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 December 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.
Rockwood Press
Prayer of Scalpel and Ash, Amy Riddell
“Prayer of Scalpel & Ash is a rare creation of song and scar, of deep vulnerability and raw humanity, of emotional complexity and simple witness. In a world where empathy is under threat of erasure, Riddell’s structurally unique, heartfelt yet conceptual poetry delicately balances illness, family, broken landscapes, broken bodies, broken faith, and our constant reaching for something beautiful we cannot name but know must be there, just beyond our fingertips. There’s such sharpness to Riddell’s metaphors, such richness to the painfully stirring world she builds for us, both defining and pushing against the edges of our shared human experience. These poems choose to both celebrate and mourn everything they touch. Even their own ghosts. Even that greater truth that always remains just slightly out of reach, that she refuses to stop reaching toward.” -John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another
Finishing Line Press
Memory Map, Tara Prakash
Memory Map charts a deeply personal geography of family, remembrance, and loss, navigating the fragility of memory and the aging process through traditional and experimental poetry. Divided into three parts, this chapbook acts as both a literal and emotional map—one that traces childhood kitchens, nursing home couches, community pools, and imagined mountain trails, all while searching for bearings in the face of change. As memory fades and time pushes forward, the speaker tries to anchor meaning in place, in texture, in the smallest details—a red carpet, a ceramic bowl, a blueberry held on a palm. Memory Map invites readers to walk alongside, to pause at the intersections of grief and tenderness, and to consider what it means to lose our way and our memories—and still remember where we began.
Bottlecap Press
A Few Lines Before I Go, Carl Scharwath
A Few Lines Before I Go is a slender, contemplative chapbook of short philosophical poems that linger at the edges of departure—personal, spiritual, and existential. In these spare, incisive pieces, the poet distills moments of awakening, absence, and quiet rebellion into lines that feel both urgent and timeless.
Written in a minimalist style that favors brevity over ornament, these poems function like whispered meditations or half-remembered dreams. Each piece occupies only a few lines, yet leaves a resonant hush, inviting the reader to pause and confront their own thresholds: between action and stillness, belief and doubt, waking and vanishing.
the way circles you, Lynda Zwinger
A chapbook of Zen, water, and the dissolving edges of the self, the way circles you follows the breath of Gichigami—the Big Lake whose tides echo through each poem. Through haiku, dharani, and elemental attention, these poems open a space where thinking softens and presence widens. A contemplative, water-leaning meditation on grief, interbeing, and the small astonishments of paying attention, the way circles you follows lake-breath logic: tide in, tide out, nothing separate. The poems breathe like the lake does—slow, tidal, sometimes disappearing mid-sentence . . .
Nearby Voices: Persona Poems, Fran Abrams
In this book of persona poems, inanimate objects tell us their personal narratives and tales of woe. In a persona poem, the author speaks through a voice other than the poet’s own. For example, the speaker in a persona poem may be a historical figure or a cartoon character. The invented voice is part of what pulls us into the poems.
In this collection, the characters whose voices we hear are the objects we see each day in our homes—including our sofa, dining table, and the baby’s crib, and in our neighborhood—such as the grocery store, gas station, and ATM. Each provides a perspective on our everyday lives that we may not have considered until we look at these speakers’ joys, needs, and worries. We learn about the carpet that loves to be vacuumed, the washing machine that’s disgusted by its family’s eating habits, and the stop sign that prides itself on preventing accidents. These poems, told from the point of view of objects we’re not accustomed to “listening” to, are a refreshing look at our everyday lives.
Isn’t It Worth It?, Ashley Lyn Werner
Isn’t It Worth It? is a poetry chapbook that takes you on a journey through heartbreak, grief, and love. The chapbook is split into two sections called “Inhale” and “Exhale”, named so to give permission to breath through rising emotions. “Inhale” recounts breakups, devastating crushes, grief, and anger sprinkled with religious trauma. “Exhale” focuses on acceptance of grief, opening oneself up to love again, and a blooming romantic relationship.
This Year, Julia C. Obert
The poems in this collection were written between November 2024 and November 2025. They toggle between horror at the violence and cruelty of our contemporary moment and delight in the everyday pleasures of being-in-the-world.
Individually, the poems are interested in the relationships of human beings to the natural worlds we inhabit—in what we might learn from mushrooms, for instance, or in the destructive damming and euphoric undamming of the Klamath River—and in our beautiful and vexed relationships to one another. Together, when splashed across the backdrop of today’s political landscape, “this country for old men, this anti-haven,” they wonder how we might best imagine our collective future.
Poetry is my exercise, Anne M. Greenhalgh
Daniel Hoffman once said “There are two kinds of poets – hard boiled and soft boiled, those who write free verse and those who write formal poems.” Anne M. Greenhalgh is a hard-boiled poet who tests the creativity made possible within the limitation of form. Within this volume, Poetry is my exercise, Greenhalgh explores the possibilities within the constraints of the villanelle’s form.
This sequence of eleven villanelles opens with the shaping forces of domestic life, transitions from family to friendship, pivots from the personal to the philosophical and the psychological, and closes with a meta-poetic ars poetica.
Museum of the Sun, Nikki Corina
Each piece is a room and each image is a relic glowing with intimacy, history, and desire. Museum of the Sun is a luminous curation of poetry as one may curate art. Drawing inspiration from masterworks of painting, literature, music, and myth, Nikki Corina reimagines the museum as a living body where love, memory, and longing are preserved. Through spare and lyrical precision, the poems invite the readers to linger in moments that feel timeless and urgently alive.
Private Silences, Kurtis Ebeling
Private Silences as a collection is invested in the archiving of moments, often small or ordinary. Spare and imagistic in nature, these poems catalogue instances as unextraordinary as watching a partner fold laundry or noticing birds through an open window. They are deeply interested in the nature of memory, the way light moves through and shapes spaces, and the capacity of poetic imagery for creating (and recreating) experience and feeling, both in the moment and in remembering.
Sunset Boulevard, Valyntina Grenier
Sunset Boulevard casts the life of an artist in a “Hotel Ending.” Like any Hollywood adventure, there’s hitting it big, cruising the strip, crushing on and being crushed. Beyond the iconic boulevards and Santa Ana winds, Valyntina’s prose poems stay up all night to ride us around greater Los Angeles.
There’s a “post-yoga flow” to the speaker’s universal and “seemingly innocuous” moments—looking for “the last bus home” or “the movie of some year,” date nights, “dancing into a sweat.” Too, there are hints at an industry known to devour in phrases like “sex pricked through a pinhole,” “I Crawl Under this Fool. It’s Depressing” and “an oh well star.” In the words of this musical poet, “star particles, articles, watch them all, fade into day.”
We Can Take It as a Gift, Emelia G Cyr
We Can Take it as a Gift is a collection of eighteen poems, that are all love poems in a way. Written over the last several months, these poems encapsulate some elements of what it feels like trying to figure out the ways of the world. There are themes of wonder, sadness, hope, longing, loss, and love. These poems may just be words strung together to sound pretty, or they may be real good poems, but the author hopes you can resonate with even just one.
Some Days Are Mostly Maintenance, Lou Orfanella
Epic moments are not required to prompt epic poems. The most epic of all poems might just be those that have their roots in the ordinary moments that shape a lifetime. The pervasive unpoetic teaching of poetry encourages the excavation of a poem by telling the readers to unearth hidden meanings and to reach agreement on the symbols thought to have been buried by the poet, rather than learning to rely on one’s own internal and external reactions to the words on the page.
Some Days Are Mostly Maintenance does not pretend to solve the world’s problems or to capture the foundation of the human condition. Rather, it offers some random thoughts and some individual reactions to the simple observations and feelings that can, at least momentarily, illuminate the value of comparable experiences in others.
NERVES, Kaleena Madruga
It is a strange thing to be human. We scratch and claw, we seek and swim. We use our hands, our voices, our hearts to make meaning. We are creatures, strange and aching.
NERVES explores the absurdity of being a person through a collection of stories that face love, loss, birth, death, and all the moments in between. A woman seeks connection with a pet store goldfish, a couple navigates an animalistic transformation, and a dentist hides a dark secret. Through each tale, the rawest parts become exposed – the nerves.
Gold Hood, Tessa Shea Whitehead
Gold Hood is an incantation of fantasies that are undercut before they can root. Here, a dreamy world is conjured and then smashed. Each poem a closely held secret caught between cupped hands.
Pretty images float on a dark undercurrent, carried along by the themes of femininity and youth. Gold Hood stares into the gleam of the speaker’s stories and finds the gaps between language and truth. In this work, Tessa Shea Whitehead channels the prophecy of girlhood: tenuous beauty, loneliness, and the edges of danger.
Dear Miami, Diana M. Bunge
Dear Miami, is a first-person meditation on Miami’s evolving culture and politics, blending sharp critique with heartfelt homage and wit. Inspired by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, the work fuses humor and lyricism, moving fluidly between verse and prose.
Written in both Spanish and English, Dear Miami, speaks directly to the City and its locale. Through a hybrid of fictional and nonfictional encounters, the book memorializes a landscape defined by transformation—one that is both familiar and perpetually in flux.
Bread for Ducks, Noah McIlroy-Shachar
Bread for Ducks contains bite-sized takes on nature, self-expression, relationships, and spirituality, among other themes. The result is a punchy, ephemeral collection of short poems, like a crumpled bag of leftovers. Slices of bread too old for sandwiches, but still useful perhaps for a stroll around the duck pond.
Noah McIlroy-Shachar is a traveling street poet, peddling poems with his typewriter partner, Ollie, across the west coast of the United States.
Wastrel Rips & Devil-May-Care Madness, Nicholas Viglietti
On the flip of these pages are the wastrel rips, the long winds, and short ends that arrive at the quick of it. Some precise angles, some perverse glitz; even some eloquent notes, and some bizarre, cringy crawlin’ truths up the spine of humanity’s existence. Nicholas wrote, and gleaned these perceptions of heartbeats, out on his rambles from the hoods to the back-woods.
He’s lived like a bear with his house on his back, and seen vast peaks of jagged desolation. He’s slithered up all the creepy bayous, for the dark truths of this nation, and world. He’s been lost at sea; lonely, desperate, and the human condition will always desire perseverance – once that’s achieved it looks for love to set itself free.
I’m Not a Cynic, But Sometimes [Things], Chris Sumberg
I’m Not a Cynic, But Sometimes encompasses 16 miniature prose poem/nonfiction/fiction hybrids, termed things by the author. These determinedly logorrheic pieces deconstruct everything from the content of supermarket grocery carts, to the philosophical underpinnings of cliché bumper stickers, to the unnecessary personas we adopt in public – and when completely alone.
Dear Heart, Harold Whit Williams
You hold in your hands, dear heart, a strange little book. A bizarre batch of obsessive-compulsive, paranoid and possessive poem-letters addressed simply to–“Lover.” This latest micro-collection of misanthropic missives from the acclaimed poet and power pop guitar hero Harold Whit Williams lovingly disturbs in tight crafted couplets dotted with oddball imagery and internal rhymes.
Consisting of dream analyses, wishful thinking, and the always popular “what could have been,” Dear Heart delves deep into the selfishness and hurt occurring in all relationships, while celebrating those fleeting tender touching moments that are made all that much sweeter as our time ticks away.
Hush Now: Lyrics and Daydreams, Elizabeth Levett Fortier
Elizabeth Levett Fortier has been a singer-songwriter in the acoustic trio, Dreamchair Music which she formed in the early nineties with her husband, guitarist David Fortier. Hush Now is a collection of lyrics she wrote while working on a variety of projects. Many of the lyrics were written for Elizabeth’s first band, Dagburnettes, formed in the mid-1980’s with guitarist William E. Gibson, bass player (and guitarist) Kevin Rusk, and drummer/percussionist David Gould. The songs, “Grace,” “Your Colors,” and “Norman’s Shovel” were recorded for the EP, A Rope of Feathers, in 1993 with bassist Ed Summerfield and percussionist Marcos Fernandes. “Holy Cow Charlie” and “Carnival Skin,” are on the 1994 EP, Carnival Skin with drummer Todd Edelman and violinist Carla Kihlstedt. These early lyrics are more experimental in form than much of Elizabeth’s later material and often explore a broader poetic format than her later songs.
h., M.P. Strayer
There are people we meet, brush against, that forever change what happens to us after. Like crossing a threshold, they demarcate the then from the now. Sometimes that person is a stranger. Sometimes they’re the love of your life.
The poems of h. chart the course of a relationship that blossoms, and wanes, in the aftermath of one such meeting. Moving through moments of grief and healing, longing and heartbreak, passion and catharsis, collectively these pieces form not only a portrait of that most ordinary of human miracles—true connection—but a love song to loss.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 12/1 and 12/31 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”
Five Poems by Colleen S. Harris
“I am always struck by the juxtaposition of the biology and science of illness versus the life of the person living with it, and how those two spheres constantly interrupt and flow into each other.” Read five poems by Colleen S. Harris, our third biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Inflammation As Girl.”
Chapbook Poem: Offering by Richard Jordan
“In my mind, the narrator recognizes that Harper’s fate could very well have been his own, and I hope that readers can relate, in the sense that we all have done reckless things, especially in our youth…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Offering,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Passage by Paul Hostovsky
“When she’d call me on the weekends, I was high half the time, impatient with her, and unforthcoming. It’s one of my greatest regrets. The tears well up just thinking about it. I didn’t grieve her properly. I’m grieving her now.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for February 2026, “Passage” from Perfect Disappearances by Paul Hostovsky, along with a few words from the poet.
“The poem captures us both there in the dreaded check up appointment: me clenching crinkling paper, scared of what the lab reports say; him…lab reports in hand like some mysterious document…” Read three poems by Mary Whitlow, our fourth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Examined.”