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What is the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review (PCR)?

Poet, journalist, critic, and publisher, P. Aiden Hunt, created the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review (PCR) in 2023. He founded it as an online literary journal for book reviews, craft essays, author features, and publishing news focused on chapbooks.
PCR‘s mission is to bring attention to more chapbooks, their publishers, and their authors. We use the abbreviation “PCR” because we hope to expand into other genres in time.
Check out our about us and masthead pages for more information.

Who is P. Aiden Hunt?

Aiden Hunt is a neurodivergent and disabled journalist, editor, and poet based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He’s launched three previous online publications in the past decade. Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is the fourth and, hopefully, the last. The previous three were journalistic in nature.
Aiden publishes journalism under the byline, “P. Aiden Hunt”. You can find out more information about him on his author website.

A chapbook is a short, printed book or pamphlet with a small collection of work, usually by a single author or creator. Chapbooks can contain poems, art, short prose, and other writings.
Major book publishers look for full-length books of at least 45 pages, but writing a collection of 10-20 poems is a serious artistic endeavor on its own. Chapbooks usually have between 25 and 45 pages with a unifying theme.
The best chapbooks have a theme larger than simply being poems by a single author.

The journal publishes on a rolling, weekly schedule. Every Tuesday we publish a New Poetry Books post and Thursdays are for new content when we have enough contributions. However, we divide Philly Poetry Chapbook Review into two volumes of three bimonthly issues per year, for archival purposes. New issue periods begin in January, March, May, July, September, and November.
Our goal is to publish at least four new chapbook reviews, one literary essay, and one author feature in each issue. However, we want our front page to stay dynamic and interactive, so it will always show (at least) the two most recent monthly editor’s notes, five chapbook reviews, two literary essays and two author features.
The front page header shows the current issue, even if content from previous issues is still there. We show the volume and issue to which individual pieces belong at the bottom of each page. Below that is a table of contents for the issue.

Free. PCR is a nonprofit publication with the goal of educating and informing about the chapbook form. We offer new content updates and a monthly newsletter update through Substack.com, but all content and subscriptions are both free and ad-free. Funding is provided by P. Aiden Hunt. We expect to seek donations, grants, and/or sponsors to help with costs in the future.
We publish PCR content under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND). Anyone can republish it for noncommercial purposes as long as the rules are followed. We want as many people as possible to benefit.

Creative Commons is one way to create open-source content that can be published elsewhere for free as long as the rules are followed. There are different types of CC licenses with different republishing rules.
If you’re not sure, just ask. We want our work spread widely, so as long as you’re not profiting from it, we’re likely to grant permission.
All content published by Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is published under license code “CC BY-NC-ND”. This means that any contents can be republished, online or in print, as long as following requirements are met:
- You credit PCR and the review’s author with links to the original if published online.
- You only republish material for non-commercial purposes.
- The piece is published in full, or in preview with link back to the full text, and it’s content is not edited.

We rely on independent contributors for the bulk of our content. Our editor publishes a new editor’s note at the start of each month also writes at least one chapbook review or author feature per month.
Want to contribute a chapbook review, essay on the crafts of poetry and/or chapbook design, or an author profile/interview? Check out our submission guidelines here.
Our budget is small, but we do pay a token fee for contributions. We are open to submissions and queries until further notice. Submissions are always free.

Yes. PCR is primarily a journal for curated content. However, we only accept content related to chapbooks. Our focus is on poetry at this time, but we hope to expand to other genres in the future.
For guidelines and instruction on submitting pitches, manuscripts, or chapbooks for review, please go to our submissions page.
We do not publish unsolicited original poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction unrelated to chapbooks. It’s not part of our goals and we don’t have the capacity.

Yes. We accept submissions of chapbooks and advance copies for review at pitches { @ } phillychabookreview.org. Submissions are reviewed by our editor and active contributors for published review consideration.
At this time, we’re only reviewing chapbooks primarily composed of poetry.

You can find the archives at the bottom of every page. We create a new static issue page when publishing the editor’s note for that issue. This will show all content for only that issue in one place.
At the bottom of each piece of content, there is also a banner showing the issue in which it appeared, above the contents of that issue.

(Last Updated: 2/11/2024)