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 September 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.
Texas Review Press
My Mother, the Butcher, Gerard Robledo
In this visceral debut poetry chapbook, My Mother, the Butcher, Mexican American poet, Gerard Robledo, sets his speaker to confront the lasting scars of a traumatic childhood marked by alcoholism, neglect, and emotional cruelty. Undaunted, he dredges the devastating history of familial pain and a mother’s callousness which haunts his daily life as a single father raising a daughter. In the process, he tries to reconcile his cultural and masculine identity with his own truth, as his struggles with alcoholism, religion, and self-worth threaten to consume him. This sincere poetry collection dissects the complexity of generational trauma—fractured parts of the self; the struggle to heal, break free, and find one’s identity. It also presents a necessary perspective on the non-traditional experiences of a single Latino father, the struggles faced, and the beauty of one’s own humanity—even in the face of unrelenting pain.
Bull City Press
Seacliff, Cate Lycurgus
Anchored by a vivid and resounding sequence, Seacliff enacts the relentless crash and dissolution of our bodies, landscapes, and spirits, even as they are recombined to return. And so this book serves as a reminder of the primeval rhythm that sustains us. Unlike other works, this seascape impels a meditation that is not merely metaphorical. In the face of very real forces, the uncertainty is not whether one must surrender, but when and how. This testament of perseverance invites us to submit to—and to celebrate—the vast vigor of our planet. Here, alongside the Northern California coast, Seacliff offers a path, one lyric runner of shine, out to a fresh horizon.
LJMcD Communications
No Paper Today, Suzanne D. Miller
A love letter to the Wall Street Journal, this tight book of poetry brings up memories and cascades into the future with its succinct style and cutting remarks.
A delightful and insightful read, Miller has created something really special that will captivate and enrapture and cause your mind to churn into overdrive.
Bottlecap Press
End of Revels, Natalie Marino
End of Revels is a collection of short poems spoken in the voice of Sylvia Plath at the time of her death. These poems are written in a new form to reflect their mystifying content and to make the argument that art necessarily involves creating something new: each poem is a half-sonnet and together the poems in this collection make up a modified heroic crown of half-sonnets.
In exploring the essence of art, this collection is also an attempt at addressing the ineffable. As a young mother of two small children who chose suicide, Sylvia Plath’s brief life and terrifying end have been obsessed over and fetishized by a society that often lets celebrity overshadow creativity. These poems aim to reveal the eternal value of creative work despite its author leaving the world behind.
Burnt Toast and Benedictions, Laura DeHart Young
Burnt Toast and Benedictions is a tender, unflinching meditation on the fractures of domestic life—where humor and heartbreak share intimate spaces, where everyday moments carry weight. In this ten-poem collection, Laura DeHart Young explores the quiet ruptures that occur in love, memory, and unforeseen moments: burnt toast scraped clean, a dead fly floating in a beer, Oreos eaten by firelight in a broken-down cabin, rhythms of attraction in an autumn rainstorm.
Unchanged, Kristen Nuku
Unchanged is a chapbook that delves into memory, introspection, and the subtleties of everyday life. The poems move between the personal and the universal, pausing on moments that feel both brief and lasting. Using simple language, the collection looks at how the past stays with us and how memory shapes the present. Each poem offers a look at human experience that is sometimes broken, sometimes calm, and always reaching for understanding.
The Language of Spring, Karen N. FitzGerald
The Language of Spring is a micro-chap book of poetry macro in its intimacy of Spring’s unfolding grandeur. Where poets often reach for the most sublime, and often obscure expressions of spring-time’s majesty, this poet lets Spring speak for itself in a language only Mother Nature can teach.
Karen N. FitzGerald provides her readers a number of ways to climb out of winter and enter into the splendor of the Spring Season when flowers bloom, and love too, sometimes; when one is inclined to question what divine sources have managed, or maybe even mismanaged, in bringing forth a new Spring Season.
proof of what?, Mikee Parangalan
proof of what? is one big huge Metaphor Alert from the mind of Mikee Parangalan. The objective is simple: using what’s Given, prove that angles A and B are congruent. How hard could that be? And what could Being in Love with Someone and It Just Not Working Out possibly have to do with anything?
Step by step, statement by reason, Mikee Parangalan works through this geometric proof to discover what The Point of it All could possibly be.
Before the World Was On Fire, Christine Potter
Before The World Was On Fire has a long and vivid memory. Christine Potter, also a young adult author, tells her own story in these poems. There are shout-outs to Margaret Hamilton and Lucille Ball, Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie, childhood role models—and in some cases anti-role models. This is a book about the great American suburbs, about growing up in a hopeful but somewhat repressed nation, a place that was at once wildly different and surprisingly not unlike today.
Strange Beauty, Matthew James Friday
Poet Matthew James Friday is turning 50. To celebrate this milestone, Friday has assembled a collection of his 50 best haiku and senryu. Haiku and its related form senryu seem fitting ways to celebrate this with their emphasis on brevity and imagery; the observance of all that is transient by focusing on a given moment. ‘Given’ is a fitting word as haiku are always a form of praise and gratitude for what is experienced in the natural world. Senryu, by contrast, focuses on human nature, often with a comic tone.
KIN, Maryann Hurtt
In these too often mean times, we find solace in our ties to each other. KIN’s poems open our senses—taste, smell, touch, hear, see, and maybe even our most importance sense─imagination. The words celebrate connection to animals, plants, humans, and earth herself.
As a watchful witness to how we care (or not) for each other, Hurtt expands our understanding of relation, of kin. If we are to survive, even thrive, we need to recognize and embrace the ways our lives are intertwined. KIN gives us tools to carry on a journey to a more compassionate world.
Café Quatrains: Sip While You Read, Colby Flade
Meant to be enjoyed at your favorite local coffee shop, sipping a latte or matcha or a mug of freshly steeped tea, Café Quatrains provides a moment of stillness in a world that moves far too quickly at times.
This short, sweet, and simple chapbook makes for a great gift, perfect for the upcoming holiday season.
A Midwest-based queer writer, artist, and coffee enthusiast, Colby Flade is the author of five books of poetry and short stories.
How to Live with Ghosts, Mala Hoffman
Making peace with the mysterious is a challenging process. In How to Live with Ghosts, author Mala Hoffman confronts life and death through a wry, somewhat irreverent lens that includes responding to art, funerals and the ghosts themselves.
Poetry has the ability to whisper truths about how we experience the world we live in. This collection allows readers an opportunity to think about where they are and where they might be going. How to Live with Ghosts can provide a roadmap to do just that.
Golden Hour, Zariah Perkins
In Golden Hour, Zariah Perkins writes toward light as both salvation and self-revelation. These poems trace the transformation of rage into radiance, survival into sacred softness. Through intimate portraits of womanhood, spirituality, and rebirth, Zariah reclaims language as a site of power: where naming, remembering, and forgiving become acts of freedom. Her work moves through fire, faith, and desire, learning that clarity, softness, and boundaries are not contradictions but portals to wholeness.
little crushes, Grace Treutel
little crushes is Grace Treutel’s third chapbook with Bottlecap Press. In this collection, she indulges in the fantasy of the crush, exploring the little limerences that naturally spark when we meet and connect with others. The ‘little’ in the title refers to the collective nature of these occurrences, and through this numbered walk-through of her heart, Grace hopes to showcase her crushes like an avid collector showcasing their displays of bric-a-brac.
All the Wayward Angels: Dream Sestinas, Tara Campbell
Within these pages lies a world in which stars snarl, candles sob, and foxes build temples to their unfathomable gods. Have you ever wanted to follow the pull of a golden key toward a treasure under the sea? In these sixteen sestinas, Campbell creates a swirling dreamworld of falling angels, rough beasts, and women “using hope to dowse for rain.”
Yes, there is darkness in this world: skeletons emerge in dark barns, ghosts swirl amidst dismal laughter in sad places. But there is also hope: women liberate themselves through transformation, peaceful hands reject pistols in favor of flowers, and an angel reminds us “we wreck/our hearts when we forget to love their wounds.” Dive in and learn why the wayward angels went astray.
You Don’t Have to Leave, Dustin Radke
You Don’t Have to Leave is a collection that lingers in the space between staying and going—between the impulse to hold on and the relief of letting go. Here, a feral cat refuses to leave the porch. A worm imagines a better love. An old Rav4 is breaking down but still carries two people to the beach.
These pieces unfold like soft confessions and passing jokes—small, vivid moments that drift between tenderness, estrangement, and almost humor. At its core, this chapbook reminds the reader that you can stay for a moment longer, even if in the end you know you’ll have to leave.
I Still Dream of Her, Baylee A. Rayburn
I Still Dream of Her is a collection born from the ache of memory and the quiet courage of reclaiming what was buried. These poems follow the echo of girlhood, its wonder, its silencing, and the long journey back to the voice that once dreamed in gold. Each piece moves through survival and softness, exploring what it means to remember the parts of ourselves we had to bury to stay safe.
It speaks to anyone who shut the door on the little girl who dreamed too big, who felt too much, who loved with her whole heart. To those who believed they had to shape themselves into something the world demanded just to survive. This collection reminds readers that we can still go back for her, that the abyss is not empty. She’s still there. She’s still waiting.
spreading, luminous, Jill Darling
Delighting in wordplay, spreading, luminous, though subtle, also delves into climate, pollution, and politics in mini poetic essays and prose poetry varied in form and structure. Throughout, language shivers and jumps, sometimes stands still as if willing time to stop, lingers in present tense and bursts of color. Poetic prose floats in mysteries of time and memory, pulling past into present through imagery and scenes that capture intensities of feeling, as if to let the past settle before moving on.
Break in Case of Glass, Marc Meierkort
Break in Case of Glass goes on a search for reason and meaning. Call it a midlife crisis, a search for purpose, a second act, in these poems Marc Meierkort fully embraces the role of the poet and the possibilities of language as the means of feeling some semblance of control over, and understanding of, a world that is seemingly losing its collective mind. It’s in the making of poems that he is able to put voice to his fears and anxieties, asking questions about the nature of the Self (“I am”) and the role of meaning. In poems that speak to and through one another, in language that is flexible and joyful and direct and unpredictable, with tongue tucked firmly in cheek, Marc dives into the world of opposites and contradictions, looking for something to help make sense of his own existence, his life in the here and now, finding solace in the poem as a stand-in for his idea of the Self (I am = iamb), and coming to understand that it’s in the process of making the poem, in the practice, in the work, where he finds peace and that sense of purpose.
Talking to Yourself, John Calvin Hughes
Talking to Yourself is an experiment in second person point of view. The poems are written in second person, but they are not addressed to the reader, as most second-person pieces are. These poems are, in fact, first person narrators speaking to themselves and calling themselves “you.” As when you drop your phone and crack the screen and tell yourself, “You are an idiot.”
The poems range from the meditative to the dramatic. Some reflect the loneliness and depression resulting from the Covid lockdown. Others are nostalgic. Some of them are reconceived and updated well-known poems from literary anthologies. A couple might be called “brautigans.” There’s even a sonnet! All in all, the poems in this chapbook provide moments of delight and wonder that will stay with the reader long after the book is closed.
Finishing Line Press
A Palace of Waning, Pamela Nocerino
A Palace of Waning is a collection of poems that explores longing for a sense of home. Through place, self, and loss, the images wander into uneasy complexities of truth where the search for home distorts the view of its presence everywhere. The journey invites readers to take perception as far as space and as near as the sound of moving fabric.
Digging Through The Bones, Christina Ruotolo
“Digging Through the Bones exudes lyricism and brevity inside of the exploration of loss that expresses emotion through tight succinct forms without melodramatic sentiment. This collection of poetry sifts through the refuse of grief with surprising candor entangled with a musicality that offers comfort in its downpours. Christina Ruotolo’s poetry is accessible, straight from the heart, strategic and purposeful, surveying the sweat on a grandmother’s brow or the fresh remnants of ashes but always polished, steady, and pointing inward.” –Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate
Snow Day, Evan Vandermeer
In Snow Day, Evan Vandermeer navigates the fragile yet profound moments of ordinary life, weaving them into an evocative tapestry of memory, place, and connection. From the silencing grace of winter storms to the chaotic hum of far-flung adventures, these poems explore the landscapes of the external world while delving into the tender, sometimes tumultuous inner terrains of family, identity, and loss. With unflinching honesty and poignant detail, Vandermeer reflects on the indelible mark of losing his father, creating a collection that is at once both lamentation and celebration.
Dirt, Jennifer Handy
Dirt is a long narrative poem, an ecopoetic memoir in verse, tracing the life of a woman who, in her forties, takes up homesteading in an attempt to put down roots and to forge a meaningful connection with the land. The story begins with the woman’s childhood, growing up in a bland suburban housing development with no sense of history or culture or indeed an identifiable past of any sort. The poem addresses issues of exoticism and the gaze, of memory and forgetting, particularly intergenerational memory and the ways it can be disrupted and destroyed. It interrogates the white, middle-class ethos of suburbia: how it fails those children who grow up in such an insular world, providing them with neither any real community nor a viable sense of moral values, leaving them empty and ill-prepared to engage with others in an increasingly global world. A cautionary tale, it reveals both the human and environmental consequences of growing up in a spiritual and cultural wasteland.
Morning Comes Roaring Down the Mountain, Emily Robyn Clark
“Anything not bolted down gets carried away,” Clark says early in this singular collection. She’s right. These persona poems did just that. I was carried away by the disparate voices, linked together by the poet’s singular perspective. Maggie the Cat snuggles up to Byron, who leans into a picture postcard of Utah. “You were remarkable that way with finding things that didn’t fit in/ making the whole mess work in your wild space,” Clark declares in “Last Bloom.” I hope you enjoy this “wild space” as much as I did. –Alexis Rhone Fancher author of TRIGGERED, BRAZEN, and The Dead Kid Poems
A Shade I Cannot Name, Carol Traynor Mayer
A Shade I Cannot Name by Carol Traynor Mayer is a vulnerable yet forthright series of imagistic poems on place, aging, and family. A deceptively quiet voice wrestles an uneasy sense of peace from everyday weightiness. Meticulous and composed, a life long-lived moves across its masterfully crafted landscape that employs “much in little.” Sparing diction in each poem paradoxically constructs the framework for this collection’s complex confessional.
Around the Bend, Colleen Wells
In Around the Bend lies the brutality of mental illness. The solitude and heaviness of depression that cannot be willed away. And yet, lists are made. And yet, the author “stayed and watched” the gift of puddles being formed by a cool rain. There is honesty around how low things can get. There is the reality of days when rising and eating are “as good as it gets for today.” There is also longing for happy days of noisy, active, laughing children contrasted with a yearning for quiet – in the rooms within and without the poet’s being. Themes of mental illness, empty nesting, and daily struggles, weave together with a thread of hope.
This Place of Wanting Nothing, Jeri Lewis Edwards
With a devoted naturalist’s eye, Jeri Lewis Edwards takes us along in this small but powerful chapbook as she weaves prose of relationships or identity with an undeniable connection to the natural world. These poems will make you feel you are right there with her experiencing that ‘place of wanting nothing.’
Jeri Lewis Edwards is a mixed media artist, poet, and naturalist residing along the Central Coast of California.
Carrying the Ocean, Shymala Dason
From the reviving joy of monsoon rains and the scorching smoke of Indian-Malaysian funeral rituals to the quiet solace of an evening garden, from the shallow seas around her homeland to the violence of Atlantic nor’easter and Pacific winter storms, Shymala Dason’s Carrying the Ocean invites us into the immigrant journey. These intimate, personal poems move from the Malaysia of the writer’s childhood to America and back again, pausing frequently to examine the cost and consequences of such journeys. These poems are for all who have traveled from home.
Onomatopoeia, Hunter Grey
This project began as a kind of experiment with arbitrariness. The idea was to select 30 words, more or less at random, and write 30 corresponding poems. After several rounds of editing, what’s left are these 16. The relationship between title and poem is not fixed throughout . Some titles have unavoidable connotations or autobiographical associations (HONEYMOON, HERON, etc.), in which case the poems adhere very closely to the subjects named in the titles. However some titles are, in a way, blanks—words encountered in text, in speech, or out in the world that seem to have very little clinging to them beyond their basic denotative meanings. In every case, though, each title word is conceived of as an event, a happening in time that, like an onomatopoeia, names itself. If BARK is the sound a dog makes, my goal is to describe the dog.
Sudden Shadows: 21 Poems of Love and Loss, James Lilliefors
Sudden Shadows is poetry of the unexpected, meditations on loss, love, faith, transformation, and resilience. Written after the death of the author’s wife – and the heart attack he suffered several months later – these 21 poems are both personal and universal, poignant and sometimes playful, on subjects ranging from the aftermath of a devastating hurricane to the lessons a father left his son to the sudden death of a childhood friend. Although they often explore the shadowlands of human nature, they are poems that leave the reader with a sense of hope, as in the collection’s closing words: “Reminding us, if only briefly, what we started with. What we have left: a lifetime.”
From Here to the Ocean, Lucie Pereira
From Here to the Ocean is a collection of poems that traverse landscapes, weaving between the lines of mixed-race and queer identity. From the streets of San Francisco to the realms of diasporic motherlands, Pereira speaks to the search for love, belonging, and self-discovery that threads through young adulthood. The journey never strays too far from the water, encapsulating the expansive and transcendent presence of the sea.
Wonder-filled and Strange, Elizabeth A. Gibson
In these poems, Ms. Gibson explores the ever-changing moods of the sea from a sun-kissed balm to a quiet threat to seeing it as our gateway to a mystery much bigger than we are. She also explores the experiences of loss and grief with humor, sadness, and in “Not Shaped Like a Fist,” with anger and resignation. Death makes a personal appearance in two poems, advising in “Close as a Twin,” that “It’s not personal,” since he comes for everyone. In another poem, “The Visit,” Death gets outmatched by a dying woman and backs off for the time being. Through it all, there is a sense of reverence at life’s beauty and mystery as when, at the end of the title poem, Wonder-filled and Strange, Ms. Gibson writes: “Perhaps there are many worlds / or maybe only this one – / lavish and unpredictable, / wonder-filled and strange.” We invite you to step into Ms. Gibson’s poetic world and explore with her why we’re here and what it might mean.
water is never still, JoAnna Scandiffio
“Water is never still” is a poetic sequence searching for answers to the question: Do the dead come back like horseflies? These poems are narrated through the eyes of a young girl unraveling her mother’s sudden death, her ancestors’ history, and the Sea of Cortez. The sequence explores how the dead return to light fires, how history is misinterpreted, and how, in a child’s mind, what she is studying, where she is living, and her mother’s death are all jumbled. Cortez, Montezuma, sailors, and tattoos echo back and forth throughout the sequence; illogical, like a sailor’s tale.
The Catastrophes, Marie Scarles
In The Catastrophes, Marie Scarles excavates the legacies of the lands she lives with and on, describing the beauty and brutality of abandoned factories, highway-side wildflowers, and toxic rivers. Mapping catastrophe’s traces from breakfast eggs to late-night shifts at the bar, this collection asks: in a time of destruction, what can be cultivated from the ruin?
Trash Truck 7:38 A.M. (And Other Love Poems), Ed McManis
Ed McManis is a writer, editor, & erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Narrative, Lascaux Review, etc. He, along with his wife, Linda, have published esteemed author Joanne Greenberg’s (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) novels, Jubilee Year and On the Run.
Little known trivia fact: he holds the outdoor free-throw record at Camp Santa Maria: 67 in a row.
A Dark Wood, Marianne Burke
“A Dark Wood considers the impermanence in our lives that gives us an appreciation of those moments when wonder prevails.” “Imagine catching such light, like painting air / or the atmosphere before it shifts…” These poems try to “catch the light” of transcendence, the joy and sorrow, in common human experience. Partly autobiographical and lyrical in style, they explore nature, childhood, family, loss, marriage and aging.
Two Years and Two Months, Chris Reed
Two Years and Two Months is a contemplation of the complex and many stranded love the author shares with her mother. The poems celebrate their living together in these last two years and two months of her mother’s life, as she turns 100, and as they are sabotaged by a world pandemic, to then find themselves redeemed by a sharing of memories, a love for the natural world and literature. As the poems deal with the losses and confusion that come with a stroke in the final months, mother and daughter eke out unexpected pathways of love and meaning through the words of Milton, Chekhov, Kay Ryan and others.
Glimpse, Maura Snell
As the title implies, the poems included in Glimpse offer a momentary or partial view into what lies between daughters and mothers, between sisters, between aunts and nieces, between friends. Although these are often complicated relationships fraught with unspoken sorrows, there are moments where the line between humanness and the ethereal are blurred.
Maura Snell was born in New York, and has lived in Colorado, Ohio, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and now calls Vermont her home.
Misdirections, Jim Wolper
Jim Wolper’s new poetry chapbook, Misdirections, is a travelogue in verse. The poems take the reader on a journey across continents and cultures. From Kyoto High Street to a Paris cinema and a floating market in Bangkok, each poem is a stop along the way, offering both discovery and familiarity. Wolper invites readers to wander through the world’s landscapes and the human spirit with curiosity, insight, and wonder. –Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University
Back in Harvest Town, Allen M Weber
Back in Harvest Town is a collection of poems that paint characters and events over landscapes with rivers, lakes, trees, and fields. The author chronicles events and emotions that inspired a boy’s departure from rural Southwestern Michigan, and the memories that draw him home as a man.
Allen M Weber lives in Hampton, Virginia with his poet wife and two of their three sons.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 10/1 and 10/31 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.