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.
All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, Robert Fanning
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: December 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Exploring boundaries of love, identity and desire, of marriage and family, of human compassion and enmity, of what is given to us and what we make, the journey ends with elegies for the poet’s mother, looking through her death toward what in us is boundless, toward where the infinite begins. For fans of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, this is a lyric collection not to be missed—a core sample from the middle of life, with all of its comings and goings and grievings.
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length poetry collections, Severance, Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet and The Seed Thieves, as well as three chapbooks: Prince of the Air, Sheet Music and Old Bright Wheel. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Common, Waxwing, Diode, and many other journals. He is a Professor at Central Michigan University and the Founder/Facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI.
Debris, Daniel Huws
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: November 27, 2025
Format: Paperback
Debris collects poems from Daniel Huws’ first two books, Noth (1972) and The Quarry (1999), alongside a substantial set of new poems and translations, and a few occasional poems.
Huws is now ninety-three and, while this is only his third collection of poems, Debris justifies Daniel Weissbort’ s comment in PN Review: ‘ one difficulty in reviewing Huws is precisely that he never wrote, or at least released, a dud poem.’ Huws’ poems are true lyrics, seeming to emerge out of often difficult or obscure moments whose import and meaning only come into view as they find their brief lyric shape.
Huws’ lifelong friend, Ted Hughes – they studied together at Cambridge in the 1950s – wrote of his poems that ‘ There is nothing fashionable about [Huws’ poems]. The all-inclusive, wholly human, wholly musical, final simplicity of the oldest folk-rhymes and songs was the ultimate aim of such a poet as Yeats… Anyone with an ear to hear will recognise the genuine substance and accent of that poetry in Daniel Huws.’ Ted Hughes is himself the subject of a witty, newly published occasional poem dedicated to Hughes on his accession to the role of British poet laureate.
Daniel Huws was born in London in 1932 and was raised and educated in both England and Wales. After graduating in Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University – where he was a contemporary and friend of the poet Ted Hughes – Huws followed a course of further study in archives at the University of London. He is acknowledged as the greatest scholar of Welsh manuscript poetry of the past century, and his own poetry includes Noth (Secker, 1972) and The Quarry (Faber, 1999).
Indifferent Cities, Ángel García
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through one state to another, from one country to the next Indifferent Cities traverses both distance and time to reconcile the most confounding reality of family: our people, sometimes, are the people we know least. Utilizing forms such as ekphrasis and epistolary, the collection sources photographs, postcards, and official documents as well as rumor, suspicion, and supposition to uncover the consequences, by choice or circumstance, of migration and immigration between Mexico and the United States across four generations.
Surveying the terrain of what one knows and does not know, what one inherits and disinherits, Indifferent Cities wrestles with every departure, each arrival, and the author’s inevitable return to determine where and to who he belongs.
Ángel García, the proud son of Mexican immigrants, is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, recipient of a CantoMundo Poetry Prize, an American Book Award, and finalist for a PEN America Open Book Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Naming, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to ancestry. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors by reimagining memories, history, homesteads, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and restories them.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto’s poems offer a vital contribution to African cultural studies through their focus on Igbo heritage and ancestry.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is from Ishiowerre, Owerri-Nkworji, in Nkwerre, Imo state, Nigeria. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the author of the chapbook The Teenager Who Became My Mother. His work has won multiple awards and has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Malahat Review, Lolwe, Southword Magazine, Vallum, Mud Season Review, LitMag, Colorado Review, Salamander, Oxford Poetry, and the Republic.
Bakandamiya: An Elegy, Saddiq Dzukogi
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa. Told in part from a Bori spirit’s point of view and in part through personal lyrics, part prayer and part praise song, Bakandamiya decries the loss of culture and spirituality due to colonization from both the West and the East. Even as it subverts myths and popular beliefs and addresses some of the events that led to the Nigerian civil war, it tackles the lingering question of nationhood.
In this work of lyric and poetic ambition, Saddiq Dzukogi blends the personal with the mythical, expanding the griot tradition of Bakandamiya, a poetic form from northern Nigeria popularized by Mamman Shata. Here the form travels from orature to contemporary poetics for the first time, taking its place at the vanguard of contemporary poetry.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (Nebraska, 2021), winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Julie Suk Award and shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, Guernica Magazine, Poetry London, Best American Experimental Writing Anthology, and Cincinnati Review. He has received fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, and Cave Canem.
Winged Witnesses, Chisom Okafor
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
The voices in these poems have witnessed the microhistories of the atypical body, the unusual body, the enjambed body, the chronically ill body trying to navigate space and time, love and displacement. The poems are a force field for questions that are at once intense and gripping: When we embody life through disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent body-minds, how do we grapple with love, time, and consciousness? How does the chronically ill body navigate the monstrosities of trauma and displacement? The poems not only play around with the idea of body-minds but also center on embodiment as touchstones of description. They are alive to history and the way poetry’s memorial practices animate the raw intimacy between the seen and unseen.
The people who populate Chisom Okafor’s Winged Witnesses are broken by numerous afflictions and darknesses, but there is a common companionship that binds them, as in a loop. Their voices call out in the wild and their jaded feet drag through lonely pathways, where wild birds dust-bathe by the wayside. There is trauma in these poems, but also light and salvation, and everything that comes between.
Chisom Okafor, a Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, lives in Tuscaloosa, where he is studying for an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, the Raven Review, the Hellebore, North Dakota Quarterly, Salt Hill, Sand Journal, the Account, Rattle, and elsewhere.
A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, Geoffrey Babbitt
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: December 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, poetry becomes a lens through which to explore the complex, visionary world of William Blake. Drawing on Blake’s own rejection of tradition and his relentless quest to challenge the boundaries of art, Geoffrey Babbitt confronts the tensions between genius and convention, life and death, light and dark.
Each poem in this collection inhabits a moment of Blake’s life, offering a vivid glimpse into his unique perspective—a perspective that rejected the normative for the transformative power of imagination. From his visionary watercolors to his provocative views on oil painting, these poems draw readers into Blake’s world, where reality and the unseen converge in prismatic intensity.
A Grain of Sand in Lambeth is an invitation to experience the world through Blake’s eyes—a world where imagination reigns supreme and art is a living force.
Geoffrey Babbitt’s poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ben Jonson Journal, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA and a PhD from the University of Utah, is an associate professor of English and creative writing and writing and rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and serves as editor in chief of Seneca Review and Seneca Review Books, for which he cofounded the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. He is the author of Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light.
82nd Division, D. M. Aderibigbe
Publisher: Akashic Books
Publication Date: December 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in 82nd Division, written in various forms including the villanelle, sonnet, blues poem, duplex, ode, and dramatic monologue, among many others, are collectively a love song to the author’s native Nigeria—a former British colony. In the book, whose title poem chronicles the lives of West African soldiers who fought alongside the British in World War II, Aderibigbe examines his homeland’s colonized past with brutal clarity and striking musicality, and considers how this past continues to shape every facet of his life and contemporary Nigerian life—be it the holidays that are celebrated, the preferred language of interaction among peers and friends, how a mother expresses love to her child, or the type of movies and snacks consumed.
Beyond its thematic unity, lustrous language, and formal virtuosity, this sparkling collection is tied together by Aderibigbe’s graceful exploration of the humanity of the people, landscape, and histories that populate the book’s pages.
D.M. Aderibigbe was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He is the author of How the End First Showed, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. He has received fellowships and scholarships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the James Merrill House, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center, Art Omi/Ledig House, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Foundation, and Boston University. His poems have appeared in Tatu: New-Generation African Poets, a Chapbook Box Set, the Atlantic, the Nation, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, and New England Review, among others.
A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza, María Auxiliadora Álvarez
Publisher: Akashic Books
Publication Date: December 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
María Auxiliadora Álvarez’s winning entry of the Paz Prize for Poetry is in many ways a loving memoriam to her father, Oswaldo Álvarez Rojas, and a celebration of the long embrace that still warms María, her seven siblings, and their mother. Her poems explore sunlight as a metaphor for her father, holding her up from behind, illuminating her path forward, and also shining a light on memory, igniting nostalgia, and overcoming the grief of loss.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Believe me, everything depends on this: to have had, once in your life, a sacred spring that fills the heart with so much light that it is enough to transfigure all coming days.” In A Sun Behind Us, the poet’s father is the sacred spring. “My father,” writes Álvarez, “is in all my writing, and his writing is in all my family, keeping us standing tall even after his sudden departure, following a brief illness. His positive influence is still the sun behind our back, projected beyond our horizon. The potent lighthouse in our life as nomads. Illuminated by the same ray of light, the eight children together form a compact stained-glass window, now dividing the fifty-two weeks of the year among ourselves, each taking our turn in caring for our mother beside the Florida sea, where she still smiles each morning. Even those who live far away travel without hesitation to fulfill a promise whispered along with our father’s last breath.”
María Auxiliadora Álvarez was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1956 and has been a professor emerita at Miami University, Ohio, since 2023. Growing up in different countries due to her father’s diplomatic career, she settled in the United States in 1996, where she received a master’s degree and doctorate in Spanish literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research areas include mystical/contemporary poetry; pre-Columbian/colonial cultures; and women, cultural, and interdisciplinary studies. She has published several critical articles in literary journals, two essay collections, and fourteen volumes of poetry.
The Long Now Conditions Permit, Jami Macarty
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: December 2, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Long Now Conditions Permit confronts the persistent brutalities of our world through poetry that both names and resists the injustices shaping it. From the quiet sorrows of everyday slight to the overwhelming crises of ecological collapse and gendered violence, these poems document what is occurring—the horrendous and the intimate, the anguished and the magnificent.
With ethical attention, Jami Macarty’s collection engages the political, ecological, and personal forces that shape and mark our lives, offering an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Each poem meditates on power, insists on articulating what is being lost—and what must be saved and reclaimed.
Amid the exploitation and violence, these poems find moments of grace: the scent of a sea rose, a desert walk in spring, the company of birds, Earth entire. The Long Now Conditions Permit is both tender elegy and urgent call, exhorting readers to grapple with the devastating failings of humanity and the saving possibilities of love.
Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses, winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award-Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe and Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Macarty’s writing is supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council, and the generous editors of such American and Canadian literary magazines as Colorado Review, Interim, Vallum, and Volt. Macarty supports other writers as an independent mentor, editor, and reviewer, and as a creative writing teacher at Simon Fraser University. Macarty lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia.
Last Train to Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Martha Silano
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: December 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Last Train to Paradise by Martha Silano includes work from all seven of Silano’s previously published books along with thirty-five new poems written shortly before Silano’s death from ALS in 2025. Silano’s poetry has won numerous awards and accolades and has been featured in the Best American Poetry twice. She has earned praise from many of our most celebrated contemporary poets including Pulitzer winner Diane Seuss who pens the introduction to this collection. The range of Silano’s work from the past quarter century, and all the life and love it embraces and collects in its revelatory and expansive linguistic virtuoso is testimony to the mind of one of our most tireless and talented poets.
Martha Silano has authored seven poetry books, including Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), and most recently, Terminal Surreal (Acre Books, 2025). She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice.
The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, Kathryn Cowles
Publisher: Fence Books
Publication Date: December 9, 2025
Format: Paperback
Eleanor Eleanor and Kathryn Cowles were spooled side by side like thread until Eleanor abruptly disappeared. In the wake of Eleanor’s leaving, Cowles lovingly compiles her unspooled residual poetry, full-color collages, and captions into this exquisite “fossil record,” this ekphrasis-turned-on-its-head “partial catalog.”
In Kathryn Cowles’s deliciously innovative third book, Eleanor lays bare the depths of the confines still facing women in Western life, even while we’re told we’re free to choose. She affixes wings to feminine figures cut out of magazines, asks, is there a way beyond? A way to real freedom, to a femininity that looks and acts however we choose? Cowles opens the door for readers to imagine new beings far beyond persona, who might sit at the same table of the invented authors in Fernando Pessoa’s world. In her introduction as editor, she writes:
“Eleanor Eleanor and I were born in the same place in the same month in the same year, and though we veered apart now and then (she liked to wander, to live in the back of a bad car, to waitress somewhere for a month or work a season on a farm), we always found our way back into each other’s company before long. But it has been more than a year now, and it’s never been a year. She’s just gone. And where? Everyone always wants to know…
Some artists are excellent executors of their own fiction. Like so many women before her, Eleanor Eleanor was not. But she did write things down. She sometimes said that her art works did not feel actually finished when she finished them.
This partial catalog, then, is an anti-chronological selection of her writings, which I found loosely shuffled on her otherwise cleared-off desk—a desk I never saw previously cleared in all the years I have known her, which is to say pretty much always. Seemed like a sign. On top was an otherwise blank notecard with my name on it.”
Kathryn Cowles’s third book of poems, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, won the Fence Modern Poets Prize and will be published in December of 2025. Poems from this project won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Manuscript-in-Progress Award, and collage-poems from the project were part of a solo exhibition at the Solarium Gallery in Geneva, NY. Other books include Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions) and Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star), which won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize.
Driving the Beast, Christopher Bakken
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: December 10, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Driving the Beast is a book about movement. Christopher Bakken’s poems shift between Greece and the American Midwest, tracking the restless nature of selfhood, while seeking glimpses of the sacred in landscapes scarred by history and political turmoil. The book’s back-and-forth mirroring invites readers to confront their own reflections in moments of catastrophe and wonder, and to view them alongside those of immigrants and refugees.
Christopher Bakken is the author of three previous books of poetry and the culinary memoir Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches at Allegheny College and serves as director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.
Music of the Wide Lane, Sharon Hass, Marcela Sulak (Tr)
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication Date: December 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Sharron Hass’s award-winning poetry is distinctive for its ability to capture ephemeral moments in time, and Music of the Wide Lane evokes epic figures from Greek philosophy, the Hebrew Bible, and poetry. Her inspirations include Sophocles, Aristotle, the medieval Iberian Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. Hass masterfully alters time and expression, lending an impression of perpetual change, as the past, present, and future intermingle.
Music of the Wide Lane explores homoerotic relationships, tense mother–daughter bonds, and the concept of light as a metaphor for truth and goodness. This remarkable fifth collection of Hass’s work includes an extended elegy for a dying father, two major poems from her previous work, and invites readers to expand their understanding of and appreciation for Hebrew-language poetry.
Prize-winning poet, essayist, and lecturer, Sharron Hass is the author of seven books of poetry and one essay-poem.
Marcela Sulak’s translations from Hebrew include Twenty Girls to Envy Me: The Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, nominated for the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus, Selima Hill
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: December 16, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Selima Hill’s twenty-second collection A Man, a Woman & a Hippopotamus presents ten sequences of short poems, prose poems and short pieces on relationships and doings between people, animals and the world at large.
Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. Her collection Violet (1997) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe Books include People Who Like Meatballs (2012), shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the Costa Poetry Award; Jutland (2015), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation which was shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize and was earlier shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize; The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016), shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017; and Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022; and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Selima Hill was awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2022, made on the basis of her body of work, with special recognition for her 2008 Bloodaxe Books retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems.
Jug Band Jag, Kit Wright
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: December 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Lovers of Kit Wright’s poetry – for its range and virtuosity, deep feeling and rich humour – may find his new gathering exceeds expectations. Jug Band Jag is a wonderfully spirited bout of poetry-making whose forms and themes are markedly diverse, while the concern for musicality is constant. Whether, that is, he is dispensing the low-down on the Gunpowder Plot, or a ghost story from the world of dry-cleaning, or a fairy tale about ox tongue; reflecting on Hitler as artist, or tracing the frustrations of a career mafioso.
He gives a detailed and moving account of the sinking of the SS Persia during the First World War, in which his own grandmother and her baby were drowned, and traces the curious history of a small Kentish coastal town. A retired classics teacher sings the rivers of hell and of course, a Deep South jug band renders the blues.
Kit Wright’s vision of the world blends the sharply realistic with a distinctive brand of surrealism. Whatever his subject and the tune that he has found for it, these new poems are linked by the quicksilver of irony and the river of humanity that runs through them.
Kit Wright was born in 1944 in Crookham Hill, Kent, and has published over 25 books for adults and children. After a scholarship to Oxford, he worked as a lecturer in Canada, was education officer at the Poetry Society from 1970 to 1975, Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University in 1977-79, and subsequently a freelance writer. His poetry titles include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (Salamander, 1977), Bump-Starting the Hearse (Hutchinson, 1983), Poems 1974-1983 (Hutchinson, 1988), Short Afternoons (Hutchinson, 1989), Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (Leviathan, 2000; Faber, 2008), Ode to Didcot Power Station (Bloodaxe Books, 2014) and Jug Band Jag (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). He has won many literary awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, Hawthornden Prize, Heinemann Award and Cholmondeley Award.
Parch, Menna Elfyn
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: December 16, 2025
Format: Paperback
Following many years of campaigning, Menna Elfyn is moving towards her own sense of resolution as the Welsh language is now accepted and respected as an official language in Wales. In this hybrid book – for the first time – she has translated or written many of the original poems in English, now describing herself as ‘a proud bilingual’. Other poems in the book are translated by Emma Baines, Joseph P. Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas.
The poems in Parch offer a voice to those whose liberty or dignity have been undermined, seeking religious, linguistic and cultural tolerance for all, and not shying away from the effects of (in)humanity on our environment, histories and lives. Among these are powerful poems responding to sexual harassment, exploitation and violence against women, as well as to the plight of people caught up in armed conflicts past and present. Mercy is a recurring theme, with poems addressing the tension between justice and forgiveness.
In Welsh, ‘parch’ (the ‘ch’ is guttural) simply means respect. Menna Elfyn’s collection explores the many ways in which respect can be expressed, as well as how our world can so often feel parched of simple kindnesses.
Menna Elfyn shares Herta Müller’s belief that ‘holding one’s own language up to the eyes of another leads to a solid relationship, a relaxed kind of love’. This distils the essence of Parch: respect as refuge; the triumph of compassion over conflict.
Menna Elfyn is one of the foremost Welsh-language writers. As well as being an award-winning poet, she has published plays, libretti and children’s novels, and co-edited The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry (2003) with John Rowlands. Her books include two bilingual selections, Eucalyptus: Detholiad o Gerddi / Selected Poems 1978-1994 (Gomer Press, 1995), and Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), a Welsh-only selection Merch Perygl: Cerddi 1976-2011 (Gomer Press, 2011), and two later bilingual collections from Bloodaxe, Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, and Bondo (2017). Her most recent Welsh language collection, Tosturi (Mercy), with illustrations by Meinir Mathias (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2023 Welsh-language Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award. She was Wales’s National Children’s Laureate in 2002, and was made President of Wales PEN Cymru in 2014. She was, until 2016, Creative Director in the School of Cultural Studies at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David; she is also Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing.
I Am That Road, Martin Dickinson
Publisher: Beltway Editions
Publication Date: December 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Evoking Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Martin Dickinson in I Am That Road: New and Selected Poems bears witness to the plight of the every (wo)man, especially those who are recent immigrants to the United States of America. In this drum-beating blueprint of the 21st Century, he documents the struggle to be: to be born, to survive, and, God knows how, to thrive. This is the book to take on a long journey, a silent retreat, your wind down each dark night. –Karren L. Alenier, author of How We Hold On.
Martin Dickinson is the author of three previous collections of poems Life List Notes (Sligo Creek, 2021); together with his wife, poet Nancy Allinson, What a Windstorm Teaches (Sligo Creek, 2019), and My Concept of Time (Finishing Line, 2014). He was poet of the month for May, 2015 for the online journal Blue Heron Review. Dickinson’s poems appear in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, California Quarterly, Innisfree Poetry Journal, the Russian language weekly Kontinent (in translation) and several other print and online journals. He and Nacy live in Friendship Heights, Washington D.C.
Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, Vera Hadzic
Publisher: Anvil Press
Publication Date: November 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
In this debut collection, Ontario poet Vera Hadzic explores themes of anxiety, eating, excretion, compulsion, and change. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery follows the construction and deconstruction of the body, both human and animal. These poems take the form of travel poetry, ekphrasis, and narrative to navigate personal and public history, and personal and public constructions of self and time. Drawing on history, art, and literature, the poems in this collection strive to mediate the inside and the outside of the self, probing at the anxious impulses to contain oneself and, at the same time, break open.
Vera Hadzic is a writer from Ottawa. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, periodicities, Experiment-O, Minola Review, Hexagon Magazine, Crow & Cross Keys, flo., These Days, and elsewhere. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by Proper Tales Press in 2023. She has an Honours BA in English and history from the University of Ottawa, and is pursuing an MA in English literature from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery is her first full-length book.
Time Being II, Joseph Torra
Publisher: Quale Press
Publication Date: December 4, 2025
Format: Paperback
Written between October 2020 and October 2021, this long poem/journal/improvisation records in one long rush a year’s worth of observations and events. Torra’s eyes and ears pull in everything about life that comes his way — Covid, a presidential election, teaching, fatherhood, family, food, writing, art, music, the urban environment, dreams, and a growing interest in the Tao. In keeping open to everything, he attunes the reader to the art of living according to the Tao. Time Being II reflects Torra’s compression of a year into a rhythmic distillate.
Joseph Torra is the author of numerous novels and books of poetry. Titles include Gas Station, Tony Luongo, My Ground, The Bystander’s Scrapbook, After the Chinese, Call Me Waiter and What’s So Funny. He published lift magazine in the early 1990s, and served on the editorial board at Pressed Wafer Press. He lives in Somerville, MA with his wife and daughters. Besides What It Takes, he has also published the books They Say and Time Being, and a prose poetry collection, Watteau Sky, with Quale Press.
CATechisms, John Delaney
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November, 2025
Format: Paperback
Ostensibly about a specific cat, this book has higher hopes—that all cat lovers, and pet owners, will find here some of their own love for these remarkable beings that inherit our homes and our hearts. I have had a life full of dogs and cats, but was always working or going to school, and so I only experienced limited periods of time with my pets. This book shows what happened after I retired, adopted an old cat, and could observe him and fully engage with him around the clock. The time was, as you see, lovingly repaid and cherished. Having sat on my lap or next to me in his bed during much of the writing of these poems, Ramen has given them his approval.
John Delaney retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for his last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He has written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific, First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps, and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He has written poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, he attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Booth. No doubt, in subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. His poetic publications include Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, Galápagos (2023), a collaborative work of his son Andrew’s photographs and his poems, Nile (2024), poems and photographs about Egypt, and Filing Order: Sonnets (2025). He lives in Port Townsend, WA.
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Contents
Chapbook Poem: When I Was Straight by Dustin Brookshire
“‘When I Was Straight’ prompted me to think about a common queer experience—how most parents assume their children are ‘straight’ and expect their children to live a ‘straight’ life.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: American Girl: Fort Hood, 2023 by Thea Matthews
“[W]eaving in and juxtaposing the lyrics of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl.’ The song’s themes of desperation, wanderlust, and longing are subverted by Ana’s life and tragedy at Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, Texas.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
“It seems such a shame that a beautiful location is just gathering dust and overgrowth, and I wanted to lean into the juxtaposition of that.” Read three poems by Bryana Fern along with a few words about “Women on the Wall.”
Bodies in Transition: Sacred & Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
“There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole.” Read Gray Davidson Carroll’s full review.
“In ‘No Breaks’ I was writing about something I hope I never have to experience. … I tried to keep despair at bay and show some defiance and resilience.” Read two poems by Gerald Yelle along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
November ’25: New Staff, Issue Archive & Donations
Read a note from Editor Aiden Hunt about our new Poetry Readers, the additions of an Issue Archive and a Contributor Fund, Fall poetry submissions, and Gaza.
Chapbook Poem: Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh by Rebekah Wolman
“Settling on the mirror form opened the way into the parallels between the original image of the egrets, their reflection, and their ambiguous relationship and the shifting, even reversing, roles of an adult daughter and her aging mother…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2025 along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
“Subsequent drafts enabled me to … uncover the metaphor of exile, whose meanings are intended to move readers from an experience of alienation to one of discernment of the liberating qualities of outsiderhood.” Read three poems by Alexandra Burack, along with a few words about “To Know Blue From the Color of Snow at Dusk.”
Book Excerpt: Rondo by Yamini Pathak
“The sculpture gardens are located on … the native land of the Lenape people. The poem is a conversation between sculpture, land, and its human and more-than-human inhabitants.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for November 2025, “Rondo” from Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps by Yamini Pathak, along with a few words from the poet.
Two Poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth
“As I shaped the poem, the olive trees became a witness to a deeper experience—to a region’s ongoing, collective pain. It was the land I wanted to make speak in a place where I did not have words.” Read two poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth, along with a few words about “Before.”
A Conversation with Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes
“We wanted something that was alive, highlighted an ever-expanding list of books by these poets, and that will hopefully survive the both of us and flourish under the curation of a fresh set of poets.” Read the full interview about the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook series.
Chapbook Poem: Red Tide by Mary Gilliland
“Reflection, research, a public service announcement, an old Zen koan, and 3 weeks of bicycling for groceries with a bandana tied around my nose and mouth inform ‘Red Tide’.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for December 2025, “Red Tide” from Red Tide at Sandy Bend, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Veronica Tucker
“’You Left the Fridge Open Again’ transforms an ordinary domestic moment into a meditation on tenderness and decay. The open refrigerator becomes a quiet altar, its hum a hymn to what lingers after love’s warmth has cooled.” Read three poems by Veronica Tucker, along with a few words about “You Left the Fridge Open Again.”
Book Excerpt: The Samadhi of Words by Richard Collins
“Zen poets, past and present, who experience deep absorption in the grandeur of this world may even gain wisdom through the way of poetry, Shidō (詩道). This is the samadhi of words.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for December 2025, “The Samadhi of Words” from Stone Nest by Richard Collins, along with a few words from the poet.
December ’25: Pushcart Prize Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to, and a carousel of, the nominated poems.