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 June 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.
Sarabande Books
Letters of the Alphabet Go to War, Lesyk Panasiuk, Ilya Kaminsky (Tr.)
In this chapbook, Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky offer a translation of Lesyk Panasiuk’s remarkable account of living in Bucha, Ukraine, during the apex of war and brutality at the hands of the Russian military. The result is a tremendous work that The Guardian describes as embodying “the idea of the rupture of language through the physical collapse of signs and lettering on buildings hit by missiles.” This slim book bears great weight.
Small Harbor Publishing
Swallow, Dabin Jeong
Swallow is a two-part hybrid poetry collection that explores grief, music, religion, and the tradition of elegiac writing. Faced with the unexpected death of their acquaintance and the incomprehensible grief that followed, the speaker examines the dimensions of the “right to grieve” through “digestible” lists, poetic passages, and haiku. The second part, “Swallow After,” written two years after the first part, conveys the lingering grief mixed with memories through a sonnet, free verse poetry, a recipe, and collages.
The Bodily Press
Supertrios (Disc 1), A.L. Nielsen
Drawing its form and impetus from the propulsive rhythms of the classic piano trio, A.L. Nielsen’s three line stanzas explore everything from the musical stylings of McCoy Tyner to physics to the afterlives of our politics. Supertrios (Disc 1) is the first in a series of musical meditations and lyrics unfolding within modernist traditions and affording the future a second chance.
His book Reading Race, winner of the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Gustavus Myers Citation for books “outstanding in helping shed light on bigotry in America” and the Kayden Award for the best book in the Humanities, has just been banned from the library of the United States Naval Academy.
Gasher Press
Transference, Katie Jean Shinkle
Transference is a collection of prose poems encapsulating unrequited queer desire between patient and therapist. Through an attentive use of address and apostrophe, the poems question the process of grief, what it means to “move on,” and the presence and absence of love on the psyche.
Wolfson Press
Triin Paja, Sleeping in a Field
If Sleeping in a Field does one thing, it showcases poet Triin Paja’s descriptive powers at their best. Her mission is to celebrate nature’s wonder and exquisite beauty without ignoring its menacing and violent shadows. She enters her poems through language that is stunning and elegant. If you’re lucky enough to remember an unplugged childhood, Paja’s poems will rekindle what might be diminished or lost by giving voice to what many of us recognize but can seldom articulate.
Moontide Press
Take Care, Mark Danowsky
Take Care is a minimalist collection of poems centered on caregiving in its many forms. Mental health issues, caregiver burnout, and related themes come into focus, at times, in these fraught poems, as does the desire to please, a kind of nursing, and the situational struggles that can result. Considerations are given to the genetic and environmental factors that complicate the caregiving experience.
Kelsay Books
The Heart of It, Alan Perry
Alan Perry is a poet and editor. His debut chapbook, Clerk of the Dead, was a finalist in the Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Competition, and was released by Main Street Rag Publishing (2020). His poems have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, San Pedro River Review, ONE ART, Gyroscope Review, Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere. Founder and Co-Managing Editor of RockPaperPoem, a Senior Poetry Editor for Typehouse Magazine, and a Best of the Net nominee, Alan lives with his wife in suburban Minneapolis, MN and Tucson, AZ.
boats against the current
Toothache in the Bone, Colleen S. Harris
Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming 2026), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014). Harris also co-edited Women Versed in Myth: Essays on Modern Women Poets (McFarland, 2016) and Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing, and Teaching (McFarland, 2012).
Seven Kitchens Press
What the Hollow Held, Rebekah Wolman
Selected as the 6th title in the A.V. Christie Series by Seven Kitchens Press, honoring women poets over the age of 50, these poems meld close attention to the natural world with the hard-won knowledge of being human–and mortal. “The slightest alteration,” one poem tells us, “yields regret” (“Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh”). The collection’s title is taken from a line in the poem “Late Father as Lost-Wax Casting,” which builds its striking, haunting metaphor with stunning skill.
Inkfish Press
Aphasia, Robert Allen
Robert Allen’s Aphasia is an expression of the confusion of tongues that can arise with love and desire. These sparse and deeply felt poems are about yearning, yearning for the understanding and notice of the loved subject. Romantic love does not exist in itself, it requires the gracious presence of another. Sometimes that recognition is a simple act of clear communication, and at other times, the connection is missed. The poems attempt to move beyond grief and loneliness and into a place of gratification and joy.
Bull City Press
We Are Not Where We Are, Matt Donovan, Jenny George
Since its publication in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has ensnared the American imagination. In We Are Not Where We Are, poets Matt Donovan and Jenny George perform a chapter-by-chapter erasure of Walden, challenging its deeply flawed beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and relationships between people and the land. The resultant poems embody Donovan and George’s collaborative spirit, unearthing in Thoreau’s text a pluralistic vision of limitless possibility and wild beauty.
Remainder, Stefanie Kirby
In the opening poem of Remainder, a woman swallows a bird; in another, a woman is a mouth. Daughters are tucked into windows or birthed as singing goats. As she dwells in the aftermath of birthing, feeding, and losing, Stefanie Kirby tenderly resigns herself to a journey of endings, discovering that what lingers—the remainder—echoes with a bittersweet ache.
Staircase Books
From the Distances of Sleep: Gloss Arias I, Daniel Tobin
This first installment in Tobin’s Gloss Arias consists of imagistic meditations on the eternal uncertainty of images. There are arias here, yes, but the “gloss” in the series title cues us to contradictory impulses: surface luster that masks the truth, commentary that obscures while it explicates. Gracefully, provocatively, Tobin casts his eye on the incandescent present: “From Highbridge Tower / black sparks of birds // carve the moment’s runes / on the sky’s slate.” — Erica Funkhouser
Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England, Danielle Legros Georges
In Danielle Legros Georges’ work, the dead dance across the page in light. Using found text and the voice of “Africans Themselves in New England” Legros Georges crafts lyrics in ode to resistance. She weaves defiance with the poetics and does not shy from the truth and horror of slavery. Afterall, Danielle Legros Georges makes it clear: this body of work is not about the inhumane but rather, it is the lyrical documentation of overt resistance and the declaration of life from Black and African folks who were enslaved. In couplets enriched in imagery, Legros Georges beckons us to remember. In each poem, breath is offered and suspended. My god— these poems—this poet. — Porsha Olayiwola
Bottlecap Press
The Vault: A Collection of Beautiful Things, Aaron Jameson
The Vault is an intimate exploration of emotions, relationships, and identity, meant to be as fleeting and raw as the experiences it captures. Each poem offers a moment of reflection and connection, inviting readers to find their own meanings within the words.
Through these pages, Aaron shares a piece of his soul, hoping that his words bring solace, understanding, and a sense of belonging. The Vault is more than a collection of poems—it’s an invitation to find comfort in shared experiences and strength in the power of storytelling.
Buried and Blossoming, Shannon McNicholas
Shannon McNicholas’s debut chapbook, Buried and Blossoming, is a memoir written in poetry, a bildungsroman, a tale of trauma and triumph. It is the story of her life, told in the context of her mother’s open heart surgery–beginning to end. McNicholas’s poetry has been described as rural and queer.
McNicholas uses a variety of poetic forms and lyrical free verse to get her point across–point being, every story is shaped by experiences, people are who they are because of both their difficult and delightful experiences. McNicholas celebrates both the journey and the destination.
Love, Longing, and Other Chemical Imbalances, Greg Massaro
Love, Longing, and Other Chemical Imbalances is an 18 poem chapbook, chronicling millennial disillusionment, fractured romance, and the absurdity of wanting anything at all. Anchored by an irreverent voice and New York nihilism, these poems drift from the domestic to depraved from Ninja Turtles to rubbery eggs.
Greg Massaro writes poems that read like texts you were never supposed to see. His work explores fractured intimacy, imagined connection, and the punchline-shaped wounds of modern life.
weight is the gravitational force that pulls us to the earth, Remi Recchia
Narrated in just twelve interconnected quatrains, weight is the gravitational force that pulls us to the earth is a chapbook between dreams. The poems find the speaker located in a dreamscape much like our own world but with startling deviations: carpooling to work (with a dragon), going to the dentist (to find diamonds in one’s gum tissue), footwear accessories (bedazzled with larvae). The tone is, in turns, quippy, earnest, and lyric.
The Red-Tail, Adam Sarlan
The Red-Tail collects seventeen different birds important to the poet’s life- bluejays, cormorants, geese, egrets, and gulls, among others. The poet finds a certain wisdom and friendship in these birds while studying their everyday habits and listening to their teachings. The poems in The Red-Tail challenge us to sit with the birds, listen to and learn from their lessons, and continue to “rise to these trills / every morning with pleasure, / with joy for this simple life.”
This debut chapbook also explores the idea of living a life “worth writing a chorus about” while mourning lost loved ones.
Is This Ok?, Jeremy Scott Munnings
Is This Ok? is a queer, mythic, and pop-culture stained chapbook of 14 poems by Jeremy Scott Munnings. The poems explore these themes through a raw and vulnerable perspective that can be grotesque and tender all in the same breath. The poems do not ask permission, but they also feel guilty for that as well. There’s an internalized shame pervasive as well as hope for an answer to all the questions that surround and pervade these poems.
Sunflowers Will Still Bend, Vita Duva
Sunflowers Will Still Bend is a tender, evocative poetry chapbook that captures the raw edges of the divine feminine coming of age with passion and vulnerability. Through vivid imagery and honest reflection, these poems explore the fragile beauty of growing up – navigating intimacy, heartbreak, identity, healing, and the quiet strength found in bending without breaking. Written for young adults standing at the threshold of transformation, this collection is a gentle reminder to readers of any age that even when the world shifts, like sunflowers, we turn toward the light.
Poems of the Winter Palace, Barbara Krasner
In Poems of the Winter Palace, poet and historian Barbara Krasner applies her lyrical talent, especially in the form of prose and persona poetry, to address a set of images she curated from the eclectic collection at The Hermitage Museum, housed in The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia. Twenty-three poems engage in conversation with European history, allegorical, genre, and abstract paintings from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In the first section, “Bring Back the Liberal Arts,” Krasner calls for a return of the Liberal Arts while bringing attention to the classical world’s Socrates, Pegasus and Andromeda, realities of Antwerp fish market, and color theory as represented by Dutch masters Rubens and Snyder and modernist Kandinsky, among others.
The Scorched Psalms, Daniel Culver
The Scorched Psalms is a liturgy for the heretics, a gospel for those who find sacredness in ruin and redemption in desire. In these poems, Daniel Culver writes toward an unshackled divine—one that blossoms not in temples or texts, but in salt-laced skin, fungal sacrament, ecological collapse, and the breath between lovers. It’s a collection of ecstatic resistance, of whispered prayers in the ruins of theology, and of wild devotions to the Earth, the body, and the sacred feminine long buried beneath doctrine.
Let’s Do Our Best to Enjoy It, Joseph Edwin Haeger
Let’s Do Our Best to Enjoy It cracks open the concept of time and attempts to pull apart the fallibility of this man-made construct, exploring the little moments we tend to let pass by. Haeger focuses in on this while asking the simple question: why? This is a collection that wants you to discover how life is nothing more than a series of moments strung together, making a composite of something meaningful.
Living Like Lions and Bears, Sara Amis
A feral Goldilocks gnaws bones given her by Mother Bear, a newly-formed woman escapes her creator by sprouting wings and talons, and android women suspect they are not being told the truth. Fairy tales, myth, science fiction, and memory combine and shapeshift. Each of these poems by Sara Amis is a door, and once you pass through the ground may shift suddenly under your feet or you may wake up and learn that a hundred years passed while you were sleeping.
Moon Child, McKenna Matus
Sometimes home manifests as something you can touch. Bricks to foundations to shutters to peppermint candles and Christmas trees. Sometimes home only frolics in the consistent and ever changing song loop of your mind and ruminating longing. Moon Child, a collection of reveries made up of bows, bones, and ramblings, seeks to unlock the truest rendition of home…
What comes beneath the Earth.
Where I’m Going, C. John Graham
Where I’m Going responds to uncertainties of mortality and loss with hints of spiritual survival as it confronts complexity in relationships, the conundrum of aging, and threats of ecological erosion and pandemic. Traversing a diverse landscape, we meander through geology, archaeology, aviation, the emptiness of space, the Garden of Eden, and Nepalese family life. Poems attempt to name while acknowledging the futility of doing so and assert that answers may lie in the emptiness of space, the human pulse, or a glacial rivulet. The immutable law of gravity is invoked to frame the frailty of the human condition with compassion, to expose the falsity of myths, and give tribute to a departed poet.
The Musings and Ramblings of a 21st Century Romantic, Ava Lauren Grayson
In her riveting, heart-throbbing, and witty debut poetry collection, The Musings and Ramblings of a 21st Century Romantic, Ava Lauren Grayson explores what it’s like being a female 19th century romantic trapped in the year 2025, where love is seemingly doomed, chivalry is dead, jobs are scarce, and heartbreak is normalized. To be a twenty-something in this generation means not knowing where your feelings stand with anyone, where your life will take you, where you best fit in, or how to stay optimistic amongst a pessimistic society.
Loveless, Breezy Jewel
Loveless is a haunting collection of poems that explores the silent desperation of pining for something seemingly unattainable-unconditional love, and makes known the emotional cost of seeking it in places that prove barren.
This is not a collection of learning, but rather indulging in knowledge already gathered in the form of old wounds. This is a portrait of violent devotion, the unrelenting aching to consume mere breadcrumbs when that is all that is offered.
A(mend)ing Fabrications, Samantha Giesen
Often, being a woman, or being feminine, is associated with the color pink. Beginning with a “little pink dress,” A(mend)ing Fabrications discusses a queer woman’s journey with the color pink. Throughout childhood, she loved the color; however, as she grows, her relationship with color evolves as she grapples with her queerness.
Threading together queerness, femininity, and color, this collection explores the impact of societal expectations and associations.
Finishing Line Press
All Saints and Other American Sonnets, Jack J. B. Hutchens
All Saints and Other American Sonnets is a lyrical exploration of the intersections between personal memory, cultural history, and the poetic tradition. This collection meditates on themes of loss, resilience, and the enduring spirit of human connection. From the Kansas plains to Poland’s storied cities, the poems weave through landscapes both physical and emotional, drawing from the poet’s life and ancestral heritage.
Moments of stark labor and tender intimacy intermingle, capturing the timeless choreography of work, family, and solitude. The text dances between reverence for the past and confrontation with modernity, presenting a tapestry of voices — of workers, saints, ghosts, and the poet’s own family. Anchored by vivid imagery and deft craft, these sonnets delve into humanity’s shared struggles and quiet triumphs, inviting readers to reflect on the beauty and tragedy of our collective stories.
Restland, Nicholas Barnes
The title for Nicholas Barnes’ poetry debut comes from a cluster of eponymously named memorial parks found across America. The poems in this chapbook-length collection comprise a bone depository in verse; a cemetery of song. Restland is a journey through youth, lost innocence, and self-discovery. Enter through the wrought-iron gates and see the mossy tombs, decaying bouquets, and looming thunderclouds. Dive into this phantom dreamland, a spiritual oasis where fluid memory and hazy time reign. Where you can bury your demons six feet under earth, grass, worms, and stone. Where you can wake from the darkness and face tomorrow with love in your heart and silver wings on your back.
And the Weather Remains the Same, Natalie Kimbell
In Natalie Kimbell‘s second chapbook, And the Weather Remains the Same, grief is a powerful force. In these poems, Kimbell shares personal losses of love, youth, and death. Often, Kimbell looks to the natural world to explain, comfort, or grieve with her. Sometimes, nature seems compassionate while on other occasions the natural world seems unaffected by her sorrow. Kimbell examines loss in all its forms, whether it be the loss during 9/11, the loss of a lover, or the loss of a loved one. These poems offer hope via humor or vibrant images. Even though the subject matter reveals the raw nature of hurt and loss, in The Weather Remains the Same, Natalie Kimbell leaves the reader hopeful.
The Bird Church, Marisol Cortez
Written in the years after returning home to South Texas, The Bird Church tends to the urban microfauna—the grackles, koi, chicharras, cosmos, feral parrots, snoutnosed butterflies, but also the ornamental fruit and children—which persist in the unsupervised scars of highways and inland refineries. Less a poetry of witness than of attention, The Bird Church considers “what is here”: the ordinary life that persists and survives amid the occupations of colonial history and its current climate and political crises.
Adiabatic Flame, Shari Crane Fox
Adiabatic Flame explores the intersections between love and death in its many forms. Like the term “adiabatic,” which refers to a reaction where heat is not exchanged with the environment, the emotional combustion is acted out, but largely unspoken. The natural world reflects this inner conflict, as well as the transience of relationships and life throughout the work. The pieces explore loving, losing, and loving again with startling metaphor, intimate revelations, and humor. The final poem culminates in a playful encounter with Death, personified as an alluring woman in designer shoes, who, over drinks, confides a reluctance to end the lives of newlyweds and the owners of new puppies. Death decides to buy the narrator a drink, delaying the inevitable unnamed. In a collection containing multiple contest winners and a Best of the Net nominee, Adiabatic Flame navigates the intersections of love and death with raw vulnerability and ironic humor.
compass, Angela Brown
Compass is a collection of impressions rather than a finished work, messy verses of vivid imagery rather than realistic depictions. Each piece aims to capture the fleeting nature of a moment: the sensory effect of a scene from my life rather than its detailed accuracy. This impressionistic style of writing allows the reader to feel and experience each verse as if it were their own. My poetry is merely a guide, a compass. The reader’s emotional response completes the work.
August 24, 1957, Robert Cooperman
Robert Cooperman was born and bred in Brooklyn, New York, where the action of August 24, 1957 takes place on fateful morning. Luckily, Cooperman survived his little encounter with a glass vestibule door that had a hairline fracture in it and eventually went on to leave New York for Denver and grad school. Cooperman has taught at the University of Georgia, Bowling Green State University, and the University of Baltimore. His poetry has appeared in over twenty full-length collections and ten chapbooks, August 24, 1957 being the latest one. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry in 2000. Draft Board Blues was named One of the Ten Best Books by a Colorado Author for 2017, by Westword Magazine. Cooperman lives in Denver with his wife Beth.
Yearnings, Stephanie Harper
Yearnings is an exploration of love in all it’s manifestations. This brief collection of poems is grounded in quiet moments and concrete imagery, but at it’s heart is all the joy, pain, and longing of what it means to give oneself over wholly and vulnerably to loving another soul and, in turn, connecting to a larger context of feeling deeply amidst all the broken pieces of our world.
The Body is No More Than a Greening Thing, Louisa Muniz
The Body is No More Than a Greening Thing is a lyrical exploration of life in all its facets. This collection weaves together poems that celebrate the body, as well as themes of childhood, the journey of motherhood, the ache of loss and the quiet power of resilience. Deeply rooted in the interconnectedness of all living things, this collection is a meditation on growth, renewal, and the enduring beauty found in even the most fragile moments. From elegies to invocations these poems traverse the natural world and reach out with an urgent voice to God. With longing and reverence, they celebrate the beauty and power of the ever-evolving spirit that binds us all.
Autobiography of Clay, Anita Feng
In one slim collection of prose poems, Anita Feng tells an intimate story of that extraordinary raw material, clay, starting from the beginning of the cosmos to what we can dig out of our own backyard. Blending science and mythology along with her life-long career in working with clay, Anita examines the question: what is clay really, and how should we behave together? How is it possible to make an original life out of unruly mud? And how much will it cost? As these questions imply, to understand clay is the same as understanding ourselves. From the poem, “Recycling”, Like the unfinished life, unfired clay can be reclaimed. There’s no need to throw out all those brow-beaten and heavily misbegotten bowls. No need to hoard them either.
Saying Goodbye to Thomas, Lenora Rain-Lee Good
Saying Goodbye to Thomas is a collection of poetry, mostly written during Thomas’s last year, and immediately following his death. What is it like for a man to face death? What is it like for his friends and family? Especially once the date and time are known, and controlled by him? Thomas helped edit some of these poems, and for those who knew him, they know that guarantees humor resides in these pages. As well as pathos. And on every page is love—a man for life, a father for sons, friends and families for the man.
Nepenthe Radiant, Aimee Seu
The nepenthe is a mythical drug that quells all worry, grief and pain. Aimee Seu returns after her battering ram of a first collection, Velvet Hounds (winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize), to spellbind once again. In Nepenthe Radiant, we pass into a world where there are symphonies in every silence, peace where we expect cacophony and nightmare in the silken fold of a kiss. Here, torment and bliss intermingle in one potent and addictive tincture. “I am now a part of the living’s selfish need to depict the dead in heaven,” Seu writes. Yet, the grand distances of these narratives span farther—shadowed underworlds, lost possible universes, spinning dreamscapes, nearly-unspeakable loneliness. Seu’s biracial, pansexual poetics examine poverty, addiction, violence and mental illness with tenderness and moxy. Sapphic ceremonials, elegies for wayward teenage heroes, the ransacked temple of youth, ecstasies of a tumultuous, obsessive romance, all unravel before us in the blazing hallucinogenics of Seu’s rich and urgent rendering. Reader, fall into the siren echoes of these pages, their one moment raucous and swollen, then barrenly low tides. Get lost inside heartbreak’s “kaleidoscopic, continuous bloom.” Gaze into the “stained glass cornea” of the beloved.
Is There Anyone in America?, Pamela Smith
Our super-saturated 24/7 life sometimes batters, sometimes soothes, always causes us to question where we are and why things are happening. This collection of short poems is the fruit of days of reflection on what it means to live in the USA today. The 28 poems collected here are meant to be lyrical and quizzical, earth-bound and ethereal as they explore such varied topics as the environment, military installations, the quiet of Southern nights, the victimization of African American boys, the influence of mass media, and what it might mean to be a saint.
MAMA, Michelle Naka Pierce
In this poignant meditation, Michelle Naka Pierce writes: Memory is all one body. Part historical document / part mourning song, Mama documents a nonagenarian mother in cognitive decline and her stories of World War II while living on Tsukishima / Moon Island. With memorī (Japanese rōmaji of メモリー) playing on continuous loop, the text leans into the Zuihitsu tradition of “following the brush”—stitching together poem, pillowbook sketch, excursion, fragment, letter, evocation, and grief as they arise. Illness creates urgency, serving as a catalyst for archiving and observing how memory itself functions. These crystalline prose poems unfold recursively, in variation, revealing their mutable surface. A textured vestige of inheritance, Mama bears witness to these accounts of loss, survival, devastation, endurance, intergenerational trauma, and resilience embroidered onto the map of war’s scars.The past resides in the present and the future too. Each moment circling on itself. Cradling time.
Incompleteness Theory, Danèlle Lejeune
If you ́ve never wished to trail poetry ́s shooting stars through a lens of science and math, Danèlle Lejeune ́s The Incompleteness Theory, an ardent love letter written across “space and time,” will shift your mind and alter your heart in astronomically stellar ways. Using images that dazzle and awaken “like glitter on the waves,” Lejèune navigates us through galaxies of devotion, desire, grief, fear, abuse, pain, and geocide with turns at once dexterious and tender. Once pulled into her orbit, you ́ll float past “bird sized geometries,” “tiny particles of minutes and seconds,” “star hungry darkness and stinger, fractal eyes.” Upon landing, you ́ll have discovered the interconnectedness of everything, the thread of love that, although incomplete, binds the entire universe together.
–Julie Weiss, author of Rooming with Elephants (Kelsay Books, 2025)
With All His Wounds the Sun Rises, Villavicencio Barras
In his second bilingual collection of poems, With All His Wounds the Sun Rises, Se levanta el sol con todas sus heridas, Moises Villavicencio Barras shares with his reader a profound vision of his ancestors, language, love, Nature, and the time that we find our ourselves in. His raw, powerful, and lyrical poetry resonates with the experiences of a survivor, reminding us of our resilience and strength. Moises Villavicencio Barras has a strong sense of being a survivor. From the first to the last word, he reminds us that Earth is our source of power, beauty, and hope.
She/Her, Ellen Hernandez
She/Her is a series of poems that express the many and varied facets of femaleness as experienced over decades and stages of life. From the child who seeks a parent’s approval to the mother who anticipates her child’s independence, each one offers reflections on those universal experiences that connect us as humans. Explorations of life’s tragedies and triumphs, joys and losses through marriage, career, parenthood, faith, travel, wellness, illness, growing, and aging, reveal the complicated process of understanding one’s identity and accepting oneself unconditionally.
Without Woman or Body, Allison Field Bell
Without Woman or Body reveals the life of a young woman as she reconciles with her sexuality, her mental illness, and the distinct memories of abuse that haunt her. These poems travel through a range of shifting geographies: from deserts to coastlines to the domestic spaces of the home. Here, Field Bell asks how are stories lived? How do they become? And what is bigger than the body when everything we know is confined within it?
Given Time: a mother-daughter cancer memoir, Christine Beck
Given Time is a memoir in poetry about the breast cancer of Christine Beck’s mother and her own recent diagnosis. These poems juxtapose loss and hope, then and now, and two women—mother and daughter—as they twine their lives together, much like the trunks of the olive trees painted by Van Gogh. This collection resounds with the awareness that we all offer gifts to those we love. Some we recognize at the time if we’re lucky. Some we don’t see until we are far apart. Christine Beck and her mother live in these pages as the vibrant spirits they were and continue to be. Like yarn carried on the underside of an intricate knitted pattern, they are “linked by strands of pink.”
Down from the Sycamores, Richard Holinger
Down from the Sycamores recognizes artistic feats, both fatuous and fabulous: from a Centre Pompidou street artist to Le Louvre’s masterpieces; from intransigents throwing insults across subway tracks to intricate inlays and tapestries of the Loire Valley’s chateaux; from seductive Parisian nights to readers of the night sky seeking landfall. These lyric poems pay homage to the human passion for shared connectedness—with the past, with nature, and with their fellow earth voyagers. Many poems originally appeared in notable literary journals, including Boulevard, The Texas Review, Chelsea, Rhino, and elsewhere. Richard Burgin, Boulevard’s founding editor, nominated “Four Paintings in the Louvre” for a Pushcart Prize.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 6/1 and 6/30 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.