denounced in the legislature, embedded in pavement, and turned into two hit songs. “Sometimes,” as one of Priest’s micro poems has it, “it is the book that opens you.”
People’s poet Robert Priest has achieved bestseller status as both a songwriter and a poet. He lives in Toronto, ON.
The Nightmare Sequence, Omar Sakr
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Nightmare Sequence is a searing response to the atrocities in Gaza and beyond since October 2023. Heartbreaking and humane, it is a necessary portrait of the violence committed by Israel and its Western allies. Through poetry and visual art, Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed capture these historic injustices, while also critiquing the role of art and media—including their own—in this time. Born of collective suffering and despair, their collaboration interrogates the position of witness: the terrible and helpless distance of vision, the impact of being exposed to violence of this scale on a daily basis, and what it means to live in a society that is actively participating in the catastrophic destruction of Arabs and Muslims overseas. With a foreword by Palestinian American poet George Abraham, this book will serve as a vital record in decades to come.
Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of the novel Son of Sin and three poetry collections, including The Lost Arabs, which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. His most recent collection, Non-Essential Work, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and the ALS Gold Medal. His nonfiction work has been published widely, including in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and SBS Life.
Safdar Ahmed is an award-winning artist, writer, musician and cultural worker. His graphic novel Still Alive won the Multicultural NSW Award and was named Book of the Year in the 2022 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Still Alive also won the 2022 Eve Pownall Award and a Gold Ledger in the 2022 Comic Arts Awards of Australia.
Stock, Jennifer Bowering Delisle
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Stock photographs are everywhere. With their contrived poses, unusual angles, and bizarre visual metaphors, they’re instantly familiar – and familiarly narrow in their vision of our society. Their ubiquity shapes and reinforces the biases, privilege, and stereotypes of their distinct aesthetic.
From found poems using metadata and keywords to riffs on stock image database search results with titles like ‘Good Mother Morning Family Happy,’ ‘Beautiful Woman Eating Salad,’ and ‘Lady Boss Smiles with Arms Folded,’ Delisle’s ekphrastic poems take a playful look at stock photography’s clichés and delight in all its strangeness, while casting a critical eye on its representations of women.
Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s collection of lyric essays, Micrographia (2023), won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. She is also the author of Deriving, a collection of poetry (2021), and The Bosun Chair, a lyric family memoir (2017). She is on the board of NeWest Press and lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.
Requiem, Daphne Gottlieb
Publisher: Manic D Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this poetic exploration of love and loss amplified by personal and sociopolitical passings, award-winning author Daphne Gottlieb declares an indictment of systems, from systems created to leave people dying in the streets (“the bullet teaches us how to dance”) to the systematic erosion of memory due to dementia (“yahrzeit”). In the absence of any indoctrination around ritualizing death, Gottlieb was drawn to memorialize her experiences of the past through poems, including “my dog teaches me things,” about the final lessons learned from her best friend, a chihuahua. What shines through in every poem is the exceptional moments that create love, how we survive the heartbreak of profound loss, and what we get to keep and carry with us always.
Daphne Gottlieb is the author of 11 books, including poetry books Why Things Burn, Final Girl, Kissing Dead Girls, and 15 Ways to Stay Alive. Her work has been published in more than 50 anthologies, literary journals, and periodicals, including McSweeney’s, Tikkun, and Utne Reader. She is the winner of an Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant-Garde, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Poetry, a Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and has been a five-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Gottlieb holds degrees from Mills College, Bard College, and Tulane University. She lives in San Francisco.
To See Yourself as You Vanish, Andrea Werblin Reid
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Written in the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid’s To See Yourself As You Vanish is a collection of unsparingly brave and insightful poems about her experience with ovarian cancer. Frank, fierce, and witty, her work does not hide behind cliches, platitudes, or tropes, but addresses the hopes, frustrations, fears, and longings that would be easy to leave unspoken. She offers friendship and understanding to those who share her experiences and powerful insights for caregivers and those who work in oncology, hospice, research, and psychology. Of these poems, Reid herself said: “I have struggled with the implications of war metaphors and the perspectives they perpetuate since receiving my own cancer diagnosis. People living with cancer and other chronic illnesses are not taking up arms, they are living as long and as humanely as possible: not to win or lose, simply to live.” The scenes in these poems are rich and spare, magical and sane, awful and special: “one bird comes to the end of his branch looking like a clever moustache. /one bird comes to the end of his song like an ordinary bird.”
Andrea Werblin Reid (1965–2022) is the author of Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse, 2014). Her poem “Language is the Virus” was named a finalist for the prestigious Perkoff Prize from the Missouri Review and her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Brooklyn Rail, Pank, Smartish Pace, and more.
Self-Romancing, L. Scully
Publisher: DOPAMINE/Semiotext(e)
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a tonal mash-up of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, confessional poetry, and fortune telling, Self-Romancing draws you into the amorous and obsessive inner life of an unnamed romantic. Relatable and snarky, heartfelt and horny, L Scully fortifies irony with vulnerability, bringing readers into a narrative as intimate as slumber parties and ordinary as Trader Joe’s. Bursting with the giddy charm of the everyday, Self-Romancing plays with form, turning a book into a crush, a crank call, a manifesto.
L Scully is a living writer. They are also, first and foremost, a lover.
What We Do With God, Daniella Toosie-Watson
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Daniella Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection, What We Do with God, meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Social constructions of propriety have no bearing on sensual connection and exploration. As the speaker navigates these different worlds and their myriad questions—calling upon Puerto Rican, Iranian, and Russian inheritance to explore where, why, and how ancestral mysticism and Western pathology intersect and/or diverge—they find those questions mirrored back as they maneuver through the stark realities of the U.S. mental health care system.
Guided by curiosity, tenderness, stark clarity, and unapologetic impiety toward a binary of holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to imagine a world where the “care” we choose to cultivate extends beyond the grace we give ourselves and those directly around us, but to the interconnecting ecosystems that hold the wider world together.
Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a poet, visual artist, and educator from New York. They have received fellowships and awards from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, VONA, the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project, and the University of Michigan Hopwood Program. Daniella has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. They were the profile writer for the Kennedy Center’s Next 50 initiative and are currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute. Daniella received their MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
All These Ghosts, Silas House
Publisher: Blair
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Silas House is known throughout the South as a quintessential person of letters—a novelist, music journalist, environmental activist, columnist, and the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky. His first full-length collection of poetry blends his Appalachian upbringing with his ongoing relation to the natural world. Poems of praise for community and the collective appear alongside others tinged with nostalgia and grief when House keenly observes the loss of rural America as he once knew it. Returning to his touchstone subjects, Silas recalls wild places, echoes stories from a lingering and living past, and explores an abiding connection to family, friends, and fellow artists.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels: Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, Same Sun Here, Southernmost, and Lark Ascending. He is a recipient of the 2023 Southern Book Prize, the 2023 Booklist Editors’ Choice, two Nautilus Book Awards, the Duggins Prize (the largest award for LGBTQ writers in the nation), and many other honors, including being longlisted for the 2019 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In 2023 he became Poet Laureate of Kentucky and was a Grammy finalist for writing and producing the first country music video to feature a gay love story. In 2022 he served as a fiction judge for the National Book Awards. His writing has appeared recently in Time, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, Garden and Gun, and many other leading publications. He is based in Lexington, KY.
Bloodmercy, I.S. Jones
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
“Violence is a failure of communication” opens this book as an omen and foregrounds a family exiled from Eden. In I.S. Jones’s stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught—the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve’s sin while coming into their own sexuality.
Grounded in the remote natural world, enclosed by firs and redwoods, Bloodmercy follows Cain and Abel through the dense geography of girlhood into young womanhood. Along the way, they discover the limits of power and control, spite and sex, faith and death, and man’s dominion over the earth. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God. Lyrical, lush, and bursting with tender imagination, Bloodmercy marks a debut to watch.
I.S. Jones is an American / Nigerian poet and editor. She holds fellowships from Hedgebrook Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Bread Loaf where she was the 2023 Rona Jaffe Scholar in poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, LA Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Since 2019, she has served as an editor at 20:35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, the longest running anthology for living African poets. Currently, I.S. is a senior editor forPoetry Northwest where she runs her column, “The Legacy Suite”, a three-part interview documenting the journey of writers publishing their debut poetry collections. Her chapbook Spells of My Name, selected for their Emerging Poets Series, was published with Newfound in 2021. She is the 2024-2025 Artist-In-Resident at Northwestern University with the Black Arts Consortium.
Stay Dead, Natalie Shapero
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
The politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero’s fourth poetry collection, Stay Dead. Shapero’s unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how “your death place / is the birthplace you choose.” With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists’ material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and “whether being born is worth it.”
Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, 2021), Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2021), and No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), as well as the pamphlet Today Hamlet (Out-Spoken, 2023). Her writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, a finalist designation from the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and an Assets for Artists residency fellowship from The Studios at MassMOCA. A former civil-rights lawyer, she works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. She lives in Los Angeles.
I Confess, Eric Schmaltz
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Eric Schmaltz’s I Confess delves into the complexities of truth-telling in poetry, and the history of technologies designed to produce truth from willing and unwilling subjects, considering what it means to use a device – poetry or polygraph – to draw out one’s most profound feelings and emotions.
Exploring the intersection of power, technology, and language, I Confess meditates on lie detection and its history, including trials by ordeal and pseudoscientific technologies. The poet then turns to his own personal experiences working with a lie detector and polygraph analyst. Taking himself as the central subject of the book, Schmaltz puts his subjectivity and positionality under scrutiny.
The answers to questions such as What does family mean to you? and Can you describe a time when you felt your best? inspire a range of forms from conventional lyrical verse to list poems to palindromes to visual poems. With an afterword by Orchid Tierney, I Confess is a personal, poetic document of truth’s performance under duress.
Eric Schmaltz is the author of Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963–1988 (University of Calgary Press) and Surfaces (Invisible Publishing), editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks), and co-editor of I Want to Tell You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn. His creative work has been published, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally.
Crohnic, Jason Purcell
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Crohnic is a brilliant and moving collection of poems that asks, what is the landscape of a medicated life? From their convalescence in a room that overlooks the North Saskatchewan River, author Jason Purcell thinks ecologically with medical records, prescriptions, and dosages, staying attuned to place and to what it might mean to live a life relying on something—in this case, an interminable course of medication—that hurts you in some ways to help you in others. How does the terrain of life change?
Picking up the threads of sickness first plucked in Swollening, Crohnic charts two years of Purcell’s treatment for Crohn’s disease, journeying from hospital rooms to bogs and muskeg, places where life and death intermingle and create the conditions for one another’s flourishing. This is a world populated by coyotes, ermines, steroids, pine, infusion drips, moss, pills, and ice. These other-than-human beings come together in Crohnic, coalescing into relations that together form a personal narrative of the management of chronic illness.
Jason Purcell (they/them) is a writer and musician from amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty 6 (Edmonton, Alberta). They are the author of the poetry collections Swollening (Arsenal Pulp Press) and A Place More Hospitable (Anstruther Press). They are a PhD student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.
Death of the First Idea, Rickey Laurentiis
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”
In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?)
Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.
Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.
Betweenness, Varun Ravindran
Publisher: Baobab Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Varun Ravindran’s full-length debut, Betweenness, is poetic polyphony and counterpoint. Formally inventive, at times layering multiple voices, and at other points, implementing sheet music as poetic form, Ravindran explores spirituality; his experience as an immigrant existing in the peripheries of both Indian and American culture, but part of neither; and of history, as he speaks on his late father and grandfather, both of whom struggled with alcoholism until their deaths. Accumulating into chords and intervals, these poems unite in a song of self that contains multitudes of voice and of form. Piece-by-piece they are hyaline and complex, while the affect of the whole crescendos into an authentic and important new voice in American poetry.
Varun Ravindran was born in Chennai, India, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Duquesne University. His work has appeared in various literary journals like Kenyon Review Online, Denver Quarterly, and mercury firs.
What is Broken Binds Us, Lorne Daniel
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.
In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.
Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.
Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has written four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.
Boat of Letters, Eve Grubin
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her much anticipated second full-length collection of poems, Eve Grubin conjures an “inky swamp, wild and warm, / where leaves hang down like muted lamps.” Grubin navigates wild waters in a “boat of letters” she constructs, with poems narrating a daughter in mourning for her mother in adulthood’s half-light; a wife in the middle of life’s existential marathon; a mother raising two children in the terrifying present; an American living in London; a Jewish woman following religious tradition in what can feel like a faithless world. Grubin shapes language and silences into a bridge that holds us between longing and understanding, between effort and the holy ground of that unattainable destination. “The Poetics of Reticence” describes hovering above the waters where “there is no vessel; there are no oars,” just the “sounds of a boat creaking,” a material contradiction in the hushed void. “Silence is praise: words cannot touch glory,” Grubin writes, but she also demonstrates what wonders our speech makes possible. In one poem, the narrator looks back at her wedding and considers how little she knew about marriage, and thinking in the context of her husband’s area of expertise, palaeography, she reflects, “I didn’t know that when two graphemes join / in a single glyph there is potential for stylistic re-imaginings, / for inventive, elegant variations.” All is preordained, she seems to say, while paradoxically, we re-imagine and invent. And even as we create our future, we embrace the beauty of all that we cannot know: “Yesterday, we talked about the shade / of a certain blue mentioned in the Torah. / Was it the blue of our son’s lips after a bath? // Or the blue of redemption? // Or the dark blue of the sky / the night we walked across the sands, the seas all around us.”
Eve Grubin is the author of Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press), The House of Our First Loving (Rack Press) and Grief Dialogue (Rack Press). She teaches at New York University London.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Matthew Tuckner
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a book-length sequence of 53 poems with identical eponymous titles. Heartbreaking and searingly lucid, this debut collection from poet Matthew Tuckner chronicles his best friend’s illness and subsequent death from cancer. Its brilliance is not only in recognizing the vastness and particularity of grief — how the loss of a beloved is so personally all encompassing that it splits time irrevocably, separating our personal history into distinct eras of before and after as the governing principles of our lives crumble — but also in joining the discrete experience of one person’s sickness to a carcinogenic imperial core, the late-capitalist global order that ensnares all people in toxic landscapes that make us sick.
Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and is currently a PhD student in English/Creative Writing at University of Utah. His chapbook, Extinction Studies, is the winner of the 2023 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The Adroit Journal, and Best New Poets, among others.
All Calm Beyond, Stephen Knauth
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Reuniting poems previously published in two separate books, All Calm Beyond brings together the work included in Twenty Shadows (1995) and The River I Know You By (1999), both written by Stephen Knauth in the period after his son Benjamin died of an early childhood cancer. These striking and stricken pages chart the path between acute mourning to the beginning of recovery, asking what it looks like to continue despite the permanence of loss. What it looks like is a halting progression made between stumbles, a battleworn collage of best efforts. This is his impossibly won wisdom: “Grief is like the blind mule you’d like to murder / until you look back and see how far it brought you.” In these lyrics, Knauth mixes the transcendent diction of religion with the plain reality of ordinary speech, Christian imagery with Buddhist teaching, and the human scale of society with the indifferent vastness of nature. If grief is not a redundant abyss the bereft parent continually circles, if its process actually traverses spiritual ground, Knauth approaches and dares ask the inconceivable question faith requires of him: “And death, death of a child, has it likewise its / cruel and sturdy purpose?” No, of course not, these elegies and meditations repeat; yet, in response to the tragedy of surviving one’s child, a father’s sorrow attests to the dimensions of eternity, a measure beyond human comprehension except for the ceaseless pain of existing without his son and the shared devotion that binds family together even after a life is over. Maybe, then, “if only to attach to the bereaved / one end of the silver thread of oblivion, umbilicus / through which ghostly underworld placentas / deliver their dark nutrition?” Yes, and forever, forever, no. The wound is an ouroboros; love is the answer and the question, the conditions that brought forth the child and all that’s left in his wake. Love, that immense and ferocious tenderness for which there is no good synonym. If love makes us susceptible to loss, then “the silence itself recalls what’s missing, what’s done.” So we sit in the waiting room of this world, listening to what comes through “faintly, faintly, through the membrane,” and remember that what will be is only possible because of what was, and walk forward to reach, perhaps, the calm beyond, because, “not knowing / where they have gone, we are left with our quiet / duty to the dead, with vows to take // and each day break, to embrace / what remains, to give, to glaze / every stick and stamen with our love.”
Stephen Knauth is the author of Dear Dusk and five other collections of poetry. He has published in many national journals, including Ploughshares, FIELD, North American Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, The Sun, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has twice received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and has also been awarded fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council. A native of Hales Corners, Wisconsin, he grew up in Buffalo and Pittsburgh. He lives with his family in Charlotte and works as a freelance writer and editor.
Seabeast, Rajiv Mohabir
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Organized as an alphabetical bestiary, Seabeast lyrically catalogues whale species by common name and behaviors, resulting in a poetic compendium that defies pathetic fallacy even as it sings the similarities between homo sapiens and the marine mammoths that have long captured our fascination. In his fifth full-length collection, Rajiv Mohabir winds together the threads of cetacean evolution, natural history, animal migration, and human culture and colonization as they concern the endurance of all species. In anthropomorphizing these complex mammals, Mohabir argues, we overwrite and erase their sublime difference and selfhood, their distinct and separate experience of embodiment; yet, in refusing to recognize the familiarities of whale behavior and social patterns, we subjugate these magnificent creatures, affirming a hierarchy that establishes anything inhuman as inherently less than human and enabling cruelty toward all manner of living things.
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of five books of poetry and has been awarded two gold medals from the Foreword INDIES and Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His other honors include being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature. His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he teaches poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Burn Me Back, Peggy Robles-Alvarado
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
“My Spanglish,” Peggy Robles-Alvarado declares, “drops the -s and makes it ma’ o meno’,” replaces accent marks with side-eye, “has a Tía sin papeles,” and recognizes that “there is no other way to say— / Cónchole papi, you look good!” Igniting across tongues, cultures, and countries, the incendiary poems in Burn Me Back harness the incantatory power of language through hybrid forms, preserving a beloved father’s memory, enshrining the legacy of the Latino immigrant community in Washington Heights and the Bronx, reimagining the world we share, and speaking toward a hopeful multiplicity of possible futures. At the cross section of Puerto Rican and Dominican diasporas, rooted in ancestral narratives and infused with generational dislocation, this speaker refuses to abandon what resists translation, makes the space she needs, and transforms objects as she names them: “My Spanglish knows a fire escape is also a terrace.” Yes, the language here is a feat of engineering — a design shaped by the conditions of emergency, an architecture of survival, deliverance to open air. Like isolating the notes in a thunderous chord, Robles-Alvarado dexterously teases out each word’s many meanings, listening for the individual strains that created her as she archives family lore and fleshes out her personal history, writing against patriarchy while codifying working-class wisdom. She reconstructs a whole genealogy in “What They Mean by Papers,” reciting a negative litany of “papeles.” “Not the Daily News or El Diario La Prensa, / or the kind my mother read to me on Sunday / mornings,” her “throat full of / pelitos de mango,” “Not the kind Tía Weltina used to roll her tobacco with,” “conjuring / Taíno spirits she exhaled … as she tried to memorize the national anthem,” but the kind “Uncle Rito forged” while he “learned to curl the R in his name / as if writing sacred geometry,” “the kind that convinced four of my aunts to marry older / naturalized men in exchange for an acre of my grandfather’s campo” — the kind that required the rest of their lives as payment, “their bodies, / all their milk and honey, all their amber and caña dulce / sacrificed to the lust of viejos verdes, old bastards / who soured early on too much tabaco y ron and wanted to plant / their moldy seeds in supple girls who had never seen snow.” Robles-Alvarado orchestrates the fullness of her song by refusing to leave anyone out, by making room for a term’s contradictory definitions and playing through discordant combinations until the dissonance resolves. What began as an elegy composed by a daughter lost in mourning becomes an expansive arrangement sounding rupture and repair. This music travels between loss and recovery, addiction and sobriety, the cooling embers of lost childhood and the heat of the present, this very moment in which you could reach out to the people around you and ask them to be here with you for every scalding second, the warmth of your skin against theirs posing a burning question — an invitation to burn you back.
Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a three-time International Latino Book Award winner, and a BRIO award recipient. She has earned writing fellowships from CantoMundo, Desert Nights, The Frost Place, The Ashbery Home School, VONA, Candela Playwrights, Dramatic Question Theater, and NALAC. With two master’s degrees in education and an MFA in performance studies, Peggy’s work appears in The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, ¡Manteca!, great weather for MEDIA, and What Saves Us, as well as online in Poets.org, The Quarry at Split This Rock, The Common, Tribes.org, and NACLA.org. She has been featured at Solfest Latine Theater Festival, The Dodge Poetry Festival, Lincoln Center, HBO Habla Women, The Smithsonian Institute, PEN America, Harvard University, and AWP. Through her 501(c)(3), Robleswrites Productions Inc., she created Lalibreta.online and The Abuela Stories Project.
Someone Else’s Hunger, Isabella DeSendi
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dislocated in her own skin after a sexual assault, Isabella DeSendi wrestles with the thorny border between desire and appetite in her incandescent debut collection. Poised between her Cuban matrilineage and her first-generation adolescence in America, between assimilation and reclamation, between owning her own cravings and becoming a sacrifice to “someone else’s hunger,” these poems dissect our human obsession with beauty and the body. The poems in this collection use the lyric form to enact destruction and reparation as they attempt to reverse the vector of aesthetic power toward grace. Because Someone Else’s Hunger is beautiful, devastatingly so, it surveys violence, romance, eating disorders, structural racism, and socioeconomic inequality, all while yearning to still find beauty everywhere. At the nail salon, the speaker chooses red lacquer and the tech “paints the color of / anger or desire across the long lake of [her] nail”; in the city, where she feels like “an animal caught / in the sewer of [her] life” with “spring’s pink garbage / strewn into the streets while petals performed / their daily adagio down the avenue”; and behind her mother’s house, where she used to vomit at the lip of the reservoir, “where the water would congeal / then break like dough under [her] body’s simple rot.”
Isabella DeSendi is a Latina poet and educator whose work has been published in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and was published in 2020. Recently she has been named a New Jersey Poetry Fellow, was included in the 2024 Best New Poets anthology, and has been named a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and Rattle‘s $15,000 Poetry Prize, among other awards. Isabella has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Storyknife Writers’ Residency in Alaska, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Raven on the Moaners’ Bench, Gary Copeland Lilley
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
With its titular nod to the most ominous bird in literature, perched on that first pew reserved for mourners, Raven on the Moaners’ Bench locates itself within the oceanic canon that grapples with loss and within the rich history of Black letters, marking a staggering achievement in both. Simultaneously generational and personal, these poems encompass the boundless record of racial injustice in the United States while honoring the particular stories — the irreplaceable personalities, memories, and voices — of each individual life. Lilley memorializes familiar figures, martyrs, and strangers as he speaks to his dead younger brother, to Trayvon Martin, to Freddie Gray, and to two men he is “grateful for but [has] never / had the occasion to know” — two men whom he remains aware of because they are, like him, among “the only four black men / driving these Victorian streets” where “the same cop” pulls them over repeatedly. The sundown specter here takes form as an officer of the law, but these lyrics inventory the many shadows twining over the long road Black Americans have walked in the last four centuries. Lilley casts his words between realms, turning back for Jeff, the brother disabled by a drunk driver at 19 who spent an estranged and troubled adulthood away from his family, who “died long before he actually did,” vaulted into a maelstrom of mental illness and structural neglect after his accident. Laying these poems at the moaners’ bench as “audible expressions / of spiritual need,” “of bodily reaching / toward the lifting away,” Lilley testifies to the burden of suffering he, his loved ones, his ancestors, and his peers have carried. And then he releases it from where he stands, graveside in his psychological landscape, beside his brother lain down “against / a wilderness of hope.”
Gary Copeland Lilley, originally from North Carolina, now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has published nine books of poetry, and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Lilley has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry and is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He teaches in the Western Colorado University Creative Writing MFA program. Lilley serves as the Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference and is a Cave Canem Fellow.
In the Good Years, Laura Cresté
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
A high-lyric historian of the human project, Laura Cresté fixes her scrupulous gaze on the interwoven threads of this distressed anthropocene era, taking in the whole cloth of our globalized societies while recording the singular details of our individual lives and most intimate relationships—their intricate embroidery, characterizing stains, and fraying hems. In the Good Years confronts a painful family legacy, returning to the violent artistic censorship of Argentina’s military dictatorship, her relatives’ survival of a Dirty War death camp, and the scattered paths of their migration to safer ground. In reconstructing the past, Cresté resists the individualistic contraction of the coming of age model, not merely solidifying the psychological actualization of a single person as they enter adulthood but discursively expanding the notion of self, discovering the boundaries of identity as they overlay the seams of the broader world. These poems exist because of a narrowly avoided fate, and they bristle with the wild energy of improbable existence even as they touch on seemingly unrelated and often ordinary things: a roast chicken recipe, an aunt’s questionable romantic advice, flea-ridden dogs, high school parties, waitressing at a dive bar, drowned newts in the swimming pool, unruly tomato plants, horseback riding. “Once saddled across a mare / named Ramona, I was afraid of the burden of my body,” Cresté writes, fearful “that she would buckle—an animal once ridden into war.” The sheer brilliance of this book’s poetics manifest in lines like these, which bring political, personal, and ecological considerations to bear on the concept of weight in the space of a single sentence. What is the heft of a life that was nearly disappeared? How does a number become a weapon to enforce the gendered economy graphing desirability against power? What is the size of our footprint on this planet, and how heavy must our presence currently be as the animals and the land reach their breaking point? How much do you weigh? How much weight can you carry? “I was a teenager and jealous of the freedom / I imagined belonged to the thin,” Cresté admits. “Now I know no one feels free, // not even the creature who devoured / the countryside, ravenous for the time / we were allowed in the field.” This stunning debut champions that ravening, relishes the external and internal wilderness of the surrounding environment and our own human nature, and honors appetite as an opportunity to savor each bite for as long as we get to sit at the table. Throughout, these poems keenly subvert experience and memory, asking how we will remember this moment, and if the blessing of being here means we are somehow, even now in all the present’s suffering, living in the good years.
Laura Cresté is the author of You Should Feel Bad, winner of a 2019 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from New York University and has received fellowships and other support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Community of Writers, Monson Arts, and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Shattered, Terry Hauptman
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Shattered, Terry Hauptman utters a collective wail, a lamentation, and a cry of rage. Collective because she creates with Lorca, Neruda, Thelonius Monk, Joy Harjo, Yehuda Halevi (and many others), leaping across cultures and languages. Yet the voice in these chants is distinctly Hauptman’s own: ecstatic, full-throated. She sings the Blackmoon, the Bloodmoon; she conjures a hyacinth fire of tears; she mourns and curses, and calls for peace in calamitous times.
Terry Hauptman is the author of seven previous poetry collections: Masquerading in Clover: Fantasy of the Leafy Fool, with hand-painted plates (1980), Rattle (1982), On Hearing Thunder (2004), The Indwelling of Dissonance (2016), The Tremulous Seasons (2020), Rubies in the Mud (2021), and Fallen Angels (2022) She has a Master’s degree in Poetry from the University of New Mexico, Alburquerque, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Ohio University, Athens. She lives in Vermont with Robert and Kira.
In the Realm of Motes, Baptiste Gaillard
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
A stunning work of prose poetry from award-winning Swiss poet Baptiste Gaillard, In the Realm of Motes is a key ecopoetic text that celebrates the infinitesimal and the ephemeral in their entropic yet orchestral movements of aggregration, fragmentation, and mutation. Both Gaillard’ s language and what these prose poems point to break apart, absorb, and reconstitute a unique space that is both easily comprehended and entirely strange. At one moment we’ re reading about a lake or a forest and the next our deepest meditations and alarms. These short prose poems must be read to understand the lower layer connecting us and our surroundings.
Baptiste Gaillard has exhibited installations and objects in galleries and art spaces in Switzerland and Europe. Language has gradually become the subject of his work, and he has since regularly published his texts in magazines, as well as six books, including Un domaine des corpuscules (Hippocampe é ditions, Swiss Literature Prize in 2018), Ombres blanches sur fond presque blanc (2020), and Un test de fragilité (2024). His work explores the thresholds of the sensible and tells of materials and transient states, like the condensation on a window that disappears as soon as it is imprinted.
Blue Loop, AJ White
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Blue Loop is composed of poems about addiction and recovery, using meditation as a lens through which memories of loss and harm might begin to be processed and accepted. It seeks to prioritize—and demonstrate—dwelling with the self in the present moment, avoiding the tendency to do what those in the recovery community call future tripping: our innate, strong desire to visit things not yet come to pass through the mode of anxious attachment. In fact, these poems are against attachment, in the Buddhist sense, accepting and appreciating the beneficial gifts of calm from loved ones and community of all kinds but in search of release from the need to rely on such connections completely. Therefore, often, they are lonely poems.
Despite searching for connection, the speaker remains most faithful to—and finds grounding in—the self. The goal of Blue Loop is to provide potential strategies and modes of thought for readers navigating any form of recovery or in search of more balanced being.
AJ White is a poet and educator from north Georgia. He is the winner of the 2023 Fugue Poetry Prize, selected by Kaveh Akbar, and of a 2023 Academy of American Poets University Prize, selected by Tara Betts. His poems have also appeared in The Account, Best New Poets, Overheard, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and lives in New York.
The Unreliable Tree, Margot Kahn
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Born from a state of fragmented time, the poems in The Unreliable Tree call out the intimate feelings mothers so often fear to share. With a precise and tender eye, Margot Kahn tracks her early years of parenthood alongside the seasons of her family’s orchard. As she chronicles the changes in her marriage, her friendships, and her own shifting identity, Kahn questions the risks we take for devotion and the labors we devote to love. These poems shine a light on the patience and perseverance required to care—for homes, for people, for heritage—and ultimately question the choices we make: to hold on to others around us, and to hold on to ourselves. Compassionate, unflinching, lyric, and raw, The Unreliable Tree portrays the world of early motherhood with humility and complicated beauty.
Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck and coeditor of two essay anthologies, This Is the Place and Wanting. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.
Goat, Goddess, Moon, Catherine Strisik
Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
Publication Date: September 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Everyone has a name that comes from somewhere. Greek American poet Catherine Strisik’s brilliant fourth collection, Goat, Goddess, Moon, is a deeply personal search to uncover the roots of her given name. In poems that originate in Crete and Thessaloniki, Greece, and in northern New Mexico’s San Cristobal and Taos, Strisik, like an archeologist, revisits and reimagines the ancestral Greek villages that are her imprint of origin and reveal the love that endures. Herein are poems that include the Greek language, the speaker’s early tongue and that of her ancestors: Maybe agape is what we mean/ agape on the edge of Fortetsa to bend/Yes bend closer/mythed/unmythed. These bold, body-centered poems explore villages, labyrinths, and the given name Aikaterίna found in myth, love, desire, superstition, beauty, the physicality of woman/goddess, elemental bodies of landscape/waters, and a mystical camaraderie with abandoned wild dogs, cats, and sacrificial goats. This is a journey of self-discovery, one that fully embraces family origins and a celebratory arrival.
Catherine Strisik, poet, teacher, editor is author of The Mistress (3: A Taos Press, 2016, awarded New Mexico/AZ Book Award for Poetry 2017); Thousand-Cricket Song (Plain View Press, 2010, second edition 2016); and chapbook: Insectum Gravitis (Main Street Rag, 2019, finalist New Mexico/AZ Book Award 2020). She is co-founder and editor of Taos Journal of Poetry, was Taos, New Mexico’s Poet Laureate 2020- 2021, as well as the recipient of a Taoseña Award as Woman of Impact for literary contribution in northern N.M. Strisik is a Pushcart nominee with over 30 years of publications with poetry translated into Greek, Persian, and Bulgarian. She offers editorial consultations for essayists and poets and facilitates both private and small group poetry workshops. Currently she divides her time between Cape Ann, MA and Taos, New Mexico where she has lived for over 40 years
Fenestration, Othuke Umukoro
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Fenestration excavates public and private history. The poems here bristle with striking clarity and immediacy while compellingly confronting subjects such as the transatlantic slave trade, familial memory, HIV, environmental perils, and more. What happened inside those slave forts in Ghana, Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, where enslaved Africans were immured for weeks, sometimes months, before facing the horror of the Middle Passage? How does one carry the memory of his dead father? Fenestration, among other things, throbbing with an unflinching consciousness that splices history and memory, unfolds powerfully.
Othuke Umukoro, Nigerian poet and playwright, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. His debut poetry collection, Fenestration (TRP, 2025), was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of The 2024 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Winner of the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize, Othuke has taught at the University of Iowa and was the inaugural X. J. Kennedy Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.
Apostasies, Holli Carrell
Publisher: Perugia Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
Holli Carrell’s debut collection Apostasies explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, erasures, and spare, imagistic lyrics, Apostasies aims to recover and reclaim the body by its own definition. Casting her experience within the broader narrative of Mormonism, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation and grooming tactics used by Joseph Smith—Mormonism’s founder—on his thirty-three “wives,” many of whom were fourteen to eighteen years old at the time of their marriage. Courageous and defiant, the poems in Apostasies ultimately celebrate doubt and disobedience; they challenge oppressive constructions of womanhood and cisnormativity, in particular rejecting motherhood, “obedience,” and religious traditions that vilify independent thought and bodily autonomy.
Holli Carrell was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives in Cincinnati. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati, where she was a Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals. Apostasies is her first book.
ERODE, Biswamit Dwibedy
Publisher: Litmus Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2025
Format: Paperback
ERODE is Biswamit Dwibedy’s fourth full-length collection of poetry and brings together his first out-of-print book, Ozalid, and the expansion and continuation of that work into Erode. As a single collection, these sequences unfold in movements of erasure and collage. What emerges is a poetics of accumulation and subtraction, a method of excavation that reveals the personal buried within the communal, the lyric submerged in the residual. If erasure is a form of attention, then ERODE listens acutely—to language, to silence, to the faint signal of the other. With a sensibility both spare and lush, ERODE traces the shifting terrain of meaning, where fragments flare into wholeness and then dissolve again.
Biswamit Dwibedy was Born in Odisha, India and now lives in Paris, France. He’s lived in Iowa City, Iowa for several years and has an MFA from Bard College. He is the author of Ancient Guest (HarperCollins India) and Hundred Greatest Love Songs (Penguin Random House) and the chapbooks Eirik’s Ocean (Portable Press), MC3 (Essay Press) and Film of Dust (Sputnik & Fizzle). His poems have been published in Poetry Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Tarpaulin Sky, and Best American Experimental Poetry amongst other places. He translates from Hindi and Oriya and his poems have been translated into French. Dwibedy is also a visual artist. He’s been an artist-in-residence in France, India, and Iceland, and directs the MFA in creative writing at The American University of Paris.
Creek Water: New & Selected Poems, Edward Harkness
Publisher: Empty Bowl Press
Publication Date: September 12, 2025
Format: Paperback
Creek Water: New & Selected Poems spans five decades of Ed Harkness’s work, a body of poetry united by his ever-attentive eye, inquisitive mind, and compassionate heart. These narrative poems quietly and evocatively explore parallels between the personal and the historic, setting ordinary details of daily life alongside world events ranging from the Civil War to the hanging of poet Benjamin Moloise in Pretoria. Whether writing about the joys of a long marriage, fatherhood, or the challenge of facing his own mortality, Harkness reminds us that history and our lives are made of moments that when witnessed deeply and generously can transform. Shimmering like the stones in the creek water he praises, these poems look to the past while speaking to our current times, to “the world breaking your heart and somehow mending it.”
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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.