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 July 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.
Middle Creek Publishing
Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde, Joseph Hutchison
In Cliff Swallow at Mesa Verde, Joe Hutchison ask Winter not to wake up, although we can feel it dreaming in hiding—dreaming in the denned fox, in the dark-swaddled seeds and also in us. But these are also poems about how these things are also part of life, part of “a dreaming on which time itself is made.” The poems in this chapbook live the seasons verses naming them. Griefs large and little, personal and universal. The wonder of the world breath that becomes ours but will also slip back into the world’s breath— “Thin fire flickers in the nest of old news”—and in between those bookends, we who look and listen to both beauty and the shadow nature embodies, learn to define ourselves with the language of nature.
Ballerini Book Press
My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties, Elizabeth Sylvia
“Clear-eyed and bracing” poems that grapple with family and memory at midlife.
As she navigates the constraints of domestic life, her growing daughters prompt the speaker’s reckoning with the desire for freedom underpinning her most significant relationships. From thrift stores to swimming pools, these poems, quick-witted and tender but unsentimental, reveal a woman trying to hold on while also letting go.
Red Bird Chapbooks
All Things Gone, Patricia Hemminger
Patricia Hemminger creates a home for juxtapositions in her chapbook All Things Gone. The collection braids together the scientific and the personal, the reverence for primordial creatures’ evolution and the harsh truth of her family’s mortality. Hemminger’s poems examine the awe, pain, and nostalgia of what it means to live in both her intimate universe and the natural world. A thoughtful and beautiful collection.
Alien Buddha Press
DREAMESCAPES, Jorge Lopez Llorente
‘Dreamescapes’ navigates the volatile interplay between the poetry of imagination and the numbing churn of capitalist routine. Waves of dream images break into various characters’ minds before they break down like the surf, from Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Drowning Girl’ to a Walter Mitty-esque jaded travel agent, washing away gray reality but leaving murky sediment.
Dreams may drown or deliver. Here they do both, always vivid, sometimes violent, never still.
Prolific Pulse Press
Solemnity Rites, Loralee Clark
Solemnity Rites is an account of reimagined myths and truths of who we are as humans and how we live our histories. In the first section, Clark poses questions such as what does a stromatolite’s birth, the forming of a desert, the process of grieving or a ritualized Neolithic funeral contribute to the ways in which we are an ecotone of the living world? In the second section she answers how we practice these histories through our personal powers and sacrifices, through the mysteries that our blood holds.
Finishing Line Press
Lacus Somniorum, Douglas Delaney
Lacus Somniorum presents a world where memory, history, and ephemeral forces converge. Through vivid imagery and fluid shifts in perspective, the poems traverse landscapes of endurance and transformation—from the weary persistence of migratory paths to the haunting resonance of forgotten histories. Whether contemplating the vastness of a field, the mechanical rhythms of modernity, or the quiet rebellion of a flower returning to seed, each piece invites readers to navigate the distance between what is known and what is possible. Grounded in both the monumental and the fleeting, this collection charts an evocative journey through the intersections of language, time, and space.
From a Sandstone Ledge, Shelley Armitage
From a Sandstone Ledge, like the rock’s elements, offers a view at once firm yet shifting, as we travel the blue highways of memory seeking a way home. From the backyard to the borderlands, the living room rocker to the 32,000 acre Llano Estacado plateau, place reminds us that we are part of, not separate from, the natural world. In these often human-altered landscapes, populated by porcupines, ducks, tarantulas, and more, Armitage explores the complexity of kinship and story-making–and the sustainability of wonder.
Always Room for Interpretation, Deborah Rasmussen
Resilience is the heart of this collection. Each poem in Always Room for Interpretation takes its place on a journey that entwines memory with the immediacy of the present. These poems are snapshots that capture a larger landscape: the determination of immigrant grandparents, the loss of a child, the meaning of home, life with cancer. Along the way, nature serves as a wise though not necessarily easy partner, reminding the reader that life is always open to new ways of seeing, new modes of feeling, yet-to-be-discovered possibilities. Woven through all is the will to engage with hope.
When You Ask Me, “Why Paris?”, Michelle Ortega
When You Ask Me, “Why Paris?” draws the reader into the author’s journey from trauma’s haunting into her recovery of peace and even joy. Against the backdrop of Paris, Ortega’s poems tell of quiet moments beside her daughter, as well as inner revelations that nudge her towards becoming a writer. Retracing steps through Paris over multiple trips that span two decades, the author invites the reader’s presence in hopes that they will fall in love as well, with themselves, reclaiming dreams and establishing hope for what is to come.
Not Quite on Grand Avenue: Poems of the Early Years, Kim McNealy Sosin
Not Quite on Grand Avenue: Poems of the Early Years is a collection of deeply personal poems that take us to a small town in the 1940s and early 1950s in Nebraska as seen by a young girl negotiating her way through the cords of family, friends, and freedoms. From the raw end of innocence as a family falls apart to forging independence through exploring the countryside on a horse to rediscovering comfort in family, these poems show the joys and challenges of growing up in a home with a front yard in town and a backyard in the country.
COCO SINATRA, Laurie Barton
Coco Sinatra is a navigation of solitude, aging, and loss. It revels in life’s daily magic–its “diamonds dipped in suntan oil”–while casting a clear eye at dysfunction. The reader stumbles into a family home being put on the rental market, a celebration of Christmas at a pub crawl. A few celebrity sightings are interspersed with the poignant confusion of Elvis and Priscilla holding hands in divorce court. These poems do not shy away from tragedy and violence as they pine for a chance at love and security. In the end, there is hope on a nostalgic train ride as “the future climbs like a ripe vine.”
A Limb Outgrowing a Weathered Tree, Whitnee Coy
In this, her fourth collection, Whitnee Coy‘s poetry continues to mature and flower in powerful and unexpected ways. She has always offered a rich and deeply lyrical poetic voice, but here, where she processes the traumas of her daughter’s difficult premature birth and the pain of separation they both endured during her child’s extended stay in NICU, Coy’s voice soars to startling new heights and insights—as well as to a triumphant reunion between mother and daughter. She continues to impress and inspire as a poet. You must read this book! —Young Smith, author of In a City You Will Never Visit
Satellite View, Lance Newman
Lance Newman’s Satellite View inhabits a personal dreamscape of the New West, traveling from the Colorado Plateau to the California coast and back again. These poems respond to signs and traces on the land, including the scars of breakneck development, the impact of climate change, and the violence of war and border control. Newman laments our detachment from each other and from the natural world, while finding moments of hope and connection in images as various as Cahuilla artifacts on a desert trail, volunteer plants at a construction site, and a coyote den in an oilfield.
The Dogs of Alishan And Other Poems from Taiwan, Laurence Musgrove
In The Dogs of Alishan and Other Poems from Taiwan, Laurence Musgrove traces his Fulbright-Hays experience in Taiwan during the summer of 2023. These poems, accompanied by extensive notes on the history, geography, politics, and culture of Taiwan, detail his journeys on the island with 15 other scholars from across the United States. In these easily accessible poems, Musgrove portrays new discoveries about himself while also celebrating the diverse range of insights and joys available on this beautiful island nation.
Family as Celestial Body, Patty Ware
In this stunning debut book, poet Patty Ware asks: “have you ever met vulnerable?” and then carries us out onto this a branch of memoir poems. She unfurls poems of childhood trauma, stories of a parent with dementia, and the complexity of having six siblings. Growing out of this, she begins to weave a more complex personal spirituality and sense of self. Her childhood was “a trail of twigs and discard—was somewhere here a nest?” Certainly these poems, woven together, create a deeply honest poem nest, inviting us in to explore vulnerability, safety, and the question of how each of us lives on our own thin branches. –Emily Wall, Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast, and author of Flame, Fist, and Fig.
Tall Tales, Briahn Kelly-Brennan
Briahn Kelly-Brennan is a poet who understands how the beauty of language swerves into meaning, how shadows can re-shape what we know, how sound can be an undertone to shift moments into awareness. Her poetry is like water moving over wide intricate stones—it ripples, pools and reflects. Her world is a carefully observed one, no word misplaced, no opportunity missed to unroll the gorgeous matter of existence or probe the mute and unfamiliar dark.
When the Cats Yawn, Kate McNairy
Venture into When the Cats Yawn and you will find quiet fireworks: each poem flowers into whimsical shapes, expands ineffably and lingers long afterward. Their sense is like a finely tuned violin discovering this beautiful, terrible world.
Kate McNairy is a minimalist poet inspired by Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, among others and she has published the chapbooks: June Bug, (2014), Light to Light (2016), and My Wolf (2021). Her poems have appeared in several journals including Third Wednesday, Raven’s Perch, Bluebird Word, Scarlet Dragonfly, and Local Gems.
Bottlecap Press
a face full of flowers, Samantha Hund
a face full of flowers explores detachment, inheritance, and the slow, strange beauty of unraveling. Spanning ten years of work, this collection is divided into three elemental movements—ROOTS, FEVER, BLOOD—that trace the speaker’s descent from quiet disassociation into feral grief, and then toward a mythic reclamation of identity.
Through confessional lyricism, violent tenderness, and fairytale logic, Hund’s poetry probes the blurry edge between dream and memory. Like a wound blooming in slow motion, each poem sings for mercy, reaches for connection, and dares you to bear witness.
The Girl and the Gifts, Colleen S. Harris
The poems in The Girl and the Gifts seamlessly weave myth, legend, family history, and love of land and seascape together into a compelling collection asking the reader to hold the tension of the opposites—the sacred and the mundane, the mythic and the quotidian. The poet asks us to interrogate how the family tales we inherit shape us, and how we can make space for ourselves while also paying homage to ancestry, memory, and the injuries and balms of human relationships.
What Happened Was, H.R. Thorn
What Happened Was is H.R. Thorn’s debut poetry collection that attempts to unravel the truths that make us human, the knots of secrets we share, and the veins of wounds we give each other—all with hands bound and tied. It is a culmination of memories, lingering moments, and heartbeats of a love that stings only once we let it.
This chapbook emerges from words raised, nurtured, and whittled in the Fall of 2024: a time in which the author found herself spliced between two places at once—Boston and New York City.
Brutal Lover, Angela Sophia
Angela Sophia wrote Brutal Lover over the course of her spring semester of her second year of college whilst at her family home. During her time at home, Angela Sophia was consumed by thoughts of mortality and the inevitable emotions that come along with it. Left maddened and mournful, Angela Sophia read through her old writings from previous years. This is when she found a poem she wrote her first year of college titled “Brutal Lover” which describes a deep sense of abhorrence and tenderness towards being human. After reading this poem, Angela Sophia began her creation of Brutal Lover, the chapbook.
Girl/Fool, Melanie DuBose
Girl/Fool is a collection of short prose poems that explore a sense of being outside and separate. Many poems detail the connecting thread between the natural world and the question that resides in all of us: what are we doing here, and how alone are we?
Inspired by the Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, the poems in Girl/Fool often toy with associations that are doubled, connections that are made and remade in new ways when the rules of grammar are undermined or ignored. An urgency runs through these poems which reminds us of the mystery in even the most ordinary and everyday object or occurrence.
Self-Vending, Ethan Palmer
In Self-Vending, Ethan Palmer becomes a machine of confession and misdirection, dispensing memories, dreams, and thoughtful oddities like miscellaneous brain snacks factory-sealed behind plexiglass. This collection functions as an earnest homage to the struggle of self-promotion, where each poem delivers a heavily processed and often unhealthy aspect of the poet’s own mechanized and poorly-maintained sense of self. While the poet bangs his head against a cosmic mirror in a futile effort to jolt loose the truth that dangles on a hook, just out of reach, a genuine love for the absurd leaks onto everything inside, ensuring a beautiful, albeit messy, treat.
all my names in one mouth, Samantha Yee
all my names in one mouth traces a journey across generations, languages, and geographies—from bound feet in old family stories to bare legs on a Vegas porch. Across these poems, Samantha Yee weaves the stories of ancestors, lovers, and selves into something whole. This is a book about inheritance: not just of bloodlines, but of silence, survivalism, rituals, expectations, and eventually, joy.
Womb, Eva Murphy
Serving as both an ode to her tiresome battle with infertility as well as a love letter to her two beloved children, Eva ventures into her own experience thus far in motherhood. In this collection of poetry, Eva showcases whimsical and sarcastic undertones while detailing her innermost yearnings, persistently intrusive thoughts and unapologetic love for her children.
With a lifelong affinity for writing and imagery, Eva Murphy writes lyrical nonfiction and poetry on topics such as relationships, grief and motherhood. Eva has recently made her formal writing debut with Banana Slug Books in their anthology, Spokane Campfire Stories. Womb is her first chapbook.
Garden Variety, Pat Miller
Pat Miller’s Garden Variety is a quietly visceral meditation on selfhood, dislocation, and the effort of surviving mundanely yet meaningfully. The poems are stitched together with intimacy in different forms – each piece full of fragmented thoughts, drifting observations, and half-formed realizations that move like weather through Miller’s mind. They are often rooted in physicality – the cold, the wind, the rain – and through this grounding, the reader is pulled into Miller’s efforts to understand time’s strange presence, the erosion of identity, and the elusive clarity of memory.
For the Dead Dreams of Others, Dan Schall
A man is stung by a wasp who claims to be his dead father. Another pictures gangsters in his blood during a cardiology exam. The angel Gabriel plays practical jokes at God’s dinner table. And an absent-minded homebody ponders microplastics in the ocean. In his debut chapbook, For the Dead Dreams of Others, Dan Schall explores these and other moments of tension and strangeness. The poems in this collection confront questions of spirituality, our changing climate, a disintegrating biosphere, and the risks we take in baring ourselves to those we love.
Flank(ed), Paul Koniecki
Set in the Midwest heart of the 1970’s rust belt, Flank(ed) is, at its core, the story of two boys growing up in the shadow of Milwaukee’s factories and breweries who find that when they have nothing else to count on at least they have each other. Like snowdrifts and ice and yeast in the air, danger seemed to always be around. Friendship, found family, alcoholism, schizophrenia, and fishing are all subjects that play significant roles in Timmy and Paulie’s formative years. We follow the pair from ages 4 to 18. Lacking the language then, we can look back and see children in the very real, very harrowing, situations of being raised by parents who were self-medicating for untreated mental illnesses. Questions of masculinity, femininity, and boys being the victims of abuse, mix like reflections in a room full of broken fun-house mirrors and remain as complicated today as then. What is lonelier than an unanswered question?
Leaving Baton Rouge, Parker Logan
Leaving Baton Rouge is a one-way ticket across the Gulf of Mexico’s American shores. From Orlando, Florida to New Orleans, Louisiana, these poems drive, fly, and conga their way through roommates, best friends, lovers, and poetry.
Parker Logan keeps these lines cooking around the center of what’s white hot and jumping. If you’re looking for a voyage, hop on this party bus, where Parker is both driver and the rider.
Don’t let go. Now swing., Colleen Hugo
Don’t let go. Now swing. details an almost painfully earnest love for the people and places that the author has thus far fallen into. By way of poetry and prose, Colleen illustrates the triumphs and pitfalls of having a chronically open heart, including but not limited to: unrequited queer yearning for a high school best friend, grief surrounding the health of aging family members, and the quiet affection of a brief summer fling.
In The Night, In The Dark, Allison Goldstein
A haunting ode to Universal Monsters, 80s slashers, and Final Girls, In The Night, In The Dark is a razor-sharp collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by classic 20th century horror films. From The Bride of Frankenstein’s first hiss to Pamela Voorhees searching for her son’s lost heart, each poem explores the cinematic chasm between dread and desire.
I Won’t Paint You Flowers, Scott Jordan Frink
I Won’t Paint You Flowers is a collection of poetry that refuses to romanticize suffering. Instead, it drags pain into the light unadorned, unedited, and unashamed. With sharp, minimalist lines, Scott Jordan Frink confronts themes of addiction, mental illness, and survival in a world more interested in diagnosis than understanding.
These poems are written in the burn—moments of emotional urgency and clarity that resist polish in favor of truth. Yet beneath the chaos lies the faint heartbeat of hope, not as a promise but as a possibility. This is not a redemption arc. It’s a reckoning—and a refusal to be silenced.
The Holiest Love I Know, Kelleen Moriarty
The Holiest Love I Know is a collection of unrequited love poems across time and shame. A spiral notebook analysis of what it feels like to have a crush on a girl, it is a bouquet of homilies, of private half-formed thoughts, and of aching desperation in the life cycle of adoration.
Kelleen Moriarty (she/her) is a writer and theatre artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Myself Am Ever Mine Own Counterfeit, Noah Berlatsky
Michelangelo’s sonnets are often an exercise in anti confession; the poet pledges that he does not love where he does, or pledges to love when he doesn’t. He laments being misunderstood even as he virtually begs for misunderstanding.
Translation also involves a confusion or obfuscation of identity, and these translations perhaps more than most, since the author does not read Italian. The poems here were mostly composed by referencing Google Translate, J.A. Symonds’ translations, and then wandering off where rhyme and inclination lead.
Some of these more or less follow Michelangelo’s meaning; some make the subtext less sub; some make the melodrama more drama; some argue with the originals or deliberately contradict them; all serve as a way to imagine oneself into the rhetoric and person of a great artist creating great art. These are thundering, impassioned, duplicitous sonnets that speak for us all—or, maybe, for someone else.
Poor Substitute, JP McDougald
A whirlwind tryst, a car-crash love, doomed from the start – but a drive so vibrant and alive, you can’t bring yourself to brake. What happens when it’s over and the wheels have stopped spinning? What other way is there to survive the ache than scribbling poetry in every margin as you become who you will be in the aftermath?
Poor Substitute isn’t just another break-up collection; it’s angsty and angry and honest. McDougald outlines the path from heartache and destruction to rediscovery and reclamation of oneself in imagery so thick, you can feel the southern humidity rising from the pages.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 7/1 and 7/31 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.