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 January 2026.
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.
Moonstone Press
The Airplane Game, Karol Olesiak
The Airplane Game is a response to fetishism of flying that permeates poetic language and human dreams. The original cover designs orbited around a stork playing the airplane game with baby alien. The final result a Northern Renaissance pen and ink rendering by Albrecht Dürer aptly name “The Stork.” A nod to the poet’s birthplace where stork’s were mythologized as birth bringers.
Dancing Girl Press
Eyes of Some Robbers, Suzette Bishop
Eyes of Some Robbers witnesses difficult and abusive relationships from childhood to adulthood, in the personal and public spheres. Lyric narrative poems also allude to “The Little Robber Girl” chapter of The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.
Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, most recently, Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her chapbook, Unbecoming, is forthcoming.
Cyberwit.Net
Whiskey Island: Literary Biographies, Virginia Aronson
The inexplicable connection between great writing and big thirst might have weakened in the 21st century. It seems that today’s top literary luminaries lead calm, sane lives compared to their forebears. Reading these biographical poems about the troubled lives of some of the 20th century’s most revered writers, however, might make you wonder: did alcohol contribute to literary greatness?
Bottlecap Press
LEPIDOCTORA, Taylor Hagood
Lepidoptera + doctor = Lepidoctera, a poetic meditation on sickness and healing in the wings of butterflies. This chapbook of poetry by Taylor Hagood prods both tragedy and renewal via an eclectic array of personal, literary, and historical contexts.
From the “butterfly brain tumor” to the regenerative metaphor of the cocoon to Muhmmad Ali’s heartbreaking descent into illness, the poems in Lepidoctora range across time, space, and societies. Here, Erik Satie appears alongside country music star Roni Stoneman, Valentino Garavani shoes sit beside butterfly knives, and magic lives with the mundane.
Through all these dimensions flit the tiny colorful wings of the lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths, that lend their quiet beauty to life’s triumphs and defeats.
The Goat, Christine R. Neuman
Christine Neuman’s chapbook is a raw, intimate offering bleeding openly on each page, inviting readers into a world where emotion and meaning arrives fragmented as the sentence-level grammatical errors themselves. Written in confessional surrealist style, the poems unfold through broken sentences and sharp juxtapositions. Neuman’s work refuses polish in favor of truth, with humor, grief, confusion and rage against the machine, Christine the queer-surrealist Sacramento poet slips between genders and sexuality, fluidly as they are, entering a subconscious realm that blends comedy and vulnerability, carrying emotional weight in hopes of bringing light to dark places. Each poem is driven by the belief that poetry should move the reader, should make them feel something, and at times, make them uncomfortable. The chapbook is not interested in real resolutions, it only exists to name the mess, longing, and the contradictions that shape our human condition.
Allen Ginsberg is a Mensch, M. Brooke Wiese
In this, Wiese’s third book, she writes of her relationship and experiences with the old poet, the standard-bearer of the Beat Generation of poets and authors who came to prominence in the 1950s and 60s, and whose work influenced the culture of the post-World War II era. Ginsberg himself was a guru or guide of the radical changes in poetry that began in the late 19th century with Walt Whitman, continued with Pound and Eliot, and continues to be the dominant poetic form today. Ginsberg used free verse to express countercultural ideals, often with a sense of humor and play.
Locus, Courtney M. Hanks
The locus of a given spiral is exact, a specific number, and there is something comforting in knowing the place where something originates. Maybe by finding the locus, a person can control what happens next, disrupting the existing shape, creating something new.
Where does a lie begin? A fear? A hope?
In Locus, Courtney M. Hanks layers lyrical prose, history, and memoir to move through the spiral, searching for its center. Through memory, loss, betrayals, and time, each vignette dissects an element of personal history, pulling at threads to find the center, continually, with unflinching honesty.
Movements, Theodore Heil
Theodore Heil reconstructs experience in his debut chapbook Movements. Borrowing stories, memories, facts, and action, he constructs a narrative of his family and his journey from and to a markedly Catholic spirituality.
His titular movements are inspired greatly by orchestral arrangements. These arrangements place emphasis on the role of sound in poetry.
Particularly, how the sonic quality of a poem is capable of holding together fragments of the past much like the body itself carries remembrances of trauma. These poems utilize sound and image to probe at the capability of living through a rupture and returning to one’s belief system with new eyes.
W/Make, Corbett Buchly
A life spent creating suggests a way of being, a way of moving through life, a way of seeing. In W/Make, Corbett Buchly explores where those impulses come from and how they are manifested, and what it means to be a maker. We uncover some of his beginnings in poems like “voice like linen” and “birthday,” wherein a teacher “unlocked the symbols secreted in story” and “language’s gate swung open.” Buchly has been a maker from a young age, his creative impulses going beyond language projects, whether he’s creating a new board game or concocting a batch of cold-processed soap.
IcarU.S.A., Joe Roberts
Between the pages of this chapbook, you’ll find volatile protest hymns, poems of rage and disillusionment, an apocalypse heralded by the return of Johnny Appleseed, and a sonnet of despair over the poet’s complicity in the atrocities the United States is inflicting upon Gaza.
The collection is more than a travelogue of American hell, though. It is also a desperate call to see beyond the faustian worldviews which have damned us. If this country can grow more human and learn to love the humanity we share with our neighbors, the poet contends, we might still forsake the doomed path our ancestors laid before us.
Nocturnes, John Vurro
Nocturnes was written in response to the poet’s parents dying within five weeks of each other. The poems examine mental illness, addiction, violence, and the emotional residue of both what is remembered and what we wish we could forget. At its core, Nocturnes seeks to understand grief as narrative, metaphor and the relationship between content and form. Rather than offering explanation or closure, Nocturnes examines the lived consequences of illness and addiction—as well as examining the complexities of being a parent.
Wheel, Lindsay Hargrave
You’ve been to this casino before. Or have you? Enter Wheel, a time-travelling slot machine that preys on those naïve enough to lose a quarter, a dollar, or even their souls to its seductive glow.
Somewhere between your subconscious and the casino floor, something eternal, sublime and maybe even sinister lies dormant, waiting to be awakened. It’s an homage to the time-bending nature of spending time in Atlantic City and what it’s like to meet angels and ancestors at the roulette table.
Pond Champ, Zach Arnett
Pond Champ is a collection of surrealist poems rooted in the psychic terrain of the rural Midwest where the Wabash River, addiction, trailer courts, ritual, manual labor, retention basins, poverty and kinship all converge. Death is a concern in these poems. So is what happens after death.
Animals don’t fare well in this selection, but neither does any living thing here. The point is that they endure. Pond Champ aims to find grace inside exhaustion and shame.
Uncertainty, James K. Zimmerman
In Uncertainty, James K. Zimmerman weaves a narrative thread that begins with the Big Bang – and what may have come before that – and then takes the reader on a journey into the depth and breadth of the Anthropocene Era. How we regard oil – the liquidified remains of flora and dinosaurs – as a gift; how we pollute our water supply with the detritus of our consumerist way of life. From there, in personifications of robots, AI, and interstellar satellites, Zimmerman interrogates how these creations – born of the genius of our species – might reflect back on us, and how they might represent us to the cosmos.
The Children Have Bloomed First and Other Notes from Fatherhood, Thor D. Mikesell
Written by a new father, for fathers everywhere, The Children Have Bloomed First and Other Notes from Fatherhood, is a collection of poems and poetic meditations which reflect the complex experiences of new fathers, fatherhood, and love. This work spans the topics of mortality, playfulness, loss, love, and the sometimes ridiculousness of parenthood.
Poems Written Before Stepping on the Third Rail, Ivan Škrtić
Poems Written Before Stepping on the Third Rail, it’s semi-self explanatory. Observations, ruminations, complaints shouted at hardwood floors, blues, unrhymed rhythms, verses from the ashcan; all sealed in envelopes, stamped, addressed, and sent to dead letter offices. There’s something for the old soul, the person with a chip on both shoulders, reluctant hipsters, self-effacing hustlers, would-be beatniks, and you. Snapshots of urban life from the Rust Belt to the Northeast Megalopolis relayed sardonically or wistfully, depending on the day.
Planetary Sway: Aphorisms for the Everyday Emergency, John Bradley
Planetary Sway: Aphorisms for the Everyday Emergency explores, expands, and at times implodes this genre in the hopes of producing starlight (indoors and outdoors). Made to be read in a car, bus, subway, café, bathtub, or favorite stuffed chair, these aphorisms may stick to the reader’s fingers. Planetary Sway would make George Orwell bang his head on his desk. It would make Franz Kafka swallow a hard-boiled egg. It would make Gertrude Stein ride a camel through Kokomo, Indiana.
Light Splits Down the Wolf’s Tooth, Sarah Sorensen
This collection explores the natural world as a mirror to our own internal world, a place of limerence, lust, and primal hunger. These prose poems demand to be felt, colliding bitterness and ecstasy, the roar of rage and the howl of loneliness. Let’s not tame the tiger, or apologize for the opportunism of a coyote survivalist. Wild life is a merging of Kant’s “beautiful” and “sublime,” a source of transcendence. Wonder without judgment. Linger in the gaze of the doe. Pause beneath the beating wings of the geese and listen to the sound of their feathers above you.
Finishing Line Press
Qasida for When I Became a Woman, Huma Sheikh
Qasida for When I Became a Woman reshapes the classical Arabic ode into a contemporary elegy of grief, resilience, and renewal. Set against the backdrop of war-torn Kashmir, these poems grapple with the unsolved murder of the poet’s father, the silences of disappearance, and the cultural restrictions placed on a young woman coming of age under military occupation. Through a blending of inherited forms and her own lyrical voice, Huma Sheikh creates a testament where violence and tenderness, absence and presence, exile and belonging coexist. Intimate yet political, this collection transforms trauma into testimony and loss into art, affirming that even in the darkest corners, memory, survival, and hope endure.
Boychik Poems, Barry Vitcov
Boychik Poems is a personal journey of growing up Jewish. Boychik is Yiddish for “young man” and these poems explore Jewish identity and traditions through the lens of a man reflecting on his upbringing. The poems delve into various aspects of the author’s life, from childhood experiences and family gatherings to reflections on cultural heritage and current historical events. While the poems are nostalgic they resonate with universal themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning.
The Palindrome of the Sun, Veronica Sanitate
Veronica Sanitate’s The Palindrome of the Sun begins in Florence, in the Baptistery, where generations came to be christened before entering the Duomo. On its floor, a black-and-white zodiac mosaic served as a living clock, the sun itself marking the year’s arc. Solstice emerges as a turning point, the fading palindrome carved around the sun evoking circularity, return, and the persistence of time. The words are barely legible, their translation lost, but Sanitate revives them, rendering the sun’s blaze as it spins constellations and traces the arc of human experience. These meditations move between art and history, science and myth, tracing cycles of life, the cosmos, and what endures. In The Palindrome of the Sun, Florence becomes both mirror and doorway; the familiar world is refracted into patterns of continuity, reflection, and return, and the reader is left to consider the measure of time, the turning of seasons, and our place within it.
VESTIGES, Savannah Grant
What does too much time spent on dating apps and not enough time spent on yourself feel like? What does being under construction (spiritually speaking) look like? Are you present with the process or avoiding it, and what, if any, closure is needed or being denied? VESTIGES seeks to answer, or at least explore, these questions, as the speaker weaves through the very beginning stages of the healing journey in the context of bad dates, missed connections, and the seemingly small details of everyday life.
No Fault of Water, Kelsey D. Mahaffey
No Fault of Water chronicles the author’s journey through a turbulent summer marked by her partner’s alcoholism. Written from the shadows of a shared life, these sensory-rich poems navigate the shifting tides of love, denial, and ultimately, redemption. Grounded in evocative language, each poem sings with emotional clarity, offering readers an intimate glimpse into the ache of holding on—and the quiet strength it takes to let go.
Ovum, Christine Kalafus
Inspired by portraiture — a stylized art form that represents containment — OVUM renders a simplified likeness of the speaker viewed through complex inheritances. If a book of poems is an assemblage, an egg is the origin. Traveling the oval, each poem a new beginning, each poem an attempt to regain what is lost, we arrive in a similar place to where we began, layered in asymmetry. A personal reckoning with a messy past, OVUM is a timely and timeless mix of intergenerational debt, safety, and the danger and durability of the female body.
Ponies and Other Poems, Cheryl Derby
The titular poem “Ponies”, takes a what-if stance. What if a pony would stop trying to buck you off, and instead lead you to a smoother carousel ride. White sheets stand in as a symbol that an adolescent girl is questioning life’s weight, life’s absence. The girl may make decisions eventually, but right now the sheets are blank. Rain is a Stranger is about a relationship. The woman feels like a stranger but is trying to get to know a man. For now, it’s okay to feel like strangers, although the rain brings them together. These poems aim for emotional depth that makes a life worth living.
Lineage, Karen Betz Mastracchio
Lineage – patrilineal, matrilineal – the lines of connection among family are not so easy. Relationships are complex, twisted and twined through our lives, sometimes the strands breaking. Each poem, anecdote, memory captures only one facet of those beloveds – parents, grandparents, children and grandchildren. If the recollections seem bi-polar, contradictory, isn’t that the very nature of love and lineage?
Suncatcher, Brian C. Miller
These poems explore the aspects of the human condition, such as love, time, and faith during life’s pivotal moments. There are vivid poems about a lightning bug’s glow that shines on a lost love memory, flames from a fire pit that mirrors a girlfriend’s natural beauty, a viewmaster that lights up childhood memories, and the presence of God through a stain-glass window. There are also poems about heartbreak, such as “ghosting,” the cracks that break trust, and the memory overload of a past relationship. Readers go on an emotional journey that captures time, love, and faith—just like a suncatcher that reflects sunlight.
Tasting Moments, Pamela Pan
Tasting Moments celebrates the strength of ordinary people as they gain wisdom and embrace new possibilities. Rooted in personal history but resonant with universal truths, these twenty-one poems delve into themes of love, family, nature, healing, and the passage of time. In the title poem, a child tastes lotus roots prepared by her mother, only to complete the circle decades later by serving similar dishes to her elderly mother, illustrating how love transforms and endures across generations. “A Song for a Strong Soul” paints a portrait of Auntie who searches for a community that shares her language, culture, and love of dancing, fights off robbers, and battles cancer. In “Tai Chi,” the poet shares that she chooses to play Tai Chi instead of practicing it because it is a joyful game that relaxes and regenerates. This chapbook offers a space to pause, reflect, and savor fleeting yet significant experiences. With a voice that is intimate and evocative, the collection invites readers to taste the power of remembrance and the richness of living, one moment at a time.
The Sky Weeps with Us, Laurel S. Peterson
The poems in this collection explore how grief builds through the weight of multiple losses, and then is at least partially dismantled through gratitude at being in the world. The poems explore not only the losses of friends and family, but also environmental shifts, changes in relationships, and the challenges of growing older. Finally, the collection builds to a letting go that offers a kind of peace.
The Art of Undoing, Hudson Plumb
The poems in The Art of Undoing guide the reader through the strange, luminous terrain of what remains after separation—and what may take its place. While tracing a path through personal and collective tragedies, these poems remain attuned to the beauty that appears unexpectedly: a whale surfacing beside a boat, “clouds passing/between the fingers of a eucalyptus tree,” cormorants “popping up with sideways prizes.” Rather than retreat from the brokenness of the world, Plumb’s lyric meditations gather its fragments into forms of quiet restoration. In scenes shaped by a father’s death in Argentina, a mother blinking glass from her eye in a Sagaponack storm, or hermit crabs crawling toward improbable survival, Plumb reveals undoing not only as loss, but as the possibility of pause and renewal.
wolf mutter, K. Blasco Solér
wolf mutter traverses psychogeography, hybrid persona, and narratives of intergenerational and ecological trauma and connection in the high-desert and alpine landscapes of Colorado. Conceived during a period of maternal grief and a two-year study of the extermination and reemergence of gray wolves in the Southern Rockies, this poetic sequence is articulated from research, interviews with wolf biologists, a writing retreat in wolf territory along the Colorado-Wyoming border, and inspiration/collaboration with other poets writing into deep ecology and the Anthropocene. wolf mutter speaks urgently to our capacities for personal, collective, and interspecies survival in a rapidly changing world with dynamic form, vivid imagery, and intimate familiarity.
My Mother’s Husbands, Anna Gasaway
In My Mother’s Husbands, the poet draws pictures of men rotating through her mother’s life. The child knows that she will not be provided the safety and security that she longs for. She yearns for her mother and her attention, but knows to keep away. She is attracted to her mother’s way of life, but knows that she cannot follow in her path. With humor and poignancy, the poet provides a roadmap for those on similar journeys. “To be upstairs and downstairs at the same time,” to scrutinize and make a way out of chaos and to live in the aftermath.
Caught in the Light, Layle Keane Chambers
Caught in the Light is a raw and unflinching exploration of a mother’s journey as she watches her son dedicate himself to a life of service as an Air Force pilot. Layle Keane Chambers navigates a battle fought on the home front, where love and anxiety intertwine against a backdrop of global uncertainty. From the constant vigilance of tracking his flights across continents to moments of intense pride and beauty, Chambers charts a course through fear and acceptance. These poems illuminate the universal experience of letting go, weaving the personal with geopolitical realities and the quiet moments of family life with the stark realities of war. Through vivid imagery and emotional honesty, Caught in the Light reveals the silent sacrifices of military families, the constant negotiation between love and fear, and the enduring power of a mother’s unwavering gaze, ultimately serving as testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, a call to find strength in looking up and the grace to become a lighthouse in a world of shifting currents.
Relict, Brian Mosher
Relict is the result of the author’s struggle to figure out what the death of his father meant to him. Does a person become something different on the day they no longer have any living parents? A child becomes an adolescent, becomes an adult. A single person becomes part of a couple, becomes a parent, becomes again single either as a widow or through divorce. But we have no word for the stage of life that begins once both a person’s parents have died. This book is an attempt to document the feelings of grief, and to reconnect to a lost past through stories about ancestors, all without losing sight of a hopeful future.
At The End of My Bones, Naomi Leimsider
This won’t end well. These poems are an exploration of the fraught relationship between our fragile, complex human bodies and our time in the world. “The landscape, the grid, the clock” rules us all. On some level we understand this essential truth but continue to insist we are “in the middle of things”. Each of us must learn this difficult lesson: we cannot change the past, and we must move forward. However, our ability to love, to make ourselves available to each other – sometimes in ways we never imagined – can help us discover new relationships with beginnings and endings, with our bodies, with the world. If not now, when?
Also the Gentle World, Robert Morrison Randolph
Also the Gentle World includes poems about a woman playing dulcimer while an osprey flies in the rain, the sea breaking on stone inside a moth’s wing, and other deep images of intense gentleness. The fifteen four-line poems and one six-line poem build worlds of powerfully focused fragility and the ask the reader to love honestly.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 1/1 and 1/31 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.”
February ’26: Section Editors & Staff Wanted
Editor Aiden Hunt begins year three with a call for applications for section editors and other editorial and production staff in this editor’s note.
“I am most comfortable in a chair with a pen looking at nature through a window. And yet nature is something my mind is also totally immersed in…So I think it’s a bit of a paradox.” Poet Lisa Low discusses her latest chapbook in this interview with Contributor Saudamini Siegrist.
“My work has always found a focus in the bodies of women, and watching the mix of strength and fragility in women as they face illness and pain has been a topic that I keep coming back to.” Read four poems by Betty Stanton, our fifth biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Vein Song.”
Chapbook Poem: Found in the African Art Collection… by Rohanna Ssanyu
“It is laborious to hold on to a culture removed, one for which I am a perpetual novice. I do, however, try, and I bring my children with me. … Can this space, this culture, only be ours if cut up and reimagined?” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery After the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: Targeted by Frances Klein
“The poem focuses specifically on the way that online algorithms ‘read’ a person’s internet history related to pregnancy or trying to conceive, then deliver the most painful possible ads…” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for March 2026, “Targeted” from Another Life by Frances Klein, along with a few words from the poet.