Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during August 2025.
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.
Wesleyan University Press
I Ask My Mother to Sing: Mother Poems of Li-Young Lee
Read: Chapbook Poem: The Blessed Knot by Li-Young Lee
I Ask My Mother to Sing contains five decades of poems by the acclaimed Asian-American poet, Li-Young Lee about his own mother and the many meanings of motherhood. This collection follows Lee’s entire career, from his debut Rose (BOA, 1986) to his most recent book, The Invention of the Darling (W.W. Norton, 2024). The chapbook also includes seven new and previously unpublished poems, including “The Blessed Knot,” published by PCR in July.
Driftwood Press
Paper Money, Winshen Liu
Read: Chapbook Poem: August Peaches by Winshen Liu
Winshen Liu’s Paper Money is a sensory and sparse exploration of grief, as well as longing, money, and longing for money in the context of diaspora. Selected by Diane Seuss for the 2024-2025 Adrift Chapbook Contest, these poems are full of foodways, Taiwanese customs, and language play. Paper Money is ultimately about grief, both elegy for the death of the speaker’s grandfather, and the loss and longing one feels for home.
Kelsay Books
I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, Diane Elayne Dees
Diane Elayne Dees’ fourth chapbook, which includes both formal and free verse, explores the trauma and confusion experienced when a troubled marriage finally dissolves. Issues of loneliness, anger, damaged self-image, and dissociation are all woven into the poems. The metaphors that tie the poems together involve everything from gardening to house decorating to playing tennis and pushing a weighted sled. The chapbook contains a sonnet crown which illustrates how trauma leads to both fragmentation and self-realization, as the poet comes to understand what has happened to her as she searches “for all the parts that fell away.”
Sybil Journal
Window Person, Megan Williams
Megan William’s poetry collection Window Person is a daring experiment, darkly humorous, and hauntingly prescient. This window into the contemporary moment interfuses pop culture, the confessional, and literary tradition in a stylistic accomplishment all its own. Williams writes with a razor sharp wit, pulling no punches, and this collection will linger in your thoughts long after your first read-through.
Bottlecap Press
Girls Love, Alexa Vallejo
“My womanhood stands / on a sad boy’s back,” writes Alexa Vallejo, who transitioned in her mid-thirties. In her chapbook, Girls Love, Vallejo uses yuri—Japanese media about romance between female characters—as a point of departure for meditations on the boyhood she lived and the girlhood she never had. Written in a time when trans people enjoy greater visibility while facing heightened persecution, these poems celebrate gender euphoria while addressing anxieties over safety, acceptance, and legal recognition. Vallejo asserts, “I am choosing a lifetime / of fear-tinged joy, anticipating every catastrophe in an age / of catastrophes.”
Girls Love reveals how we can’t move forward until we reckon with our past. Vallejo’s narrative poetry juxtaposes real life with imagined histories in order to make sense of what it means to be a middle-aged trans woman in the United States today.
Mind the Gash, Jennifer Benningfield
Mind The Gash celebrates resilience by slamming the abstract into the concrete. The tension that draws tight the fine line between internal struggle and external surety is visible in every line of this collection.
Jennifer Benningfield presents an intimate gathering of poems inspired by the gradual decline of her mother’s health. In them, readers will see the value of confrontation and the necessity of celebration. There is dark humor, there is absurd drama, and above all there is momentum—the momentum that makes us feel alive.
Dogwitch, Catherine Rockwood
Dogwitch explores mood disorder, neurodiversity, and the vulnerable work of trying to show up for others while managing an unruly psyche. It does so in part via affective encounters with a dangerous rescue dog.
The varied poetic forms and styles in the chapbook are linked by the idea of the witch and her familiar, who share an intense bond that can operate for both good and ill.
cartographic failure, Jo Podvin
These poems are enthusiastic little glosses on zero, being, and alreadiness. Gesturing towards the ineffable by means of shameless wordplay, they exist as wee sly invitations to delight in rhythm, be swayed by rhyme.
Watch as they tumble across the pages in a cavalcade of intimations, glimmerings, and whiffs.
Jo Podvin lives in Oakland, California, on the Ring of Fire. Her work has been published in Gastronomica, The Scribbler, Bittersweet, The Canyon Chronicle, and Tricycle, and on the websites (and airwaves) of the public radio programs Forum (KQED) and A Prairie Home Companion.
Packing the Dogs and Other Peasant Traditions for Miami, Alex Richardson
Alex Richardson’s poems explore the nuances of selfhood and circumstance, particularly when the cultivated routines of existence encounter the unexpected. In Packing the Dogs and Other Peasant Traditions for Miami, his poems examine the liminal spaces between worlds both natural and psychological. The collection contemplates where we come from, where we are going and the ways the self manages the journey. The poems seek to reconcile a stable identity within a landscape that is changing, a dynamic reflected by the ironies of daily life, as the speaker navigates evolving relationships with place, with loved ones, with the past and with the future. In Richardson’s case, there is usually a dog by his side, adding another liminal element to the experiences.
The Leonids, Hannah Rodabaugh
The Leonids reflects on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, touching on everything from Long COVID to the trauma of losing loved ones to the claustrophobia of sheltering in place. Its short, fragmentary poems weave together snapshots of the author’s personal experiences with the larger state of the world, asking readers to grapple with the ways they may be culpable for how the social contract of collective empathy and care disintegrated during the pandemic.
Little Bit Weird, Aodhán Ridenour
Little Bit Weird is a confession to “the woman I could never love enough.” Little Bit Weird is also a prudent examination of the multi-lingual relationship test, big age gaps, professional poetry, modern warfare, and what it means to be rather attractive and a little bit weird. She taught me what true love is, which is why I could never lover her enough.
Aodhán Ridenour is a writer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He served as editor-in-chief for The Phoenix and was an assistant editor of fiction for SLAB.
Triangulations, Andrew Brenza
Perfect for the desultory wanderer of the post-apocalypse, Andrew Brenza’s Triangulations is a chapbook-length series of 21st century visual and concrete poems offering a roadmap through the cloud-chamber of personal divination. Via the feverish, surreal and prophetic confluence of image and text, Brenza creates fragmented and electric fields of linguistic potentiality in which the trekker is beaconed to uncover the salvation of rapturous being.
Cosmic Beat, Alexander Selimov
In Cosmic Beat, Alexander Selimov takes readers on a raw journey through what it means to be human in today’s chaotic world. These are expressions that pulse with life and emotion. From the alpine heights of the Caucasus to the urban streets of America they throb with the energy of transformation.
Cosmic Beat will dig deep with anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t quite fit the script, anyone who’s watched everything speed up while that little voice asks if we’re trading our souls for likes and notifications.
Ordinary Time: a book of hours, Peter Vanderberg
Ordinary Time is a lyrical meditation on the intersections of faith, ecology, and daily life, shaped as a modern “book of hours.” Moving through the cadence of liturgical prayer—Matins, Lauds, Vespers—these poems pair with observational drawings made in the same spirit of contemplation. Together, they invite readers to linger in the quiet revelations of tide and wind, gull and osprey, drought and late rains. Born from the tradition of lectio divina and the rhythms of the natural world, this chapbook becomes a contemplative space where scripture, memory, and presence blend into a single prayer.
we’re all mad here, Miranda Holman
we’re all mad here is a personal lens into the darkest places your mind can take you and the struggle of battling your own demons. In this empowering collection of poetry, moments of indecisive feelings, irrational thoughts, and manic episodes are recreated to show the reader no matter the struggles being faced, there is hope for healing, personal transformation, positive change and growth. The raw and open nature of the poetry allows for a personal reflection and relationship with the author and provides a glimpse of what’s underneath the surface that most people battle in silence, yet we all relate to, even if alone in our own thoughts.
GOALS, Paul Stinson
In GOALS, Paul Stinson confronts the myriad forms of longing and the transcendent power of memory with equal parts humor and reverence. These poems explore themes of class, faith, loss, and acceptance to find the wondrous in the everyday, and hope–even joy–in the face of despair.
Paul Stinson’s poems and stories have appeared in AMBIT, The Evergreen Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he lives in Austin, Texas.
HemisFear, Nichole White
HemisFear is a poetic exploration of the internal balance between logic and imagination, structure and spontaneity, order and intuition. Through eleven formally diverse poems—including a Sestina, Pantoum, Villanelle, Iambic Pentameter, a Haiku and free verse—this chapbook navigates the cognitive landscape of the left and right brain, mapping the conceptual and emotional terrain of self-identity.
DELPHI, Lindsay Remee Ahl
DELPHI is an excerpt from a longer manuscript called If a Dolphin. I was doing research on WWII, and I found the physics of that time particularly interesting. In 1938, when physicists first discovered fission, a paradigm shift happened—their understanding of how the world worked was reconceived. In science, the world often looks orderly—there are physical laws that usually remain in place, there are designs that are predictable, but fission revealed that that built into the atom itself was a randomness, an instability. It was at this time that Einstein and Bohr argued about how physical reality was structured and Einstein famously said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” to which Bohr answered, “How do you know?” That seed of instability in the atom signaled a seed of chaos in the workings of the universe. That paradox that we all experience—a mix of order and chaos—inspired these poems.
Personal Mythologies, Christiaan Sabatelli
In Personal Mythologies, Christiaan Sabatelli weaves narratives from his own life with classic stories from literature and mythology. He asks the reader to move through a multitude of experiences and emotions, starting with a request for intimacy and moving through desire, regret, and loss before finally settling into hope and new beginnings.
Ancient Afternoons, Grove Koger
Ancient Afternoons looks back to the cradle of Western civilization and forward into our own psyches.
Odysseus ponders the tumult of his life and his travels, wondering, again and again, whether those adventures he remembers were nothing more than the visions of a dying man. Theseus struggles to escape the labyrinth in which he has trapped himself. And, millennia later, young Plato undergoes a traumatic event that he will eventually transform into one of the most enduring myths of the Western world.
A Jumble of Words and Feelings, Camryn A. Shaver
Camryn brings nostalgia and feelings into poetry, pulling together her fondest childhood memories as well as her spilling her heart out about the things she cares most about.
Camryn believes that words have power, and speaking up about important things is easier done with creativity. Some topics are difficult to talk about but need to be. With this book, Camryn hopes not necessarily to change people’s minds. She hopes to at least make people think outside of their box.
Blood Before Midnight, Maceo Nightingale
Blood Before Midnight is a collection that deals with themes of surrealism, addiction and mental health. The poems move through strange characters and settings such as private schools where students sniff cocaine, octopus dance clubs, neon lit movie theaters and more.
Maceo Nightingale is a writer based in California. Blood Before Midnight was written in rehab centers, psych wards and sober livings across California and Austin Texas and finished while living in his apartment in Hancock Park Los Angeles.
Divergence: A Journey Through Bipolar Disorder, Isabel Snyder
Originally a therapeutic approach to processing and reconciling with a traumatic past, Divergence is a collection of poetry exploring one individual’s experience getting diagnosed and living with bipolar disorder. The collection was written and arranged as a chronological, personal narrative about grappling with mental health throughout adolescence and into young adulthood. Within the pages of this chapbook, you will engage with experiences of depression, mania, and everything in between.
Finishing Line Press
The Pocket Museum of Natural History, Michele M Miller
With vivid imagery, finely tuned detail, and a lyrical, sometimes unsettling tone, Michele M Miller’s chapbook, The Pocket Museum of Natural History, is an exploration—of the intersections between nature, science, personal experience, and the ephemeral moments of wonder, love, abandonment and loss. Miller offers a collection of artifacts—among them insects and animals, eggs, bones and fossils, rotting potatoes, a sharp bit of glass and a two-headed calf—and asks us to examine the interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds, to find moments of renewal born from transformation, and to discover the sacred amid the mundane. On the cover, Rosebud, a gouache and collage by renowned visual artist Julie Speed, fittingly illustrates Miller’s imaginative physicality of language and subject. The Pocket Museum reads like a poetic cabinet of curiosities, each poem offering a specimen for contemplation, with the desire to keep close the emotional meaning of objects and the living in a universe composed of impermanence.
bastard bee, Jawn Van Jacobs
bastard bee by Jawn Van Jacobs offers a refreshing take on masculinity, emphasizing that true strength lies in vulnerability. Through striking portrayals of nature’s overlooked creatures, the collection explores the queer experience and highlights how leading with love can lead to a more authentic self. Targeted at all men, especially young queer individuals, Jawn’s poetry provides a new perspective on identity and resilience. With its mix of natural imagery and personal insight, bastard bee redefines what it means to “be a man.”
Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire, C. Henry Smith
24 Covers… is a sweeping, chapbook-length poem of “startling and gorgeous” language, capturing dispatches from a speaker “stunningly adrift in capitalism, mourning a rootlessness or a distance from problematic roots.” The apostrophic work obsesses over the landscape of home—the physical landscape, the emotional landscape—on our private folklores, and on those rituals we cannot escape. It is at once a meditation on cows and then a meditation on the infinite incarnations of the body, on the practice of living while saturated in longing, and on the symbols and sins that make us who we are. Across the twenty-four sections, the author charts desire, hauntology, anxiety, and the relationship of self to an imagined past, utilizing lines that stretch past the page and a swirl of unlikely images that reach across the canyons, avenues, and dreamscape houses of the poem. This is a sonically rich and decidedly original achievement from a writer who sees sensations and emotions simultaneously occurring outside of the strictures of memory, language, and time.
Small Talk, Jeffrey Schwartz
This is a book of elegies, meditations, and dreams. It’s a book about connections and disruptions. It’s a book about time, how quickly it slips through our fingers and how it never ends. In Jeffrey Schwartz’s Small Talk, memories resurface cinematically: A driver flies through his sunroof to the past, the deceased reappear at a Florida bar or in a sister’s spare room, two couples discover love in the same state 35 years apart. While the world in Small Talk is threatened with aging, mortal accidents, and violence, the transcendent moment is never far away. It might arise from a song, a long distance call, a shared pause in a busy ICU, or spotting angels on a department store escalator. In Small Talk, Schwartz confronts what is inexpressible and explores ways we create to connect, particularly during personal and historic tragedies.
Crosswalks, Jan Seagrave
Moms and grandads crisscross the dusty roads of desire and dismay in these poems set in strangely familiar territory. Hummingbirds, squirrels, feral cats, coyotes and the creatures that are trees reveal their otherworldliness to shape the scope of human knowledge. The setting looks like any ’50s American suburb, but beyond the tract houses and cracked sidewalks, its residents hope for brotherly love. They long for the restoration of a liveable culture. Poet Jan Seagrave explores the emotional, social and physical topography of her neighborhood faced with the challenges of global warming, pandemic and social change, while finding a path through personal loss. She discovers an area worn by time, but one whose people, flora and fauna are still lit with beauty and promise.
AERODYNAMICS, Gail Ghai
Aerodynamics, Gail Ghai’s fourth book of poetry reveals vivid childhood memories, intense family dynamics, profound love and loss all set in a backdrop of aviation. From her first time flying at the age of three and a half, to later in life catching a midnight flight from Tampa, flying, aircraft, “takeoffs and landings” as well as the family’s interactions with their pilot father, fold and unfold throughout the poetic vignettes and poems. The verses in Aerodynamics also include our human experiences of anxiety, jealousy, sibling tensions, sexual awakenings, parenting, humor and finally joy and hope.
being from being broke open, Marcia Casey
being from being broke open ruminates on the crucial questions of being human: Beyond family, where do we belong? What is “home”? Who are we? How do we live? How do we go on living? From a childhood in which home felt like shame and woods were haven, the natural world – trees, birds, seasons, water, mud – offered up the language these poems use to navigate them. In each poem, sensory experience opens, petal by petal, to reveal inherent depth and meaning. Yet, each clinched circle of understanding inevitably ruptures, springs open when new experiences shake us up – or break us. What will save us is love, and the common thread of being rooted in matter as an integral part of the rampant spiral of evolution. We are broken open into new meanings and new horizons. And if, at times, we find ourselves caught in something we cannot grasp, or make sense of, or live with, these poems show us we can still bow to and trust “the unfathomable / cavern in the hold” by which “the whole / took shape” – and go on.
Poetry, In Motion & Stasis, Carlo DiOrio
Poetry, In Motion & Stasis is a collection of 19 poems by Carlo DiOrio, with sketch illustrations by Joe Cairone accompanying 11 of the works. The poems and illustrations deal with experiences arising out of our many life passages — touching on themes of love, loss, laughter — and were written between 2016 and 2024 in Florida, California and New Jersey. It is DiOrio’s first published poetry collection.
Khumásiyát: Poems from the Moroccan Desert, Yahya Frederickson
Khumásiyát: Poems from the Moroccan Desert is a collection of poems inspired by the traditions of the Ait Khabbash Imazighen (“Berbers”) of southeastern Morocco and the Saharan landscape they inhabit. Each poem contains the same 125 key words. To compose these poems, the poet wrote 125 words on separate slips of paper, drew them randomly from a basket, and strung together into lines of five key words each, sometimes into five-lined stanzas, or quintains—hence the name khumásiyát, Arabic for a form containing “five”—to form poems 25 lines long. The familiar words recombine into different groups, with different syntax and grammar, to form imagistic relationships that are surprising and new.
Self Portrait in a Dark Room, Matthew Cariello
“Self Portrait in a Dark Room” explores how individual moments of awareness can be connected to create a life story. These poems have an ekphrastic impulse – many of them are based on the paintings, drawings, and words of Vincent van Gogh – but a better of reading them would be as improvisations on themes: presence, absence, pain, love, and how we “spill our light” in the world. The speaker is various. Sometimes the poet, sometimes the painter – and sometimes a mixture of the two. And although the book tells a story, “getting / it right wasn’t the point.” The reader is invited to be a participant, not merely a spectator, in the recreation of the larger artistic narrative.
Spin: Tales from the Diamond, J. R. Thelín
A North American sport since the 1840s, baseball has been described as “the national religion of the U.S.” and “America’s favorite pastime.” Spin: Tales from the Diamond tracks one writer’s love of the game from sandy lots to major league parks, from pickup games by grade school players to suffering, as an adult, another losing season by his favorite professional team since childhood. The chapbook is also a story of father/son connections, of hoped-for romance and glory, and a meditation about growing up, and old, in the U.S.A.
White Brown, Kayla Pica Williams
One moment you’re too white to understand, the next you’re brown enough to be claimed. Kayla Pica Williams brings the bicultural experience alive. Pica is pulled between the white mainstream culture and brown Peruvian heritage, struggling to find identity in a world where the expectations of others often limits diversity of expression. She fearlessly engages issues of immigrant life while utilizing various experimental forms to discuss the intricacies of multicultural trauma, erosion of familial traditions, the complications of teaching across ethnic boundaries, and communicating through hostile language barriers.
Making Home, Elise Toedt
Making Home is a collection about the complexities of finding contentment through the hardships and joys life brings. It grapples with the end of life and its beginnings, the complexities of love and community, and learning to love oneself through the hard work of deprogramming and noticing what is beautiful right now. It’s a collection about the iterative process of making home inside oneself and the world. We are reminded how with each new iteration of ourselves, while the imprint of the past continues with us, we nonetheless build anew.
The Windswept Verses, Mark Kaplon
The Windswept Verses by Mark Kaplon is a poetry collection from Hawai‘i that celebrates the wonder of nature, the interconnectedness of all living things, and the transitory nature of the self. Accessible, lyrical, and imagistic, these poems follow what the author calls the “windswept way of the senses,” taking the reader on a journey across vibrant landscapes and into “the fleetingness of the moment / that makes somehow / such an eternity of the moment.”
CONSUMING, Charlotte McCaffrey
Consuming pushes open the swinging doors of a 1980’s restaurant kitchen for all to see. Here is an insider’s view of this all-consuming world: the chefs, line cooks, food, and patrons. Cleaning ladies, criminals, onions, arias and more combine in these concise, accessible, and, at times, quite funny poems.
Charlotte McCaffrey was born in Mobile, Alabama, and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis. A former chef and special education teacher, she now resides with her partner in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work includes the chapbook, Reposed (Finishing Line Press), and has been published in anthologies and journals, including Bayou, Chrysalis Reader, The Comstock Review, English Journal, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, MacGuffin, Poetry International, Women’s Studies Quarterly and many others.
Commodore Rookery, Christy Lee Barnes
Commodore Rookery tells a small story of survival, resilience, and healing. In the wake of a traumatic labor, breastfeeding struggles, postpartum insomnia, and Covid isolation, Barnes finds unexpected solace in taking her infant son on daily visits to the local blue heron colony. Through concise, image-driven poetry, she captures and honors her own early matrescence—the process of becoming a mother—in dreams, fairy tales, daily walks, and 4:00 am feedings. This is not just a postpartum or a pandemic story; it is a story for anyone who’s been forced to painfully shed old skin to find a stronger, softer, more brilliant creature beneath.
The Moon’s Eye, Sheila Dietz
Sheila grew up with two sisters and a brother. They shared their lives with the ghosts of her mother’s three siblings all of whom died tragically, one as a baby, one at the age of four and the last, her mother’s brother, at the age of 18. Sheila’s family moved every 2-3 years as diplomatic families are required to do. As a result, she spent, off and on, most of her childhood living in Holland, going to a Dutch school. She learned a 2nd language, learned to monitor her speech because of her father’s work, and lived in a culture where her mother’s intense grief was not treated as it would be today. Sheila’s main outlet became her poems which detail how tragic experiences and debilitating grief, when untreated, have the power to damage following generations. This collection of poems reveals how it is possible to grow from the darkness of turmoil towards the light, but life is complicated, and darkness and light intermingle, coloring one another. This collection is about feeling and being unseen. The poems aim to evoke a sense of what it feels like to be unseen, even emotionally banished. The poems move as the poet does, towards feeling seen. Sheila does not presume that her experience has been the same for everyone but hopes, while respecting individual journeys, that her work resonates with others.
Memoirs of a Mean Sax, Jean Fineberg
Memoirs of a Mean Sax draws you into the author’s experiences from her decades as a touring and recording jazz musician. Her humor and pathos recount lessons learned as a female saxophone player in the competitive male-dominated New York music scene. An opening Fibonacci poem explores the subliminal composition process, followed by a hilarious comparison of her composer brain to a laundromat, and an exploration of the deep-seated insecurities which affect all artists. Jean offers a compelling metaphoric poem comparing her drums to her adopted daughter, and concludes with sardonic, yet serious, advice for those planning to make their fortunes playing music.
Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies, Kathleen McClung
Climbing the Fire Escape, Flipping the Raft: Poems on Women in Movies celebrates a wide range of inspiring women characters—the resilience, resourcefulness and courage of Thelma and Louise, Dorothy and Auntie Em, and others young and old who battle and triumph over monsters, bad guys, and everyday conflicts. With curiosity, compassion and craft, Kathleen McClung explores women’s strengths and vulnerabilities in comedies and tragedies, blockbusters and contemplative indie films. The sonnets, sestinas and other poetic forms in the collection embrace Frances McDormand’s Minnesota police chief, Grace Kelly’s Manhattan socialite, Kate Winslet’s Titanic survivor as well as women providing care and love in quietly heroic ways.
Old Scooter Poetry, Karen Lee
Old Scooter Poetry is a book dedicated to my husband, Jeff, and his obsession with collecting old Vespa scooters. After experiencing the replacing parts, buying, selling, and repairing old scooters year after year I finally gave in and began to enjoy his hobby. These poems are about understanding his love for Vespas and the difficulty of parting with them even when they won’t run.
Garden Clippings, Cynthia Storrs
Cynthia Storrs‘ poems detail the nature, gardens, and greenery around her, describing in vibrant language and colors the transitions, losses, and faith which fill her world. Using fresh images and experimenting with form and playful rhyme, blossoms become crowns, hillsides transform to vegetables, dying tulips reform into withering hands, while family and pets puddle under Tennessee’s relentless summer heat. Storrs employs the lens of nature to bring focus on the tangles of life which encompass us all, and plants in her readers a hope for next year’s harvest.
Traveling, Ellen Rosenbloom
The adventure of falling in love—the adventure of visiting new places. The loss of a father, the beauty of a mother, a sister, a brother and the magic of a husband. All comes together in this sometimes serious, sometimes whacky assembly of poems.
Ellen Rosenbloom takes the reader on a ride, at times, rocky, at other times serene and everything is included, even a couple of mouth-watering recipes to an ode to her favorite plant. All the while thinking of new and lasting love and all the ups that come with it.
Caterpillar Girl, Meredith Heller
In Caterpillar Girl, Heller takes us with her once again into the heart of nature. Join her as she spends a summer camping in California beside the Yuba River, Lake Tahoe, Joshua Tree, and the Redwoods. With an ear tuned to beauty and an eye to wonder, she weaves sensual, numinous poems from the metaphors she finds in nature. Tracking her discoveries along the trail, she learns that life, like nature, is in a constant state of metamorphosis, and the best way to navigate is to become fluid as the river.
Diaspora of Things, Jill Pearlman
Diaspora of Things, an extended poetic sequence, digs into the world of emotional artifacts, as a means to negotiate one’s relationship with the dead. When the house is sold, the poet excavates her mother’s mute collection of objects, as if after a shipwreck, searching for clues that might leap across and bridge the silence. In grief, our deepest values are exposed, questioned, and asserted – touching upon the nature of art at the core of survival itself. Portrait, auto-portrait, Diaspora of Things engages in phenomenology, as yearning for and gesture towards acceptance.
Influences: The “Irish” Poems, Karen Petersen
Influences: The “Irish” Poems reflects the region’s unforgiving history and terrible beauty with a kind of wry cynicism, dark humor, and love of Nature that is so characteristic of the Irish philosophy of existence. Unrelenting in their gaze, these poems yield to the unvarnished sentiment of the simple aspect of ‘now,’ whether on the darkness of death or the rambunctiousness of feral felines — and there is something here to captivate every reader.
It’s Over, Susan Wolbarst
It’s Over is a series of haunting poems powered by bare-boned immediate feeling. The narrative structure of the poems connects readers to the intensity of each moment, whether the subject matter is a naked woman running through the streets of Nazi-occupied Poland, the survivor of a suicidal jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, a mother who loves being a badass, or drinking beer in Mexico during the predictable daily downpour. The poems are propelled forward without any sense of artifice or pretense. Self-irony and understated lyricism are interspersed with evocative epiphanies, expressed in simple and direct language.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 9/1 and 9/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: The Blessed Knot by Li-Young Lee
“A well-made poem is a knot, but not a tangle. The well-made knot of a poem can disentangle readers from illusion, to free them from confusion. Poetry is a form of disillusionment.” Read the July Chapbook Poem by Li-Young Lee along with words from the poet.
“This work is an archive of my attempts to become more familiar with who I am, and why I am here, to immerse myself in these ancient spiritual questions…” Check out five poems and five images by Laynie Browne along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Creating Space by Lisa Sewell
“Yoga, the walks, and the writing became a daily exercise in paying attention—to the world, to the bodies in the world around me and to my own body…” Read the Excerpt Poem of the Month for July 2025 by Lisa Sewell along with words from the poet.
“My poetry tries to examine … the difference between the lives we live inside ourselves and the lives we expose to other people.” Read five poems by William Doreski along with a few words from the poet.
July ’25: Poetry Readers Wanted
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about PCR’s Summer poetry and new poetry reader opportunities brought by our growing original poetry submissions.
Four Poems by allison whittenberg
“I grew up as a film buff and I loved reading Hollywood Babylon. Over the years, I have learned to separate the truth from the myths.” Read four poems by allison whittenberg along with a few words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: August Peaches by Winshen Liu
“I wanted to sit with a particular end-of-summer indulgence, where a host has saved specialty foods to welcome visiting friends and family–fancy chocolate, favorite sodas, a certain snack.” Read a poem from Winshen Liu’s chapbook Paper Money along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Cheesecake Factory by Max McDonough
“This poem lives in the weirdness of the suburban mall spaces a lot of us grew up visiting (or loitering in!), places that feel like they could be anywhere and nowhere at once.” Read a poem from Max McDonough’s chapbook along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Meyer
“Love had made me stronger in a lot of ways, but also showed me the weakest parts of myself that were left crystallized for him to see. This was much like wood morphing into rock during the petrification process.” Read three poems by Alexandra Meyer along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers
“Anchored by sensory detail, the poem journeys between childhood safety and adult experience in a canyon town shaped by rivers and monsoons. … This poem is a meditation on time, tastes, and tenderness of memory.” Read three poems by Kristiane Weeks-Rogers along with words from the poet.
Chapbook Poem: The Seventh Age of Shakespeare’s Father by Scott LaMascus
“This poem hit me hard last winter, sitting a moment near my late father, as our family was trying to absorb the meaning of his ALS diagnosis … I wondered, if ‘all the world’s a stage,’ what role had I just been assigned?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Landscape with footprints in ash by Selma Asotić
“When I want to sound smart, I say things like: a poet is one who leaves. When I accept that I’m not very smart, mostly just perplexed and a little scared, I write poems about ghosts and circle farms.” Read a poem from Asotić’s new book, Say Fire, along with words from the poet.
“All of my encounters with the U.S. healthcare system follow the protocols of the ridiculous. This poem, couched in the conventions of the contemporary sonnet, explores my latest, decisive encounter with a doctor’s office.” Read three poems by Robin Arble along with words from the poet.
September ’25: Best of the Net Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s Best of the Net 2026 anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to the nominated poems.
Verses of Mourning: in the aftermath by Jessica Nirvana Ram
“[Ram] presents a revealing and heartbreaking collection that asks the reader to think about what they remember the most about those they have lost.” Read Alex Carrigan’s full review.
“This poem reckons with our capitalist, product-driven society to ask people why disabled stories are only relevant if they portray the ‘other’ overcoming trauma to become abled people’s inspiration porn.” Read three poems by Makena Metz along with words from the poet.