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.
Black Lawrence Press
Strange Vigil, Scott Frey
Taking its title from Whitman’s vigil, kept through the night in a field beside a dying soldier, Scott Frey’s Strange Vigil spans the three years of his daughter’s life, shortened by a brain injury received during her birth and complicated by intensive medical needs. With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers, this chapbook invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care. Grief and memory echo in the concourse din amid hurried hospital exits and final flights, funerals and all-school assemblies, football games and horror movies, pushing into fraught mixtures of loss and laughter and, ultimately, the wonders that are breath and presence.
Green Linden Press
Cardiac Thrill, Meg Kearney
In Cardiac Thrill, Meg Kearney uses the sonnet to tell a story that is personal and poetic, medical and historical, mortal and fabled, physical and metaphysical. Her touch is deft, witty, conversational yet capable of taking the measure (literally) of life and death. The interlocking nature of the crown of sonnets makes perfect sense in her capable hands as she, the formal prestidigitator, transforms one scenario into another. The poems have a marvelous naturalness that suits this wise, heart-tugging obeisance to the crux of our being. —Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel
Cathexis Northwest Press
Bleeding Ghosts, Lara Chamoun
Bleeding Ghosts is a lyrical exploration of grief, perception, and identity, working in the currents of experimentalism and Surrealism. Though each individual piece stands on its own, towing the line of poetry and fiction, the core narrative of the collection follows an unnamed protagonist whose lover’s death fractures their sense of reality, leaving them untethered. Their world shifts between the intimate and the incomprehensible, and they spiral into detachment and delusion. Eventually, a second self – The Watcher – emerges, offering an external gaze that forces them to reckon with who they have become and how they envision their future. What follows is a slow, dull awakening, a step back into the real world, a movement toward elsewhere, and even toward the possibility of love again. Bleeding Ghosts resists a single reading. The narrative is submerged beneath a dream logic that reflects the absence of stability or clear distinctions between what is memory, what is the present moment, what is perception and what is reality. The work draws inspiration from authors who blur the limits of the conscious and the subconscious – think Sabrina Orah Mark or Leonora Carrington. In some ways, more than a story, it is an atmosphere.
Rattle
Haunt Me, José Enrique Medina
We don’t get to choose who haunts us. In Haunt Me, José Enrique Medina opens a door between worlds—the living and the lost, the remembered and the repressed. These poems drift through memory like a haunted house: Abuela slams the door to keep out the devil’s children, the dead drink beer at the bar, and silence smells like ruda and regret. A mother never returns, but her absence grows roots. With dark humor and aching tenderness, Medina conjures Mexican family life, queer whispers, and sacred forgiveness. This collection asks: What do we inherit from those who vanish? And what becomes of us when the ones we long for stay silent—while those we tried to forget come back, again and again, to remind us who we are?
In Case of Emergency Press
Just write about a bird, Ellie Cottrell
“Just write about a bird,” was the advice offered by one well-meaning poet to the author of this collection, as she struggled to find her footing in the local poetry scene.
While the poet was (sort of) joking, Ellie Cottrell still found much truth in this well-worn recipe for poetic success; just write about a bird, or a flower. The trouble was, she’d never had much interest in writing about either.
From here, the concept of Just write about a bird was born. A story told in three parts, the author invites the reader to join her as she searches for her own place in poetry. Themes of nostalgia, grief, loss, love, and hope are nestled among flights of fancy about a kid flying to the moon and becoming (briefly) a British pop star.
The follow-up to her debut poetry collection, Speakeasy, her new collection sees Cottrell return with a stronger, more confident poetic voice – but her desire to forage for magic in life’s trivialities remains.
Bloodaxe Books
The Sky Around My Father, Emilie Jelinek
The Sky Around My Father charts the estrangement between a daughter and her charismatic but often terrifying father. With nuance and precision, these poems bear witness to a childhood shaped by fear, love and music – where admiration and foreboding uneasily coexist. Drawing on the language of Eastern European fairytales, folk music, chess and meteorology, Emilie Jelinek’s sequence explores the mythic and monstrous dimensions of paternal absence. The observing moon, recurring throughout, becomes a quiet symbol of grief and longing, bridging distance with light. Through a textured blend of anecdotal and compressed lyric poems, ther sequence captures the reverberations of trauma and tenderness alike. At once intimate and archetypal, The Sky Around My Father confronts the deep complexities of the father-daughter bond – its beauty, its terror, and its lasting weather.
The Bodily Press
Red Tide at Sandy Bend, Mary Gilliland
Barnacles sparkle, puffins glint, human practices result in fish-strewn beaches. Like blue-green algae on lakes and ponds, red tide is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Nourished by human waste and warming waters, cyanobacteria multiply in harmful algal blooms (HABs) that release neurotoxins. In a whirl of games, addictions, concussions, swimming bans, Red Tide at Sandy Bend posits a world of creaturely interdependence visceral and intimate.
The Poetry Box
Wild Heart, Patricia Cannon
In Wild Heart, Patricia Cannon has created a book of conversations between her poems and her photography. These are not ekphrastic poems, but instead each poem and photo were created independently. The reader will enjoy discovering new layers of meaning between the two artforms as they “eavesdrop” on each of these “conversations.”
Finishing Line Press
consider the light, Kathi Crawford
consider the light is a hybrid collection that explores growth, resilience, and self-discovery. Through poems like Self-Portrait as Make-Believe and Ceilings, the work examines themes of memory, societal expectations, and the struggle for self-empathy, capturing both the beauty and rawness of life. From a working-class Rustbelt upbringing to chasing the American Dream in Texas, this collection serves as a beacon for women who’ve felt alone in the world, reminding us of our shared humanity.
What The Pause Gives, Colleen Teasdale Filler
What the Pause Gives invites exactly that—what we can see and feel when we pause to take in the world around us. These are poems about noticing, whatever that pause may be. It’s about how meaningful small moments can be, whether they be observations of roots, acorns, trees, skunk cabbage, apricots, dogs, wolves, bears, wind, water, or fire.. Some poems contemplate what we humans do to the world, both when we have a sense of knowing and a sense of how much we don’t know, what it is to be hardwired, when we might be tethered, and finally offering Reasons to Survive.
Hurt Sounds. Isabella J Mansfield
Hurt Sounds, is a single chord strum on her father’s guitar, his collection of his records, a broken harmonica. It’s a phone that won’t ring on a birthday, a holiday, or just to say hello. No matter how long we have with our parents, it will never seem like enough time. In Hurt Sounds, Mansfield has allowed a glimpse into the most precious memories she ever shared with her father: his deathbed.
This One Life, Lee Robinson
The poems in This One Life take us from childhood to old age, through love and loss, along the way learning lessons from the natural world and confronting mortality with honesty and wisdom.
Lee Robinson practiced law for 25 years in Charleston, South Carolina, and was the first female president of the Charleston County Bar. She has published two novels and a young adult novel.
Ash Grove, William LaPage
ASH GROVE is a fractured hymn to the obscure corners of the periphery—where language splinters, turns, and reforms. William LaPage‘s poems navigate the recursive digressions of thought, half-dreams, and silences that pulse with their own strange frequency. Lost in what feels familiar, the ordinary becomes uncanny: streetlights blur into ghostly memory, conversations repeat like mantras, and time folds in on itself, delicate and cutting. Whether unraveling the architecture of longing or mapping the shape of absence, ASH GROVE is a journey through subliminal terrain. But in the recursion and disjunction, a strange kind of light breaks through.
The Last Girl, M.R. Mandell
In The Last Girl, M.R. Mandell’s sophomore chapbook, she tells stories of abandonment, and survival. Opening with a young girl’s vivid memory of sexual abuse, M.R. guides us through her speakers’ experiences with exploitation and betrayal, often from the ones they trusted most. Using a collage of voices, she winds us along shallow streets of suburbia, haunted bedrooms, and stark city rooftops. With honesty and humor, she reflects on a childhood full of poverty, fear and death, ending with grown-up tales of feminine defiance and hope.
Troutwatching, Dallas Crow
Dallas Crow’s second poetry chapbook, Troutwatching, is a wide-ranging collection that explores life with sons, animals, and art. There are poems set in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West, the Midwest, and Appalachia. There are poems in response to pizza, pumpkins, paintings, photographs, and other poets, while others respond to front-page current events both horrific and awe-inspiring. These are poems in love with language and absurdity, travel and trout. In the end, this is a collection of love songs with an eye on mortality.
response, Patricia J. Boyle
response is an engaging collection of reflections and observations that call the reader to look more closely at the world we inhabit. The poems recount tales of leaving home, surprising encounters, losing a pet, coursing rivers, and passing storms. They talk of flowers and trees, bubbles and snails, the companionship of an evening walk. These and other stories invite us to contemplate our connections to others and the plants and creatures who share our space. The poems reflect gratitude for the awe-inspiring moments that arise in ordinary circumstances every day.
Small Talk Symphony, Joshua Lillie
Small Talk Symphony is an exercise in wandering, a series of deep breaths and slow exhalations spent navigating home. The directions contained revolve around withstanding, resisting, and belonging in a modern world. If depression is anger turned inward, then anger must be the muzzle bent backward. These poems aim to keep their fingers off the trigger while always ready for the worst.
Afterglow, Adrian Schnall
These poems of vignette and reminiscence take the reader on a rollercoaster of emotions – from the sorrow of watching aging parents decline and die to the delight of a Facetime call with a grandchild; from wonder at the beauty of nature to dismay and frustration at seeing it despoiled; from the pleasure of witnessing a small act of kindness to disbelief at the inhumanities we see all around us; from a doctor’s self-recrimination when a patient has a bad outcome to the joy he feels in knowing he’s made a life better. Each of these poems sings with a particular cadence and resonates – be it with regret or resignation, forgiveness or hope.
The Swing at the Edge of the World, Lea Graham
In this chapbook of travel poems, the heft and range of perspective is explored. What do we see and experience when in unfamiliar places? How are those sights and experiences determined by the familiar or the angle of the self? How does our knowledge or lack thereof determine how we piece together a place? How does travel then change our familiar places? If we spend time in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, France, does that change our vision of Paris, Arkansas? Paris, Texas? Like the photo of Lantau Peak by the photographer, Yoav Horesh, in which his subject is shooting photos from the second highest place in Hong Kong, perspective shapes the view.
Hospice, Molly Akin
Hospice catalogs a decade in the poet’s life marked by becoming a mother while supporting a terminally ill parent, reckoning with the intimate work of caregiving. Formal explorations grapple with the twinned dynamics of mothering and motherlessness. Throughout the collection, Molly Akin considers how we trace our origins and inheritance within the imperfections of memory. Hospice employs precise and deliberate syntax to examine universally human and deeply personal themes.
Sailing To the Edges, Jennifer M Phillips
Sailing To the Edges by Jennifer M Phillips invites readers into journeys of adventure and wonder, both historic and modern. An extended poem accompanies Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen as he sailed with a Belgian expedition to Antarctica in 1897, a harrowing journey much of which was spent trapped in ice in the complete bitterly cold darkness of polar winter. Shorter poems arise as meditations on the poet’s own travel from the stark beauty of the seas and landscapes of Iceland, Svalbard and the coast of Norway, a poignant and disturbing encounter with our rapidly changing climate.
A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A. Foley
In her chapbook, A Kind of Mercy, Sharon A Foley portrays her twenty-nine years lived as a nun within the religious order of the Sisters of Mercy. She’s attracted to the order by her high school guidance counselor, a nun, who seems vibrant and fulfilled. Ms. Foley captures the intricacies of living with thirty-seven other postulants: chanting the psalms, playing softball, doing laundry, taking part in a Christmas Pageant. Throughout the book, Ms. Foley speaks of her private thoughts: doubts, desires, jealousies, admirations, and “stifled anger” as she navigates this calling.
While she enjoys comradery with some nuns, she experiences conflicts and differences with others. Eventually she experiences a “gouging loneliness” that prompts her to leave this convent life. Through poems carefully crafted, Ms. Foley allows her reader to laugh and cry with her on every step of her journey.
Pop-Up Shrines, Linda Drach
What happens when the balance shifts from health to sickness after we pledge in sickness and in health? Pop-Up Shrines explores how illness and disability coexist with “new rooms” of discovery and resilience. The poems in this collection make room for it all. Wheelchairs and pill bottles. Cougars and herons. Table salt made from human tears. This lyrical exploration of love, loss and change celebrates the sacred moments and common objects that form our imperfect, everyday lives, illuminating life’s “dark corners feathered in wonder.”
Orchard Language, Kathy Pon
In Orchard Language, Kathy Pon and her husband bear witness to an almond orchard’s “vertical revelry, like a prayer surging skyward.” Her poems speak to a life of cultivation, harvest and aging trees, the mellowing of a marriage, and worries about water and stress to the land. Still, amid these changes she finds kinship with critters and all that grows here. Her poems speak to a reverence for a natural world that in turn, nurtures the human spirit.
His Only Merit, Benjamin Green
When I finished compiling poems for my collection entitled Old Man Looking through a Window at Night, I thought I was done writing poetry. After all, it had taken twenty-six years to collect enough work for another full-length collection. I was sixty-six years old; there did not seem time enough to gather poems for another book.
I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, the 1954 Knopf edition. Immediately, I started writing responses to his work. Some of the reactions became “after” poems; some of the writing sounded like a reply. I conversed with Stevens’ poetry, I conversed with Stevens, the man. Sometimes we argued; sometimes we agreed. Within a month, I had nineteen poems—this chapbook.
Mazurka, Katieann Vogel
Deep in the forest—among bears, foxes, deer, and soaring pines—a striking melody beats to river and drum. In the shadow of the Krkonoše Mountains, this song and dance multiplies in triple time: and Mazurka is born.
The mazurka, a Polish waltz, is a beloved dance of Czech generations past and present that originated centuries ago under the Krkonoše Mountains, or Giant Mountains, straddling the present-day border of Czechia and Poland.
Between continents, generations, languages, and cultures, the poems of Mazurka honor this music and dance of the Bohemian people, the natural worlds that inspire them, and the strong women—from antiquity to the present and into the future—that dare to face their pain and endeavor to transform it.
Bottlecap Press
Skeleton Mine Disaster, Ryan Di Francesco
Skeleton Mine Disaster follows a speaker moving through dream and daylight with equal clarity: a snail gnawing at the temple, an unplugged moon still “plugged in to the wall,” a half-eaten Honeycrisp glossed by a fly, the dull fluorescents of service work and waiting rooms. Across lineated lyrics and hybrid, diaristic pieces, Ryan Di Francesco charts panic and tenderness inside contemporary life—addiction and long sobriety, insomnia at 3 a.m., cheap carpets and neon, the ache of caregiving and the stubbornness of love. The poems refuse grand pronouncements in favor of precise, lived textures: a dustpan in a bathroom mirror, a lorazepam on a dresser, FM radio in a kitchen where anger has just been served. What emerges is a lucid anti-romance of the everyday, where terror and mercy share a single breath.
Formally restless, Skeleton Mine Disaster splices lyric concentration with narrative drift, collage, and the occasional anti-poem feint. The result is a field guide to surviving the ordinary apocalypse: closing the window so no more insects get in, finishing the coffee, waking the beloved from a nightmare, and writing it down before the light changes.
My Growing Collection, Scarlett Svoboda
Personhood has always been undefinable, a grasp at both the concrete and incorporeal concepts behind one’s soul. Seemingly, for a teenager: impossible to parse through. In My Growing Collection, Scarlett Svoboda attempts to craft an idea of her own identity through bouncing rhymes about bounding jack rabbits and reflective dialogues with mysterious deities.
It stands to reason that this chapbook has no all encompassing conclusion or grand realization. Rather, it is an exploration of life through sixteen poems, from a transforming perspective over the course of many years. My Growing Collection jumps between stark moments of loss and profound friendship in pursuit of self-understanding. In contemplation of forgetting her own childhood memories, Svoboda grasps for any item to add to her personhood as life begins: a glass model boat, an ancient rib, a warm bed, even centipedes. These poems arise from experience in a growing body of flesh, uncertain of her final form.
Letters, Alison Bell Miller
Letters is a collection of epistolary poems addressed to real people—some personal, some celebrity. In these poems Alison explores the pain of failed relationships, the deepening of new ones, and those that exist only in the imagination.
The book begins with the lines “On the bridge out of Brooklyn you asked Do you trust me to not drive over the side, kill us both?” and from there takes us through sometimes interlocking tales of suicide, addiction, survival, and next level love. From a letter to her father to one addressed to Sylvia Plath, each poem is a story that reveals more about the narrator and invites us to consider our own connections.
Twenty-Six Short Ones, Sean West
Allusion and reference chip through the façade of ordinary life only to reveal another façade. Nothing, it appears, is what it appears upon first glance. Flatulence becomes shorthand for love, a plane crash reveals the sandpaper quality of time, garbagemen dig up the future as well as the past.
Then again, everything appears to be exactly what it appears to be. If we open our eyes, we’ll see we live lives of quiet routine – watching sports, drinking coffee, awaiting that eternal footman.
Split Air, Kayla Howe
Split Air confronts America’s epidemic of gun violence through poems that move between the national and the deeply personal. Some are rooted in the author’s own family history, others in public tragedies etched into the American consciousness, from Columbine and Sandy Hook to Parkland, Uvalde, Aurora, Orlando, and Las Vegas. Across varied forms, these poems render violence not as abstraction but as lived experience.
Together, the collection becomes a chorus of mourning and warning, refusing to let tragedy dissolve into numb repetition. Split Air captures both the brutal shock of a bullet and the lingering dread that shadows daily American life. With urgency and force, it seeks to jolt us back into the raw space after a shooting, when grief is sharp, action feels imperative, and complacency has not yet set in. From that space, change is possible.
Seasonal Affective Disorder, Robert J. Wilson
Summer turns to autumn and chestnut leaves shroud the body of a forest shrew, spring turns to summer and a colony of bees gather on a linden tree’s blossoms.
Seasonal Affective Disorder recounts the decay and regeneration, suffering and beauty, of the transformative beings which serve as subjects of these poems, from a homeless woman laying claim to an island which has been deserted by the threat of an impending hurricane, to cottonwood seeds filling a woods with the illusion of snow in early summer.
Sandcastle, Carlin Steere
Sandcastle is a collection of 30 poems and prose poetry pieces detailing the fictional experience of a queer writer grappling with life on her own while spending a month in a writer’s residency at the Provincetown Sand Dunes.
Observations, Sharon McPeters
This chapbook is a study of human nature. The characters respond to their environments and circumstances in evolved, adaptive ways. They all have the necessary strength to understand and overcome obstacles.
Observations is also about the deepened intellectual resources the characters need to comprehend their lives. As their lives pass by, the characters’ sentiments are shaped into resolute, sharpened and identifiable poetic forms.
To Love, Despite, Ryan Bolding
To Love, Despite collides longing, myth, memory, and the trials of modernity. These poems explore ancient love and loss, wrestle with the challenges of endlessly laboring, and reclamation of self through desire, fantasy, and nature.
This chapbook’s collection aims to explore what it means to live tenderly-with grief, despite systems, and in the hope of finding tranquility and defiance through gentleness.
Two Crossings, Steve Mentz
These poems trace two saltwater crossings. In the first a family sails from Brooklyn to Southampton on board the Queen Mary 2. The second features a group of swimmers crossing from Port Jefferson, NY, to Bridgeport, CT.
The five thousand nautical miles between North America and Europe unfurl a changing relationship between self and sea, as the ocean liner arcs across the top of the Atlantic. Textures of whitecaps and human memories jostle with the strange community called into being by the massive ship.
i drew you from the river, Rue LaFrance
i drew you from the river cuts through red dirt and dry valleys with a flood of sentiments about God, death, and rivers. The poet draws from the depths—some convergence of nature and nurture, hunger and hope, sacrament and sentiment. She navigates love and inheritance with the intimate regard of Ocean Vuong and the raw urgency of Richard Siken. These pieces were scribbled down in margins and gathered on notebook paper over the course of several years, and stitched together on long train rides and lingering airline flights. Ultimately, the poet urges the reader to follow the rivers. Ultimately, this collection promises, we all will reach the sea.
I think we should be louder at Dyke March, Sophia Carroll
I think we should be louder at Dyke March is a collection born out of the chaos and upheaval of a Saturn return. The twin blows of a startling diagnosis and the end of a long-term relationship catalyze a search for love, and self-love, amid trauma, illness, and grief.
In this, flash writer and poet Sophia Carroll’s debut chapbook, limerence and dating disasters become opportunities to probe family histories, unhealthy coping mechanisms, and formative memories. I think we should be louder at Dyke March is a hybrid of poetry, prose, and pieces in between—and as it weaves between genres, it weaves together diffuse inspirations, from Marie Howe to slam poetry, from alternative spirituality to zoological fact sheets, to achieve catharsis and clarity.
Padding Loamy on a Brew of Earth, Tori Grant Welhouse
Padding Loamy on a Brew of Earth is a lyrical reckoning with identity, displacement, and the quiet negotiations of love. In this intimate chapbook, the poet reflects on her time as a young MFA student in London, where an unlikely romance led to an elopement and a new life in a remote Scottish village on the edge of the North Sea. These poems confront the alienation of being foreign and the complexities of forging connection across difference. With language as rich and textured as the soil beneath her feet, the poet invites readers into a world where love and identity are tilled, turned, and tenderly unearthed.
SAPPHICS, Caitlyn Alario
SAPPHICS is sapphic in both form and content; a series of sapphic stanzas, this collection explores the expansiveness of queer identity through relationships and experiences that shape one speaker’s understanding of her orientation, not only sexually but more broadly, to and in the world. The poems in this collection are concerned with attention and the ways that relationships, however they may or may not be defined, might sharpen, alter, or redirect one’s way of seeing the world.
From childhood crushes to one night stands, SAPPHICS bears witness to the enduring messiness of love in all its forms. At its core, this collection serves as a testament that no relationship, however fleeting, however painful, however undefinably felt leaves us without some new understanding of ourselves, the world, and our place in it.
Bottle Episodes, Michael Colbert
Bottle Episodes charts a path from obsessive gay crushes, through life-affirming love, soul-crushing first dates, and a series of consuming, short-term love affairs. Redefining the force of romantic narratives through unconventional shapes and frames of time, each episode offers its own particular delight. With equal strokes of playfulness, whimsy, melodrama, and joy, the poems of this collection are as interested in referencing Girls as they are in simping, swooning, and finding a new self both inside––and out––of love.
Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy, Shandela Contreras
Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy is a lyrical excavation of the Black & Brown body as both target and vessel. The hospital recurs here: sterile, haunted, and historically unkind, where marginalized women are expected to be silent. Threaded through these poems is an unflinching study of the cycle women inherit; how they are molded, whether consciously or by quiet modeling, to become saviors: to guard the future, to preserve the family through the preservation of themselves. Yet the very systems that demand this duty often deny the freedom or resources to fulfill it. Here, that tension breathes and breaks open.
The Morning Brightness, Ameerah Brown
What happens when the sun can’t reach you, or when rain continues to pour down? Life goes on, bills keep coming, and no one waits up for you. This journey of poetry is a short walk through a moment in life. A moment to take a seat on a park bench and reflect, a journal of sorts.
The Morning Brightness is a constant pulse of sunshine despite the thunderous clouds. This story is a rocket through the thick overcast set to reach the sun. Come along with your emotions packed and a heart ready to breathe.
SLT SHKR, Carter Hemion
SLT SHKR is an exploration of the memories that build the spirit, the life animating the body, and the fire inside the soul. It is a reflection of the ways we are bound to each other and a means of survival in daily fresh starts.
SLT SHKR stirs up shadows of nostalgia and the remnants of relationships beyond time. It is a reflection on the realities of surviving rare diseases, falling in and out of love with the self, and reconnecting with a home that never existed inside a constantly changing bodymind. SLT SHKR turns vertigo to sand and blossoms to stone. It weaves together the strings of humanity in every curious memory haunting the uncertain future to find a new path forward.
Birch Fever, Kassi Wilson
Birch Fever explores the friction between pent-up emotions and family dynamics amid the stunning backdrop of the North Shore. Inspired by a road trip in the dead of winter—temperatures plunge as frayed nerves heat up.
This collection is a daring odyssey of suppressed truths, bold confessions, and the changing nature of familial relationships. Be swept away by the beauty of birch trees, mystical forests, and quaint fishing towns.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 9/1 and 9/30 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.”