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 November 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.
BUNNY
Landguage/Mirror Me, Marina Blitshteyn
Formally distinct, the two chapbooks composing the tête-bêche Landguage/Mirror Me share the trappings of gendered and classed experiences where freedom isn’t free. Located and then dislocated from place, grounded in Americanisms and warping them, self- and socially- conscious, Landguage/Mirror Me voices the silences of women in exile. As playful as they are vexed, the poems in Landguage/Mirror Me estrange and beckon with their rhythms and mouthfeel.
Anstruther Press
the blades of grass are dreaming, Hollay Ghadery
Formally adventurous, fragmented, and forward-thinking, the blades of grass are dreaming captures the sacred dailiness of our lives as time rushes forward and folds back on itself. With quiet intensity and emotional precision, these poems dwell in the fleeting moments that make up our most enduring experiences—birth, loss, devotion, and return.
Prolific Pulse Press
Cancer Courts My Mother, LindaAnn LoSchiavo
Cancer Courts My Mother gives voice to the creativity borne out of the experience of late-stage cancer from the perspective of a caregiver and a daughter.
Written with candor, warmth, and grace, these poems explore universal themes of sorrow, resiliency, relationships, anger, hope, and love.
This collection is for anyone who’s ever wondered how to go forward in the face of suffering, but doesn’t expect an easy answer.
Death ends a life – but cannot not end a relationship.
Rockwood Press
Spotting the Rise, Richard Jordan
A chapbook of poems centered on growing up and coming of age in a (former) mill town in New England in the 1970s & 1980s.
“It may not be possible to understand post-industrial New England without reading Richard Jordan. “Rainbows” in this book are both promises and trout. Hornpout, a kind of catfish, caught at Willard Pond, are full of tannery chemicals and toxic. You need a loving father to tell you that, and many of these poems are about the way good men parent their sons. There’s natural beauty here, but mortality, the end of a fishing trip with a dying friend, the Vietnam War—these things also hover. This is a fine collection from a wise poet, a soothing, necessary read.” Christine Potter, author of Unforgetting, poetry editor of Eclectica
Ugly Duckling Presse
Jombii Jamborii, Joan Cambridge-Mayfield, Jeremy Jacob Peretz
Jombii Jamborii is a wild party. In Guyana’s Creole language, Creolese (or Kriiyaliiz), jumbi (or jombii) can mean “wild” or “of low status.” These pejorative attributes have been similarly ascribed to Creolese through a coloniality of language centuries in the making. Jumbi, however, are also cherished and feared agents of ancestral memory, often understood as “ghosts” or “spirits.” A mass of unwieldy revenants, these jumbi-words cavort together back and forth in both Creolese and English, mirroring multigenerational movement and song bridging worlds of ancestors, young, old, and those yet to be born or remembered.
Red Lip Peril, Dalmacia Ruíz-Rosas Samohod, Judah Rubin (tr)
Red Lip Peril brings Peruvian poet Dalmacia Ruiz-Rosas’s searing, corporeal, political poems of the 1970s and 1980s into English for the first time. Harnessing and writing back against state violence, against amnesia, against complacency, and into desire, these poems speak a Lima on the brink, caught in the landslide of history, where the poet is “still shut up remembering ’77 / when for screaming my dreams aloud they beat me”.
Dear Enheduanna, Erin Honeycutt
Part prayer, part performance, part poetic treatise, Dear Enheduanna writes out to the high priestess and first known author then swallows whole the epistolary form. Pulp decay as publishing tactic. These are conjuring poems; poems coming after collaboration—entanglement as conceit, as kink, as communion pleasure tactic. Smuggle in a sexy mirror, smuggle in a double-headed dildo, smuggle in a sentence then feel it read back: the author is reader is author is reader.
Same Day, Sarah Anne Wallen
Same Day consists of poems about time and discovery/re-discovery. Written mostly in the winter of 2021, this collection comes from a place of urgency that emerges from a sustained and desperate need to organize the chaos of experience through language. Through this cataloguing of touch, thought, response and action, the author shares an intimate portrait of the workings of her internal clock.
Bottlecap Press
to love something you must carry it on your back, Keana Aguila Labra
to love something you must carry it on your back is a reflection of growing up in the Filipino American diaspora. With, sometimes, fragmented imagery and themes of yearning, generational trauma, Superman, and airports, Aguila Labra presents their experiences, though disjointed, as unequivocally theirs. The houses and places moved through remain home with “our two sinks and two dishwashers // the nicks where we marked our heights” and even strangers met are family, are Ate. With poems eking with love, it asks if you, too, can sit quietly with them in the end.
Keeper, Seeker, Dragon of the Sea, Lydia Rae Bush
Keeper, Seeker, Dragon of the Sea is an exploration of communication with a narrative arc and magical realism lens. Rooted at the shore and in the waves, this poetry takes readers across three perspectives, raising questions of conflict, reconciliation, attachment, boundaries, and need. Conversational and scenic, mixing action, dialogue, and inner reflection, Keeper, Seeker, Dragon of the Sea delves into identity and our relationship with the earth, reflecting the power of connection and the complexity of time and space.
Stump, Ann Kammerer
After years apart, a young woman returns to visit her estranged mother. She meets her mother’s latest partner—a veteran pilot of World War II with his own history of loss, abandonment, and unmet expectations. Amid poverty and fractured relationships, the three struggle to connect.
Set in the late 1970s in Battle Creek, Michigan, Stump uses eight mini-stories in verse by Ann Kammerer to explore a broken mother-daughter bond, diminished hope, and the erosion of the American dream in a once-thriving Midwestern city.
Foxhole, Azalea Aguilar
Foxhole is a collection of poems that inhabits the tense, uncertain spaces of a childhood shadowed by addiction and lingering trauma. Through the eyes of a young girl, the poems move through a household where love and fear coexist, where a father carries invisible battles that never leave him, and a mother tracing the edges of her own pain in ways only she could bear. Amid the tension, moments of quiet grace emerge—a father pausing along a Texas highway so his daughter can gather wildflowers, a mother sharing ice cream on a sea wall after the house has gone dark. The collection also bears witness to personal loss, the experience of leaving home to protect yourself, and the grief of leaving parts of your life behind.
Even Goddesses Need Smoke Breaks, Ryan E. Holman
Even Goddesses Need Smoke Breaks examines different expressions of femininity in poetry. Goddesses and witches are the height of social aspects of femininity and are nonetheless cast outside of society—goddesses, because they are thought to embody a quality so completely as to be divine; witches, because they are often messing with forces that people don’t want to understand or simply “don’t fit.”
Breaks and Interruptions, Carol Durak
Durak’s desire to be heard, by the living and the dead, and the turmoil of saying what needs to be said, motivates this collection of gems. Through each poem Durak threads the sorrow-song, making a necklace of endings and eternities. Sometimes dark, sometimes indigo, always relentless, whether psalm, dirge, sonnet, blues, free verse or prose, the collection could be subtitled, Lamentations.
tkhines, Eve Bernfeld
When she learned about tkhines, the nearly-lost tradition of Ashkenazi Jewish “women’s” prayers, Eve Bernfeld gave herself the assignment to write one a day. Over the course of three seasons, the supplications poured out, scraps of text calling for help from the ineffable to make it through the sacred grind of everyday life.
The ordinary exhaustion of parenthood—slicing onions for family dinners, being woken at 3 am for nightmares and nosebleeds, packing snacks for baseball games—gives rise to an altered state of consciousness, threaded through with magic, fairy tales and bursts of joy from the natural world. The tkhines in this chapbook lie at the intersection of poem, prayer and spell.
Finishing Line Press
Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain, Emily Robyn Clark
With candor and cinematic vision, Clark writes from the caves of grief and from the longing to scale the mountain in search of beauty. This is a book shaped by loss. Clark holds her father’s hand as he slips away “in a dark dream,” only to enter a whirlwind engagement in Paris months later: an emerald ring, a city of light, a future opening before her, until everything collapses like sand. Her fiancé’s struggle with mental illness and religious trauma brings her to the edge of death with him, a second grief as sudden and shattering as the first.
Red Rain, Edytta Wojnar
Red Rain is a meditation on life, womanhood, marriage, and the pandemic’s aftermath. While exposing acts of random violence committed against women, the poems offer hope for healing through meditation, writing, and connection with nature.
Born and raised in Poland, Edytta Wojnar received her MFA in Professional and Creative Writing from William Paterson University.
Portrait Lands, Melissa Mitchell
Portrait Lands delves into grief’s incredible acceleratory effect on personal transformation. The throughline of the work asks the question, “What happens to our internal landscape as our emotions and identities evolve within us?” Through close observation of the landscape that surrounds us, these poems suggest their mirror image within us and track the stream of a life as it begins to cut a canyon.
True If Not Destroyed, James Gage
The follow-up to his award-winning chapbook “True If Destroyed” from Finishing Line Press (2016), “True If Not Destroyed” is a snapshot of the American experience in the first quarter of the 21st century, examined through the author’s own observations and desires. Gage’s pursuit of the truth in a commercial media landscape rife with falsehoods is further challenged by revelations that our culture has often been sabotaged by its own leaders. Balanced by personal poems that mine themes of love and lust, family and parenting, “True If Not Destroyed” is the hope of one American to help forge a better future for our country while celebrating all aspects of its past.
Echoes in Still Air, Diana Athena
Echoes in Still Air can be compared to a stained window: the fragmented language is knitted together to form images and associations which translate into a continuous reshaping of the world after loss. Each poem is a meditation on re-discovering the body, breath, and memories hidden behind the veil of everyday existence. In this collection the past echoes through nature and the elements creating a steady rhythm, reminding the reader to surrender and to trust the journey of inhabiting the pieces to become whole once more.
Thrive, Sarah Hirsch
Thrive gathers poems of youth and loss and growth and love, asking us to find beauty in the unfurling. Joy, dance, seedlings, romance, the vast powerful scope of the sea, the fresh eyes of children, and believing in the possibility of glorious, fragile, improbable things, the moment of a flower blooming.
Sarah Hirsch is a painter, writer, and teacher. She lives by the sea in Rhode Island with her partner and their oodles of critters, and she loves to open water swim, garden, fiddle, sing, and contra dance, and organizes community folk events.
They Still Call Us Witches, Anne Gottlieb
In creating the Golden Shovel form, Terrance Hayes honors the legendary Gwendolyn Brooks. Gottlieb uses the form to not only honor Ms. Brooks, but many other influential writers for an entire collection. She honors women and women alone, illustrating their universal struggles and triumphs through often personal specificity. In They Still Call Us Witches, themes of identity, relationships, and love follow the arc of growing up. On the outside looking in on her own life, a sense of ‘otherness’ is found in navigating relationships and this feeling, along with feeling connected to all women, becomes a source of strength.
Ever the Sky, Ada Pendill
Ever the Sky follows a speaker in motion between states of being, between selves, between the earth and whatever sky hovers just beyond reach. These poems chart a constellation of quiet ruptures and luminous repairs, capturing moments where grief opens into astonishment, and stillness into revelation. With painterly attention and a deep sensitivity to the natural and surreal, the poems explore what it means to live in a shifting body, to long, to transform, and to recognize oneself—if only briefly—in the flicker of sky and light.
A Shade Pulled Just Barely, Anne Bucey
A Shade Pulled Just Barely is a short book of poems that spans many years: from early to late midlife and beyond. The poems unfold as if before a window facing west. The sun is high, but descending. In the fullness of time passing, a woman uncovers aspects of herself that she has kept hidden. Tensions between shadow and light, restraint and desire, love broken and made whole, thread the collection. A Shade Pulled Just Barely suggests a woman’s meandering path to a deeper awareness and self-acceptance.
Variations on a Theme of Love, Kathy O’Fallon
Variations on a Theme of Love, a poetry chapbook, is a lyrical meditation on the ups and downs of experiencing love in life as explored through human relationships, pets, nature, and passions. From golden hawk to plum, from lover to child to friend, the collection traverses a wide expanse.
Kathy O’Fallon’s poems have been published in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies such as RATTLE, Passager, LAdirge, and Salt Marsh Press.
Motherlands, Camille Hernandez
Motherlands is a lyrical meditation on the parallel journeys of motherhood, immigration, and amputation. Each journey is a radical act of care and a type of haunting. Camille Hernandez navigates the shifting terrain between daughter and mother, homeland and new land, memory and body. With tenderness and grief, Motherlands explores how the severance of migration echoes the ruptures of childbirth, and how both leave behind a scarred but sacred map.
ANIMALS IN THE HOUSE: 18 SONNETS by Sally Cobau
In Sally Cobau’s Animals in the House: 18 Sonnets, she writes about many people including her husband, children, parents, grandparents, friends, students, and past loves. She creates an ever-shifting landscape to illustrate the fine line between whimsy and despair. The “characters” in these poems never fully disappear. Even in death, they inhabit a ghostly presence, haunting the old homes. Likewise, the animals that live in the houses provide a comfortable opposition to the human world as they enhance our earthy, beautiful existence.
Ways I’ve Known Water, Lisa Breger
How can we stay open to the vibrancy of life and hold both joy and sorrow, the darkness and light that mark our days; how do we carry forth in our difficult world? These are the central concerns of this collection of poems that follow the ways of water to adapt, persist, and face obstacles with love and reverence in an ever-changing world.
The Day the World Ends, Helen Weil
The Day the World Ends imagines a world where everyone went to sleep one night, and only one person woke up when the sun rose again. With too much living left to do before she can sleep, she embarks on a cross-country roadtrip in an attempt to answer the question: when we’re gone, what will be left? The Day the World Ends is a narrative journey through loss and finding the love that remains in the aftermath.
Each Time, a Forest, Carol Tiebout
The poems in Each Time, a Forest speak to us from the world that sits behind the world, a world that comes into our dreams, finds us during times of illness, and at the end of life. It also arrives in times of deep change when we may be living among packed boxes, or when the impact we face from climate change takes center stage. Here, bears, sheep, stars and forests come close in a way that opens the door into deep wisdom and help in finding paths through the ordinary world and its sometimes extraordinary difficulties.
Ruin Me Before the Party Ends, Chloe Rodriguez
Ruin Me Before the Party Ends is a sharp, intimate exploration of memory, identity, and the ghosts we carry from past loves and forgotten places. Through a series of vivid and surreal odes, the collection delves into the tangled landscapes of love, longing, and the personal histories that shape us. With wit and vulnerability, the poems invite readers into a world that balances the chaotic energy of youthful rebellion with the quiet ache of growing up. From the neon glow of Miami’s forgotten dive bars to the haunted swamps of Florida, each poem is a search for meaning in the spaces that elude us—whether in the fleeting pleasure of a fast-food quesadilla, the fading memory of dive bars and strip clubs, or the tender grief of a mother’s absence. Ruin Me Before the Party Ends is an invitation to a party where nostalgia, loss, and the desire for connection are all tangled together, and where the end always feels just around the corner, with each poem a desperate attempt to hold on before it all slips away.
Rural Education, Evan P. Schneider
Rural Education is a vivid and unflinching meditation on coming of age in a small, agricultural town. Through language that is steady, often funny, and sometimes brutal, these poems explore the lingering imprint one’s upbringing leaves on identity after its beauty and harsh realities fade. Gritty yet unexpectedly gentle, Rural Education stakes its claim somewhere between elegy and dispatch, a place where tenderness hides in long silences and the pass of a tool. What emerges is a collection haunted by memory and softened by humor, a place where a boy learns the world by way of its textures and rough edges, and the slow drift of seasons and time.
I do not remember what’s inside anymore, Veronica Tyler
I do not remember what’s inside anymore is a visceral collection of poems that navigate the corridors of identity, self-destruction, and heartbreak. From the oppressive, fluorescent-lit aisles of a Wal-Mart to the conflicted echoes of loss and regret, each poem explores the spaces that trap us in a perpetual state of longing, confusion, and despair. Veronica Tyler explores self and memory in a eulogy to a brokenheart that weaves together the struggle for her sense of belonging in a word that seems to suffocate the soul. It is a piece for those who know life is never linear, and that the search for authenticity often comes at a cost.
Incident Names, S.J. Pearce
Incident Names is a stylistic sampler that reckons with the visceral fear and danger of the embodied nature of day-to-day life, particularly for a woman in the present. While always wishing to slink back to the purely literary, each poem is pulled towards the consequences of text in the world.
S.J. Pearce is a writer and translator who lives in New York City.
Wild Familiars, Linda Malm
Wild Familiars is a finalist in the 2024 Finishing Line Press chapbook competition. The collection embraces the nature of birds to convey observations on life and mortality. The tone is one of appreciation and acceptance, rather than fear. Ducks pair and glide: “O for such a shadowing”, dead birds are honored: “my feather cache”. Birds are held: “faint body heat through feathers”, released: “I fly”. Sometimes birds briefly inhabit a poem: “parting wing beats”, “reflections that wobble with a swallow swoop”. Sometimes birds fully dominate an incident or narrate a persona poem. The poems utilize a variety forms, word play and music. Wildness in birds and in ourselves is valued for its intensity.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 11/1 and 11/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Chapbook Poem: When I Was Straight by Dustin Brookshire
“‘When I Was Straight’ prompted me to think about a common queer experience—how most parents assume their children are ‘straight’ and expect their children to live a ‘straight’ life.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: American Girl: Fort Hood, 2023 by Thea Matthews
“[W]eaving in and juxtaposing the lyrics of Tom Petty’s ‘American Girl.’ The song’s themes of desperation, wanderlust, and longing are subverted by Ana’s life and tragedy at Fort Cavazos, previously known as Fort Hood, Texas.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem for October 2025 along with words from the poet.
“It seems such a shame that a beautiful location is just gathering dust and overgrowth, and I wanted to lean into the juxtaposition of that.” Read three poems by Bryana Fern along with a few words about “Women on the Wall.”
Bodies in Transition: Sacred & Perishable by Carissa Natalia Baconguis
“There is a muscular intimacy to the ecosystem of these poems, each one of them creating as vivid a world individually as exists in the collection as a whole.” Read Gray Davidson Carroll’s full review.
“In ‘No Breaks’ I was writing about something I hope I never have to experience. … I tried to keep despair at bay and show some defiance and resilience.” Read two poems by Gerald Yelle along with a few words about “No Breaks.”
November ’25: New Staff, Issue Archive & Donations
Read a note from Editor Aiden Hunt about our new Poetry Readers, the additions of an Issue Archive and a Contributor Fund, Fall poetry submissions, and Gaza.
Chapbook Poem: Two egrets at the edge of a tidal marsh by Rebekah Wolman
“Settling on the mirror form opened the way into the parallels between the original image of the egrets, their reflection, and their ambiguous relationship and the shifting, even reversing, roles of an adult daughter and her aging mother…” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2025 along with words from the poet.
Three Poems by Alexandra Burack
“Subsequent drafts enabled me to … uncover the metaphor of exile, whose meanings are intended to move readers from an experience of alienation to one of discernment of the liberating qualities of outsiderhood.” Read three poems by Alexandra Burack, along with a few words about “To Know Blue From the Color of Snow at Dusk.”
Book Excerpt: Rondo by Yamini Pathak
“The sculpture gardens are located on … the native land of the Lenape people. The poem is a conversation between sculpture, land, and its human and more-than-human inhabitants.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for November 2025, “Rondo” from Her Mouth a Palace of Lamps by Yamini Pathak, along with a few words from the poet.
Two Poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth
“As I shaped the poem, the olive trees became a witness to a deeper experience—to a region’s ongoing, collective pain. It was the land I wanted to make speak in a place where I did not have words.” Read two poems by Yasmin Mariam Kloth, along with a few words about “Before.”
A Conversation with Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes
“We wanted something that was alive, highlighted an ever-expanding list of books by these poets, and that will hopefully survive the both of us and flourish under the curation of a fresh set of poets.” Read the full interview about the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook series.
Chapbook Poem: Red Tide by Mary Gilliland
“Reflection, research, a public service announcement, an old Zen koan, and 3 weeks of bicycling for groceries with a bandana tied around my nose and mouth inform ‘Red Tide’.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for December 2025, “Red Tide” from Red Tide at Sandy Bend, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Veronica Tucker
“’You Left the Fridge Open Again’ transforms an ordinary domestic moment into a meditation on tenderness and decay. The open refrigerator becomes a quiet altar, its hum a hymn to what lingers after love’s warmth has cooled.” Read three poems by Veronica Tucker, along with a few words about “You Left the Fridge Open Again.”
Book Excerpt: The Samadhi of Words by Richard Collins
“Zen poets, past and present, who experience deep absorption in the grandeur of this world may even gain wisdom through the way of poetry, Shidō (詩道). This is the samadhi of words.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for December 2025, “The Samadhi of Words” from Stone Nest by Richard Collins, along with a few words from the poet.
December ’25: Pushcart Prize Nominations
Editor Aiden Hunt announces Philly Chapbook Review’s 2026 Pushcart Prize anthology nominations in this editor’s note and provides links to, and a carousel of, the nominated poems.
“From the height of the camel, I could see the ruins of Palmyra and a medieval castle on a hill. Present day Wadi Rum in Jordan has no evidence of an ancient civilization in the desert until one arrives, by car not camel, in Petra.” Read two poems by Sandy Feinstein, our sixth and final biweekly poet of the Fall 2025 issue, along with a few words about “Souvenir.”