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 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.
Driftwood Press
Mega-Galaxies, Elizabeth J. Coleman
“From a street-corner bodega to the Serengeti Plain to the ‘bell-jazz of our galaxy,’ these poems find meaning in all spaces. I appreciated these poems for their steady voice, precision, and how they often quietly wrestle with big questions of the human spirit. Chapbooks might be ‘small’ by definition, but this collection feels rich and expansive; the contents of Mega-Galaxies push us toward something vast and infinite.” — Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Gasher Press
Self-Portrait as Chimera in a Convex Mirror, Trevor Ketner
In resurrecting and expanding the Oulipian form of the chimera, Trevor Ketner in self-portrait as chimera in a convex mirror and other poems creates a lyric vessel for magical juxtaposition and connection. The long poem at the center of the chapbook employs the syntactic DNA of John Ashbery’s own Convex Mirror; it scaffolds the accrued language of Ketner’s abiding interests in natural and domestic spaces and demonstrates the rich potential and play in contemporary procedural poetics. A mix of formal innovation and tradition, experimentation and pattern, self-portrait as chimera in a convex mirror and other poems may be best described as a tenderly constructed ritual in train-hopping across its imagined poetic landscape. By combining language across eras, cultures, disciplines, and aesthetics, the poems herein suggest that, given we are the culmination of the causes and effects that preceded us, we are each perhaps chimeras ourselves.
The Poetry Box
Moon Talk, Nathalie Le Breton
Moon Talk is a journey inspired by the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and a breast cancer diagnosis. It is foremost a journey toward light while attempting to express the complexities of relationships and accept the mysteries of life and death.
Nathalie Le Breton grew up in the Southwest of France. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works, writes, and studies plant magic. Moon Talk is her first chapbook.
Grayson Books
Bold, Marvelous, Lisa Beech Hartz
Winner of the 2026 Grayson Books Chapbook Competition, the poems in this collection center on the photographer Doris Ulmann and her subjects, especially Appalachian craftsmen, musicians, and ordinary folks during the early part of the 20th century. The photographer’s curiosity and unflinching gaze, as well as her empathy and humanity are evident in the poems.
Small Harbor Publishing
Dog Woman, Melinda Freudenberger
After a night out, BABY encounters Dog Woman, a version of herself who resembles a dog. BABY resents what Dog Woman represents–all that she would rather repress–while Dog Woman must now contend with a body she didn’t ask for. Together, as they learn to live under the same roof, they re-imagine time, fall in love, and irritate the wound.
Lily Poetry Chapbooks
young girl in the flower of time, Kathleen Hellen
“Kathleen Hellen’s poems skip across the page, daring you to exhale, they scuttle in your mouth and rattle in your heart. The young the girl the flower the time all speak at once, grasping at connection in the wilderness and wildness of adolescence. You cannot look away – the poignancy of vulnerability, the meanness of the world that seeks to bruise the most tender petals – in these fiery poems of defilement, beauty and spirit triumph.” —Mary Buchinger, author of There Is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated
Flume Press
Animals I Never Saw, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ Animals I Never Saw is an experimental collection of poetry in which lost histories are re-recorded, ornamental birds are de-taxidermied, and the echoes of extinction reach the ears of the future. Through a blend of prose, poetry, and structurally innovative forms, Andrews breathes life back into the Hemignathus Procerus, an extinct species of bird, a used-to-be native species of the Hawai’ian islands, and asks us to reexamine what it means to be a neighbor of the living and the dead.
The Dogcatchers, WLS
In a not-so-distant future The Dogcatchers are employed by the state to dispose of the bodies of dead animals. It is their job. Through prose poems littered with deep nostalgia and strangled by the inevitable, catastrophic conclusion of the Anthropocene, we learn that their work is to re-learn how we might turn toward one another in a time of crisis. How we might re-wild, be humbled (become dirt), re-member– join with the non-human in their suffering. How we might die well, without heroics. What would it mean to please an ant? To answer to the geese? The gagged creek?
Bottlecap Press
If You Can Hear This, Victor McConnell
If You Can Hear This is a collection of poems that explores aloneness, grief, and love in modern America. Tender moments of parenthood are interspersed with narratives that travel through landscapes both banal and absurd.
Lovers wade into a river at night, speed traps remind us of fragility, and an old man watering tugs at the heart. Ultimately, we are left pondering not only where we will be in the end, but what (and who) will be left when we’re gone.
This Is How I, Riley Danvers
What happens to hearts searching for love? What happens when hearts broken by unrequited and disappointed love keep searching for love? What happens when they find it? This Is How I is a glimpse into the mental and emotional struggle that comes from finding new love after losing old love.
Written from the perspective of a speaker who is actively falling in love with someone, This Is How I explores the anxiety and excitement and romance and uncertainty of a new relationship as it fills and moves through her body. Questions lead to searching which leads to reflection on the past and an honest exclamation of the desires she doesn’t know how to repress or confess. This Is How I is an examination of how vulnerability and the choice to keep pursuing love, even in the wake of continued heartbreak, can create a life that is beautiful, even in its imperfections.
Where the Road Begins, R. J. Gooseman
Following in the footsteps of Shel Silverstein—with a dirty, boozy twist— R. J. Gooseman’s Where the Road Begins is a chapbook made to get a laugh out of anybody. Inside you’ll find a beaver in therapy, a mime burning silently in a house fire, a bathroom sink that quits its job, an orgy that goes questionably right…
If you feel too dumb for most poetry, are too dumb for most poetry, or are a smart (you’re not) burnout nostalgic for the days of sitting crisscross applesauce on a sticky classroom carpet listening to funny rhyming poems, then pick up a copy of Where the Road Begins today.
Easy Does It, Heather Dittmer Davis
Easy Does It explores the theme of memory as a portal to self-discovery and future becoming, tracing the lines into the past as a dream-like endeavor. This work explores identity through its often incongruent and comical moments in parenthood, marriage, and being human. Themes of queer family life, feminism, spirituality, and motherhood intersect to create an experience of depth and hilarity. This collection shines with spiritual reflections, societal commentary, and bares its soul for the reader to join a friend in question and wonder alike.
Swim Poems, Beth Winegarner
Beth Winegarner’s Swim Poems is a collection of brief poems written in the afterglow of swimming in the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay. Each one is a tribute to noticing the ever-changing nature of place: sea-birds and other wildlife, currents and tides, fellow swimmers and the writer’s own temperaments.
Written over the course of a single year of regular swims, these poems also explore the unseen nature of water and its connection to ancestors and the dead. They question and reframe humans’ relationship to open water and remind us that humans are part of nature, including aquatic nature, and that access to clean waterways is crucial to our overall well-being.
A Key Without a Door, Dalal Yaqub
A Key Without A Door is a personal recollection of Palestinian livelihood through a liminal or out-of-place sense of being. Moving through memory and inheritance, homeland and exile, this collection of poetry and prose delves into what it means to belong to a place that exists simuntaneously as a geographical space, folktale, and longing. Within lyrical reflections that are rooted in the symbol of the Palestinian right-to-return, this work traces Palestinian being or identity not only by dispossession displacement, but by defiance; carrying the homeland of Palestine in the body while navigating life elsewhere, as an American citizen.
New Chicago: An oratorio with or without music, Patrick T. Reardon
New Chicago is an incantatory tour through a gritty, mystical and biblical Chicago with side trips to the rest of America and the world. It is a fever-dream vision of pain and outrage, kindness and embrace.
Inspired by the libretto of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah: An Oratorio, New Chicago is an anthem of the unity of all people, suffering the same suffering, confused with the same confusions, each a sinner and a saint. “My soul among souls,/an endless field of souls, lilies, arrayed in many colors…”
New Chicago is the psalm chant, the gut howl, the trumpet blast of each “soul behind the skin.” It is “all manner of thing.” It is Brother Suffering “hugged to my chest because what else?”
Finishing Line Press
IN A PLACE, AT A TIME, Cheryl Howard
IN A PLACE, AT A TIME is a reflection on youth and age, traveling backward and forward in time and pausing here and there to suggest timely and timeless lessons, hopes, dreams. Geography figures prominently in the chapbook: the ways in which people and places interact and create identity, make us who we are. In this case, New Mexico is the “blue plate special.”
Can you see her, the moon?, Erika Nichols-Frazer
Can you see her, the moon? examines how we heal from trauma and grief, specifically pregnancy loss and a world that is struggling in so many ways. Can our own personal grief matter while also holding collective trauma? How can we heal as individuals and communities? How do we talk about difficult things and support each other in hard times? How do we find joy again? Can you see her, the moon? explores these questions and what it means to be a young woman struggling to build a family with the person she loves, grieving private losses while the world faces global destruction.
A Wild Ride, Louise Kantro
A Wild Ride gallops through the political and social landscape of individuals, some from real life, some fictional, who have suffered from policies either created by the government or unchecked under a regime without empathy. From the ill-treatment of Native Americans in boarding schools; family separation of immigrants and refugees; struggles caused bysexual harassment; traps created by gangs, trafficking, and the foster care system; tragedies resulting from policies about abortion and guns, life in the US is not safe. After the extreme malaise many experienced after the 2024 national elections, the poet urges action and unity.
Poems for Supper, Leah Stenson
In Poems for Supper, Leah Stenson serves up a feast of verse drawn from decades of love, longing, marriage, separation, and reunion. Plumbing emotional depth, these lovely lyrical poems trace a journey spanning continents and the complex terrain of a lifelong partnership. From youthful passion to the maturity of a mended bond, the poems are steeped in memory, myth, and quiet resilience. Poems for Supper is both deeply personal and universally resonant—a meditation on impermanence, endurance, and the poetry of everyday life.
Wet Season, Connie Hills
Connie Hills’s debut poetry collection, Wet Season is a crop of juicy riff-driven poems ripe with sensuality, clarity and humor. Here is a poet who dives into the ordinary and surfaces with the sublime—whether she’s riding on a train, watching surfers, looking at worms or facing vision loss. In free-verse lines studded with physical detail, we travel with Connie to see Van Gogh’s grave in Auvers-sur-Oise, to sight Bengal tigers in Rajasthan and circle home to her native California coast— where portraits & elegies to her beloveds rest: her dying mother, beloved teacher, chosen sister and dear dog. Come enter this temple of Zen-like poems tattooed with a meditative mind.
Steward of the Blooms, Camden Michael Jones
Steward of the Blooms is a meditation on the varied act of tending—to beloveds, to blooms, to words, to onself—and gives balance to the scientific and the natural without cloying sentiment. From the cosmos to the feathers of a sparrow to gallium arsenide, the speaker of this collection is one and the beautiful same, digging into the tenderness of life’s finitude, asking what is it to be a single body within the earth’s larger body, and beyond. Let these poems, let this meditation, guide the reader spellbound by embodiment in affirmation of life’s magnitude and minutiae.
Sisters in Time, Rosemary Herbert
If ever there was a gift to a poet, it is the chance to unearth the remains of a woman of her age, if not of her time. Stemming from Rosemary Herbert’s work uncovering a pagan burial in a fourth-century, Roman-era, Christian cemetery in Winchester, England, Sisters in Time depicts life on an archeological dig, and revels in ruminations on the strangely intimate and reverent experience of becoming acquainted – through their bones and grave finds – with figures from the distant past. These poems transport the reader to the juncture of then and now, where the lives of two women separated by centuries become as surely joined as one skeleton’s mended bones. Here, the poet finds herself fated to give new life to her unknown sister in time, whose eternal resting place she revealed in the pursuit of archeological history.
Wild Heart, Karin Uphoff
Wild Heart moves through the reader like the seasons, drenching with sunlight and rain. Each nuanced poem reveals how humanity weaves into the flowing energy connecting all things. This chapbook includes poems of the author’s communion with nature as a child, which nurtured a sense of belonging that carried into adulthood where she explores loss and grief, resilience and gratitude with a sprinkle of whimsey and humor. These poems also touch on how human action can create separation and how we may come back into balance by cherishing what nature has to teach us. In a world of complication and strife, Uphoff’s words call in the quiet power of equanimity and reverence for all life. Dear Reader, “lay bare your amaranthine heart” and enter fully into these transformational poems.
The Undressing of a Moon, Elaine Nadal
The Undressing of a Moon is a lullaby for the brokenhearted. It addresses the human desire for love while depicting how trauma can sometimes impact relationships. Peeling away the layers of complexity in the human experience, it paints a moon reflecting a light that leads towards a path of discovery, forgiveness, self-love, hope, and fulfillment.
Elaine Nadal is Poet Laureate of Milford, CT. She is a writer and educator. She is the author of When and Sweat, Dance, Sing, Cut, both published by Finishing Line Press.
Solo Duet, Greg Nelson
Solo Duet unfolds a timeless journey of heartbreak and rebirth. The poems find paths into life’s sustaining light, distilling romantic love lost and rediscovered, the challenges and joys of parenthood, and nature’s mysterious beauty, into clear-eyed transcendence. Eight poignant poems focused on a father’s love for his son shape the heart of the collection. Together, father and son learn, grow and lift each other up, embodying the Renaissance ideal of masculinity as sensitivity coupled with strength. Across a variety of forms and techniques, Solo Duet reaches out to the reader and invites them in, celebrating life with vision and humility, without sugarcoating its trials.
The Opal Flare, Amy Randolph
The poems collected in this chapbook were written over a period between my mother’s death and the height of the Covid pandemic that claimed so many lives. My friends lost friends and close relatives. My students lost friends and close relatives. During the peak of the pandemic, my father passed away. He had to live out his days confined to an assisted living facility in Texas. I was unable to attend my mother’ funeral (I was recovering from surgery), and Covid kept me from attending my father’s funeral service. For a long time, I thought of myself as the “unfilial” daughter. These poems are not “about” my experiences, nor do they evade them. Instead, they take them on in the more mysterious realm of the unconscious. One might think of them as “soul-poems,” or “sorrowing poems” with intimations of hope.
Meditations on Rising, Angela Goodrich
Meditations on Rising traces the journey that so many women now face in navigating divorce later in life after decades of marriage. The poems focus on gathering oneself after collapse—and how attention itself becomes an act of resistance. These poems are thoughtful reckonings on motherhood, shedding the histories we carry and the personal responsibility to hold grief with wonder. The book explores rising as a return: to breath, to voice and to agency. Faith, too, is reimagined—not as certainty, but as practice: patience, forgiveness, silence, and the daily labor of choosing life over bitterness. Meditations on Rising is a courageous witness to what it takes to rise—not by leaving pain behind, but by learning how to live honestly within it.
Saxophones and Dripping Faucets, Becky Nicole James
Saxophones and Dripping Faucets is a bildungsroman that demonstrates how connection stitches or shatters character and paradigm. These poems offer glimpses of iniquity, betrayal, resentment, and desire. The collection forms a searing critique of family of origin and family of choice as both implode.
Becky Nicole James has published poems in Bellevue Literary Review, Margie, and Moon City Review. Her work has received an Honorable Mention in the Lena M. Shull Book Contest, the Fieldstone Review Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net nomination.
Materfamilias, Ann LoLordo
The poems in Materfamilias reach back through a family’s history to illuminate the lives of women: relationships between mothers and daughters, the stories told, choices made, and, ultimately, shared, for better or worse. In images mysterious and taut, they investigate a particular inheritance of desire and loss, opportunity and worth, marriage and motherhood — a legacy that reveals a troubling truth. As Donna Baier Stein, award-winning writer and publisher of Tiferet Journal, observes, “Poet Ann LoLordo explores the rich realm of maternal bonds and the ways our matriarchal lineage supports and shapes us. Each poem in this lovely chapbook is a psychologically insightful and verbally skilled gem.”
Shades of Isolation, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
The poems in this collection explore the isolation most of us experience at one point or another in our lives. The characters in these poems range from an adventurous scientist who arrives in the U.S. from behind the Iron Curtain to a woman in a diner searching for her iceberg, from a climber on Mt. Everest to a princess trying to escape her glass mountain, from an elderly couple stuck in a building without an elevator to a dog chained among banana trees, from a dolphin in an aquarium to trees that act like people. All struggle to come to grips with separation and exclusion. The lyrical poems in this volume dramatize that while life often brings pain, we must not surrender to it. Instead, we must seek, observe, touch, and trust.
I Have One Student, Mary Ellen Redmond
I Have One Student celebrates the classroom as a community of characters, each of them distinct, unique, many of them unforgettable. As a teacher, Mary Ellen Redmond never stops thinking about those students when she leaves work. They ride with her on her way home, sometimes appear in her dreams, are almost always waiting in the morning when she wakes up. As a poet, she notices the things—big and small—that reveal the troubles and traumas of their lives. And she captures their stories in ways that will resonate not just with other educators but with anyone paying attention to the young lives unfolding around them. In her poems, you will meet Claudio from Haiti; Natalie, a sixth grader who reads Homer; David, who desperately needs a heart transplant; Sacul Rellek, who writes his name backwards; Deja, who silences the class by sharing something very personal; and many other ordinary, extraordinary students. And you won’t forget them, either. Nor will you want to.
The Argument of Time, Jenny Isaacs
In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale time is boldly and experimentally personified as the play’s chorus/narrator, subverting the Aristotelian “classic unities” of time, place, and action. These poems, written over the course of twenty years, take up and investigate “the argument of Time,” examining experience in the probing light of memory and drawing on physics, linguistics, and biology to illuminate the mysteries of consciousness, desire and loss.
Darwin Would Have Much to Say, Sally Pont
Running is not a solitary endeavor. Rather, it is a journey through a menagerie. The creatures, from diminutive and scurrying to taloned and stalking, are not on display, per se. They are going about their lives, as am I, and enter my line of vision as much to their surprise as mine. These poems, largely, chronicle that daily experience of seeing and being seen as I run up and down the farm-framed hills of Ryland Chapel Road in the Piedmont of Virginia. If I ventured into the hills, I might find a still, though I prefer my moonshine from the sky. So I cling to the road, along with deer, possum, turtles, squirrels, skunk, vultures, a bevy of other flying things, the occasional black bear, and my old companion, Time.
Just something she said…, Diane Smith
Just something she said… is a collection of free-verse poetry based on a woman’s thoughts and observations about beginnings, endings, love, and loss. Imagine two friends talking and having coffee in a quiet café, when one says something seemingly insignificant—just a simple thought she’s been pondering. These poems are the stories that emerge when that simple thought stirs into something bigger and reveals an unexpected truth.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 6/1 and 6/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
“This language offers one possible framing through which to appreciate the law’s capacity to hope for, request, and even command commitment to a more just future.” Read two poems by Maggie Wang, our first biweekly poet of the Summer 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Possibilities for Action.”