We here at Philly Poetry Chapbook Review love poetry, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. We have a hunch that our readers do, too. Every Tuesday, we publish an update about what poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, are provided by the publisher. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Chapbooks
Like Wine or Like Pain, Francesca Leader
Contributor Chapbook
(Meet Francesca)
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
How does it feel to fall in love while broken? To stumble into an experience both beautiful and painful, exhilarating and terrifying? Do we retreat in order to protect unhealed wounds, or surrender to a transformative–and potentially destructive–emotional force?
The poems in this sequence are verbal ink sketches, written in moments of intense feeling, that map the psychological journey of falling in love again for the first time in two decades. They reveal a person struggling to savor and grow a new love while still processing the trauma of a failed relationship, roiled with sexual desire and wracked with anxiety. The sequence begins with intense infatuation, passes through the morass of doubt and renegotiation of boundaries, and finally arrives at a mature passion that accepts sorrow while allowing joy to dominate.
Like Wine or Like Pain is a story of reconciliation with the emotional complexity of love in a time of healing.
Francesca Leader is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana. In another life, she earned her Master’s degree in Modern Japanese Literature from the Ohio State University in 2006. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Five South, J Journal, Barren, Funicular, Wigleaf, Milk Candy Review, Literary Mama, Hooligan, and elsewhere. Her artwork has been featured on the covers of Cobra Milk, the Adanna Literary Review, the Harpy Hybrid Review, and Cream Scene Carnival, and she regularly contributes commissioned illustrations to Flash Frog. She was named the winner of the Southeast Review’s 2023 World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest, and has been nominated for various other awards. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.
Rainy Day, Norma Cole
Publisher: knife | fork | book
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Norma Cole’s forms of expression are ambitious. Her poems often (though not always) take small forms; they are made of short lines, in small stanzas, so that the space of the page starts to play an active role in the reading of them. Subtly, surreptitiously, these small packages explode in delicate, or sometimes not so delicate, arrays of color and attitude. Norma is famous for her empathic connections to people, artists and others, living and dead. Many of her poems carry dedications. She builds community as part of her poetic practice. On the other hand, she reserves a razor-sharp and ice-cold anger for the abuses of power and depredations of the morally corrupt as she observes them in the halls of power, here and around the world. The world is always calling in these poems; sometimes it is being called away, as we are made to look, through Norma’s poems, from the perspective of the universe. It is then that the human quality really shines through. Norma is a visual artist, in addition to being a writer, and has often worked in collaboration with other artists. Not just the look of her poems, but the images she shows us in them, will carry us a long way.” – Vincent Katz, March 16 2021, Tribute to Norma Cole
Norma Cole was born in Toronto in 1945. She is a poet, painter, and translator. Her most recent books of poetry include Fate News (2018), Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside (2012), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008 (2009), and Spinoza in Her Youth (2002). Her awards include the Fund for Poetry, Gertrude Stein Award, the Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry. normacole.org
Tuesday Morning, Sam Kilkenny
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
This short collection of poems was created out of necessity. Like any good writer, artist, or living human person, I was having trouble feeling motivated to write. So, like any good writer, artist, or living human person, I looked to my friends for help. My friends, Danielle Camille Dollar, C.W. Bryan, and I came up with an idea to break this writer’s block. We called it Poetry is Plagiarism.
The title, Tuesday Morning, is taken from the last poem in the collection. It serves as a reminder that you don’t have to be productive to be happy. You don’t need to tie yourself to one way of living. Lean on others, try to write even when you can’t, and on days when you simply can’t do anything, allow yourself the grace to lay in bed all day.
Sam Kilkenny is a nonfiction writer and poet. He lives in Atlanta, GA where he writes everyday. He is currently writing with C.W. Bryan at poetryispretentious.com. His work can be found on the website, most notably his poems for the Poetry is Plagiarism Series. When he isn’t writing, you can find him biking around Atlanta like a madman. He hates cars and loves Wendell Berry.
We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning, Lee Potts
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning, Lee Potts’ second chapbook, seeks to explore the way desires shape our own lives as well as the world we live in. The poems transverse a landscape of human yearning, from personal wishes to the collective dreams that bind all of us.
Many of the poems here happen when a moment of wanting intersects with reality and reveals the beauty and sorrow that ensues. For instance, there is the quiet longing for connection while death waits nearby in “The dust we bring home with us the dust we left behind,” as well as a profound reflection on ambition and legacy in the title poem, “We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning.”
This collection is an invitation to reflect on the ways our desires propel us forward, hold us back, and ultimately shape the course of our time on earth.
Lee Potts (he/him) is founder and editor of the poetry journal Stone Circle Review. He returned to writing poetry in 2017 after a 25-year, post-university hiatus. His poetry has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, and elsewhere. In 2021, his chapbook, And Drought Will Follow, was published by Frosted Fire Press. He lives just outside of Philadelphia with his wife and daughter.
Connections & Choreography, Jacob Schepers
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Connections & Choreography, Jacob Schepers assembles a textual experiment consisting of poetic fragments—lines and phrases—undergoing transformation across four rearrangements. “This is an example of movable type,” one section announces, and while the chapbook’s formal innovative constraint may often seem to fit the bill as the prima donna of this imagined production, what ends up taking center stage is the lasting mystery of how poetic meaning forces its way out of an imposed straightjacket and ends up accumulating lyrical significance and inviting further introspection and interrogation.
Connections & Choreography is a scene, a spectacle, of imposed constraint and recombination. A tongue-in-cheek yet instructive “Preface as Press Release” introduces the work further within the document itself and establishes each poetic phrase as a fame-starved member of a cast of characters who all seek wider exposure and grander spotlights.
Jacob Schepers is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014). His poems have appeared in DIALOGIST, The Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame, where he now teaches in the University Writing Program. With Sara Judy, he edits the online poetry journal ballast. Originally from northern Michigan, he now lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and four sons. More at www.jacobschepers.com and @JacobSchepers.
a year of nothing much, Lindsay Pelliccia
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
What happens once you put your cap and gown away in your childhood closet? Who are you meant to be and what is life supposed to look like? These are the questions that Lindsay Pelliccia asks in a year of nothing much, her raw account of life after college. In the collection of 11 poems, Pelliccia describes the struggles and beauties of her life without the familiar and comforting structures of her youth.
These poems appear in the order they were written. This chronological structure follows Pelliccia as she moves back to her Massachusetts hometown, travels around the Northeast, fails to find work, contemplates her adolescence, and falls both in and out of love. At its core, a year of nothing much is a meditation on life and love. The collection dissects the connection between freedom and restriction, love and hate, and hope and sorrow.
Lindsay Pelliccia is a creative who hails from Western Massachusetts. She has been previously published by several literary magazines and independent presses and has a self-published collection of poems titled 30 Days of April. Pelliccia is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Jo Literary Magazine and Creative Collective which has published five, soon to be six, issues. In her spare time, Pelliccia writes, makes books and zines, and listens to her CD collection (of which she is very proud).
Past Life Recall, Ellen Rosenbloom
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Ellen Rosenbloom’s Past Life Recall is about the never-ending process of the self as it shapeshifts and cycles through time and space. Different selves emerge: some famous, some icons, some mythical, some characters from literature and some everyday people.
The sound of words in this collection is important as it lends a soundtrack to the poems. Tightly wound in this process are the echoes and repetitions—a vibrant undercurrent. The styles of old and new mingle together in this unending multi-verse with multiple periods of history skipped by and dotted with shiny flashes of wit and whimsy. The span of centuries to present day is played out, taking the reader, most hopefully, on a journey through lives both past and present.
Ellen Rosenbloom was born on a air force base in Clovis, New Mexico where her father was a surgeon. She has a BS in Fine Art from Skidmore College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School. Ellen’s poems and stories have been published in many journals and web sites. She has also published a novel and novella. Ellen works by day as a Copywriter. She lives in New York City with her favorite person, her husband, Adam.
Full-length
woke up no light, Leila Mottley
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Leila Mottley follows her trailblazing first novel with a perfectly pitched first collection of poems that demonstrate her spark and scope. woke up no light reckons with themes of reparations, restitution, and desire. Moving in sections from “girlhood” to “neighborhood” to “falsehood” to, finally, “womanhood,” these poems are the breathing life of a Black girl as she grows into adulthood, simultaneously youthful and profound. Each poem is a searing vignette, capturing the dissonance of Black girlhood through visceral language. The collection is sharp and raw, wise and rhythmic, a combination that lights up each page. From unearthing histories to searching for ways to dream of a future in a world constantly on the brink of disaster, Mottley sets forth personal and political revelation with piercing detail.
woke up no light confirms Leila Mottley’s arrival and demonstrates the enduring power of her voice—brave and distinctive and thoroughly her own.
Leila Mottley is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a New York Times best seller. She is also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.
Good Grief, Brianna Pastor
Publisher: HarperOne
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
When Brianna Pastor released her self-published poetry collection, Good Grief, she was blown away by the outpouring of support from people who reached out and said, “Yes. Me too.” For anyone who has struggled with questions of identity or coped with serious emotional issues, including grief, trauma, anxiety, and depression, this collection will help you find hope on the other side.
we don’t know how long our pain will last. we assume that because it hurts now, it is probably going to hurt tomorrow. it may even hurt the next day. perhaps it will get worse. but we sleep, and you see, and we do this marvelous thing in our sleep—we mend. And tomorrow is not always what we thought it would be.—from Good Grief
Brianna Pastor is a queer writer, empath, and advocate from New Jersey. She began sharing her work on Instagram in 2014, to cope with the personal pain in her life and begin her healing journey. Journaling and introspection has always been at the forefront of her being. She writes about the raw, the uncomfortable, the overlooked; conveying that at the root of all things, is love. Brianna hopes to write and inspire those in a way that she, herself, needed when she was younger.
Deer Black Out, Ulrich Jesse K. Baer
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Deer Black Out is a(n obsessional re) mediation of violence and trauma through the trans/coalescence of identities surfacing and resurfacing within a manuscript of serialized poetry, influenced by HD, Zukofsky, and Ronald Johnson. It’s sort of like a body, the movement of which you can only recognize emerging within a field of static. Just the outlines. A deer! In ramifying lines, this poetry creates a self-reciprocating dialogue with the very act of self-replication. The language exists as the prosthetic support that co-creates and conditions the Baerself’s emergence into the real.
Ulrich Jesse K Baer received his MFA from Brown University in 2017. He was born in Georgia and grew up beneath Southern power plants. He has a poetry chapbook with Magic Helicopter Press (Holodeck One, 2017), a science fiction chapbook with Essay Press (At One End, 2020), and a full-length book with Apocalypse Party (Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, 2021). He has been included in journals such as FENCE, Baest, and Bone Bouquet. He loves horses and lives near Paris, France.
The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, Arthur Sze
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In The Silk Dragon II, National Book Award–winning poet Arthur Sze presents a sophisticated vision of the vitality, diversity, and power of the Chinese poetic tradition. Traveling over one and a half millennia, Sze guides readers through a luminous history of verse, from the contemplative insights of fifth century poet Tao Qian, through Tang dynasty poets such as Wang Wei and Du Fu, and into subsequent centuries in which lived such innovative artists as Li Qingzhao and Bada Shanren, among many others.
Extending the work from the original 2001 volume, The Silk Dragon II then traces classical Chinese poetry’s eruption into the free verse of the modern and contemporary eras, introducing groundbreaking poems by the Chinese Modernist master Wen Yiduo, as well as those from major living poets such as Wang Jiaxin, Zhai Yongming, and Xi Chuan. Through this remarkable journey—deepened by Sze’s personal introduction—we see that the “impossible task” of translation is yet rich with encounter, as both long-lost voices and those still speaking enter the same conversation, with the same vivacity.
Arthur Sze (he/him) is an award-winning poet, translator, and editor who has published eleven books of original poetry. His works have been translated into fourteen languages, and include The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; and, Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His book of translations, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (2001), was selected for the Western States Book Award. A recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, Sze has also been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and National Endowment of the Arts. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Crushed Wild Mint, Jess Housty
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Crushed Wild Mint is a collection of poems embodying land love and ancestral wisdom, deeply rooted to the poet’s motherland and their experience as a parent, herbalist and careful observer of the patterns and power of their territory. Jess Housty grapples with the natural and the supernatural, transformation and the hard work of living that our bodies are doing—held by mountains, by oceans, by ancestors and by the grief and love that come with communing.
Housty’s poems are textural—blossoms, feathers, stubborn blots of snow—and reading them is a sensory offering that invites the reader’s whole body to be transported in the experience. Their writing converses with mountains, animals and all our kin beyond the human realm as they sit beside their ancestors’ bones and move throughout the geography of their homeland. Housty’s exploration of history and futurity, ceremony and sexuality, grieving and thriving invites us to look both inward and outward to redefine our sense of community.
Through these poems we can explore living and loving as a practice, and placemaking as an essential part of exploring our humanity and relationality.
Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with their homelands, their extended family and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.
Burn, Sara Henning
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Publication Date: April 22, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sara Henning’s Burn draws readers deep into the moments that make us, focusing on instances of crisis and renewal to explore our relation to time and lived experience. In these poems, we follow a speaker as she works through the loss of young love, the death of her parents, marriage’s hardness and beauty, sexual assault, and the devastation of a pandemic—evolutions of trauma that fracture time and alter perception. Twinned with these extremes are shimmering manifestations of joy only an imperfect world can make possible.
Burn magnifies the way time leaves us both the victim and the victor of our realities. The blaze of her late-mother’s Tiffany lamps sends the speaker back to childhood, where she unearths mica from the schoolyard dirt. The devastation of an ecological crisis, the annihilating act of rape, and the unsolved disappearance of a caretaker all level the speaker’s world and upend her place in it, forcing her to reconstitute reality from what remains. In poems which summon the spirit of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, this collection walks through the physics of temporality as refracted through love, loss, and grief, so we better understand its effect on our lives. Through this insight, Henning introduces a new way of being in the world.
A work of advocacy and uplift, Burn shines with the vibrant possibilities of narrative lyric poetry as it forges a path from grief to hope.
Sara Henning is the author of Terra Incognita and View from True North, which was chosen by Adrian Matejka as co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, a 2019 High Plains Book Award, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. Her work has appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Marshall University.
Grief’s Alphabet, Carrie Etter
Publisher: Seren
Publication Date: April 22, 2024
Format: Paperback
Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter is a shattering elegy for the poet’ s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. Beginning both chronologically and alphabetically, the collection moves from early life with the narrator’ s adoption, through to the mother’s unexpected death and the banal yet painful tasks which follow, such as sorting clothes and arranging the funeral. The final section deals with life after loss, and the long work of grieving which culminates in the title poem. Evoking the complex, intimate relationship between mother and daughter, this raw yet deft collection celebrates love in the same breath as it weeps for its loss.
American expatriate Carrie Etter has lived in England since 2001 and published three collections of poetry: The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011), and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society. Her fourth collection, The Weather in Normal, was published with Seren in October 2018. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) and Linda Lamus’ s A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Her first pamphlet of short stories, Hometown, was published by V. Press in 2016. She is Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath.
Reader, I, Corey Van Landingham
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Reader, I draws its title from the conclusion to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” Spanning the first years of a marriage, the speaker in Reader, I both courts and eschews nuptial myths, as its speaker—tender and callous, skeptical and hopeful, daughter and lover—finds a role for herself in marriage, in history, in something beyond the self. While these poems burn with a Plathian fire, they also address and invite in a reader who is, as in Jane Eyre, a confidant. Steeped in a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and power structures, Reader, I traverses bowling alleys and hospital rooms, ancient Troy and public swimming pools, to envision domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa.
Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Illinois.
No Gods Live Here, Conceição Lima, Shook
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country’s past alongside the poet’s own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation’s distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place.
Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.
Conceição Lima was born in 1961 in the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, where she resides today. She studied journalism in Portugal and attended graduate school in London, where she later worked as a producer at the BBC’s Portuguese Language Service. She has published four books of poetry: O Útero da Casa (The Womb of the House) in 2004, A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó (The Painful Root of the Micondó) in 2006, O País de Akendenguê (The Country of Akendenguê) in 2011, and Quando Florirem Salambás no Tecto do Pico (When Velvet Tamarinds Flower on Pico de São Tomé) in 2015. Her work in Shook’s translation has appeared in the Literary Review, Jai-Alai, and World Literature Today.
Shook is a poet and translator whose work with Conceição Lima has been recognized with a 2017 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and as a winner of the 2021 Words Without Borders—Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.
Mother of Other Kingdoms, Kai Coggin
Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Publication Date: April 22, 2024
Format: Paperback
Mother of Other Kingdoms is a tender, inward-exploration of motherhood, amidst the chaos and destruction of human life on earth. These lyric poems center on mothering the more-than-human world—plants, flowers, animals, birds, insects—all with their elaborate taxonomies and delicate identities. As a Master Naturalist, Kai Coggin brings us a different perspective, seeing through a magnified lens focused on the thriving invisible worlds that others overlook. She takes a heart-forward turn deeper into her quiet forest home, invites the reader in, and treads soft footprints in poems, intersecting stories of the vibrant natural world, motherhood, love, loss, ancestry, grief, wonder, joy, and impermanence. Where her recent books have been overtly political, Mother of Other Kingdoms slows us down, reminds us to breathe, amplifies the voices of caterpillars and honeybees. The world is breaking before our eyes, yes, but there are still birds, still flowers, still trees . . . for now. Coggin does not shy away from the fires, she shows us the smallest miracles before they burn, takes your hand and says “look closer.” These poems are intimate, close to the skin, infinite and infinitesimal—this collection mother’s worlds we so desperately need to hold.
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs and author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE grant fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.
Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Lynne Thompson’s Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women—their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these personal odysseys—which vary stylistically from abecedarians to free verse to centos—replicate the many ways women travel through the stages of their lives, all negotiated on a palette encompassing various shades of blue. These poems demand your attention, your voice: “Say history. Claim. Say wild.”
Lynne Thompson is the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press and Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar; and Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize. Lynne lives in Los Angeles CA.
Two Minds, Callie Siskel
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Does loss define us, or do we define loss? Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, Callie Siskel wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid poetry. Two Minds indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the pursuit of self-revelation. Drawing on ekphrasis, ars poetica, and the prose poem, Siskel expands the elegiac genre as she oscillates between childhood and adulthood, art and mythology, as well as the natural and domestic world. At once cerebral and emotional, Two Minds is an essential meditation on the ways that loss cleaves and doubles our perceptive power.
Callie Siskel is the author of Arctic Revival, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in the Atlantic, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and Paris Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she holds a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
A Song of Flowers: Ni Xochitl, Ni Kuikatl, Mardonio Caballo, Fernando Laposse
Publisher: JBE Books
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Nahuatl, a language spoken in present-day central Mexico since the 7th century, poetry is designated by a pair of metaphors, in xochitl in cuicatl: “the flower, the song.” This term defines poetry as “an elevation, an outpouring that is expressed.” Poems are a bouquet of words and associations to be sung to the sky. A confluence between an art book and a book of poetry, this work is a voyage into the poetic land of Nahuatl, an exploration of the literature of the Song of Flowers. It comprises 50 poems in Nahuatl, translated into English by Adam W. Coon, written by Mardonio Caballo. His work is introduced by literary scholar Alberto Manguel, who denotes the symbolism of songs and flowers in world literature. The stunning volume is made-to-measure by designer Fernando Laposse, using natural fibers derived from wine and corn production.
Mardonio Carballo is a Nahuatl-speaking poet considered one of Mexico’s greatest contemporary poets.
Alberto Manguel is an Argentine Canadian anthologist and a former Director of the National Library of Argentina.
Fernando Laposse is a designer who works with organic, sustainable materials. His work is held in the permanent collections of the V&A and SFMOMA, and he is represented in the US by Friedman Benda Gallery in NYC.
Get Well Soon, Jamie Sharpe
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the spring of 2020, Jamie Sharpe was in New Brunswick, purportedly studying the famed Magnetic Hill outside Moncton. A dog-walker discovered Sharpe in a ditch, disrobed except for his backpack containing a manuscript …
With his fifth collection, Get Well Soon, Sharpe reaffirms “he is utter master of his language. Whether [Sharpe’s] poems are the result of long lucubration or the inspiration of the moment, they bear no mark of effort, and it is not without admiration, nor even without astonishment, that one is carried along — by the noble, unswerving amble of those gorgeous stanzas, proud white hackneys harnessed in gold — into the glory of the evenings. Rich and subtle, [Jamie Sharpe]’s poetry is never merely lyrical; it always encloses an idea within the garland of its metaphors, and however vague or general that idea may be, it serves to strengthen the necklace; the pearls are secured by a thread that, though sometimes invisible, is ever sure.”
Jamie Sharpe is the author of five books of poetry. He lives in the Comox Valley, British Columbia.
Every Hard Sweetness, Sheila Carter-Jones
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights’ era atrocities through the story of her family’s experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The result is a stunning work reflecting on race, criminalization, and the devastating consequences of a Black father’s incarceration on his psyche and family, specifically his Black daughter. Told through a mixture of photography, ekphrasis, and erasure, Carter-Jones’ powerful collection creates an extraordinary record of her family’s life at a time of great suffering and upheaval.
Sheila Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep, the winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks Blackberry Cobbler Song and Crooked Star Dream Book and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals.She received her MFA from Carlow University where she facilitates writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic Program. Sheila Carter-Jones lives in Pittsburgh PA.
Metromorphoses, John Reibetanz
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
When he first hiked the Don Valley trails / all he heard was river as he strode / beside its glitter of smashing glass Grounded in the local and immediate – from Toronto’s rivers and ravines to its highways and skyscrapers – Metromorphoses explores some of the radical changes that have taken place in the city during the course of its history. The collection’s poems focus, in roughly chronological order, on the city’s inhabitants and the changing relationships between people and place, from the original Indigenous presence, through the immigrants of the nineteenth century and the Depression and war survivors of the twentieth century, to the twenty-first century’s setbacks and affirmations. We encounter characters such as Symphony Pete, who whistled classical music while hiking Don Valley trails, Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from southern slavery in a packing crate, or the exhausted anonymous newsboy a photographer caught fast asleep next to his stack of newspapers on a flight of stone steps. We zoom in like time-lapse photography on the changes that a single site has experienced, from wood-frame cottages to foundry to synagogue to furniture store to parking lot to the new provincial courthouse. These poems bring the reader closer to the impulses that drove the art of the Mississaugas, the escape from slavery or famine of new settlers, or the social awareness of a Dr Charles Hastings or a Raymond Moriyama. Far from Eliot’s “unreal city,” Metromorphoses takes us into the heart of the real Toronto, alive and ever-changing.
John Reibetanz is an award-winning poet and fellow of Victoria College, Toronto, and senior fellow at Massey College. His most recent collection is New Songs for Orpheus.
she, Kirby
Publisher: knife | fork | book
Publication Date: April 22, 2024
Format: Paperback
From the author of Poetry is Queer and This is Where I Get Off, their highly-anticipated new full-length collection.
“SHE is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. SHE is joy’s pronoun!” —Erín Moure, author of Theophylline A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo)
Kirby’s work includes Last Licks (Anstruther Press, 2024) Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021), What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020), & This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019). Their column, “The First Time” is a regular feature at Send My Love To Anyone.
The Autobiography of Nancy Drew, RJ Ingram
Publisher: White Stag Publishing
Publication Date: April 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
A Collection of Thirst Traps, Sonnets, & Other Forms, The Autobiography of Nancy Drew offers an unexpected and unique perspective on the profound impact of pop culture icons. Within these pages, are a celebration of both strong fictional divas and real-life rock stars. Each poem serves as a self-portrait, capturing the essence of iconography through physical and corporeal manifestations. Stark contrasts emerge, juxtaposing the present with a deeper sense of presence. As you journey through these verses, you’ll encounter a blend of melancholy, mystery, and sensuality—a tantalizing exploration of Nancy Drew’s ilk.
RJ Equality Ingram lives in Portland, Oregon & works as a used bookseller for Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette. RJ received their MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California. The Autobiography of Nancy Drew is RJ’s first collection. RJ’s cat Brenda lost a leg posing for thirst traps.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 4/16 and 4/22 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
New Poetry Titles (2/27/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 2/27 from Alien Buddha Press, GASHER Press, Bottlecap Press, University of Arizona Press, Omnidawn, Signal Editions, Guernica Editions, The Backwaters Press, University of Nebraska Press, Caitlin Press Inc, Autumn House Press, Georgia Review Books, The University of Kentucky Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Brick Books, Changes Press, Tupelo Press, Black Lawrence Press, and MoonPath Press.
March ‘24: Welcome to Issue 2
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about our second bimonthly issue, contributor accomplishments, and things to come.
New Poetry Titles (3/5/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 3/5 from Graywolf Press, Knopf, Bottlecap Press, powerHouse Books, Milkweed Editions, Acre Books, Seagull Books, The University Press of Kentucky, Yale University Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin Books, Able Muse Press, Button Poetry, Miami University Press, Eyewear Publishing, Black Ocean, Seren, MoonPath Press, and Book*Hub Press. Editor’s picks from Diane Seuss and Cindy Juyoung Ok.
Contributor Poem of the Month: The Plan
Read the Contributor Poem of the Month for March 2024, “The Plan” by C.M. Crockford, along with a few words from the poet.
New Poetry Titles (3/12/24)
Check out new poetry books published in the week of 3/12 from Belle Point Press, Bottlecap Press, Black Lawrence Press, Haymarket Books, Ecco, Milkweed Editions, Seagull Books, Hub City Press, Nightboat Books, Signature Books, Four Way Books, Curbstone Books, Kaya Press, Kith Books, Saturnalia Books, Ohio University Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Jackleg Press, Semiotext(e) and Brick Books.
Chapbook Poem of the Month: Collection
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2024, “Collection” from Dreamsoak by Will Russo, along with a few words from the poet.
Meet Our Contributor: C.M. Crockford
Meet our contributor, C.M. Crockford, a writer and editor originally from New Hampshire, now living in Philadelphia with his cat, Wally.
New Poetry Titles (3/19/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 3/19 from Bottlecap Press, Autumn House Press, Knopf, Guernica Editions, Tin House Books, Milkweed Editions, University of Wisconsin Press and Book*Hug Press.
Meet Our Contributor: Mike Bagwell
Meet our contributor, Mike Bagwell, a writer, poet, and software engineer in Philly. He’s published two poetry chapbooks and has a full-length collection forthcoming in 2024.
New Poetry Titles (3/26/24)
Check out new poetry books for the week of 3/26 from Bottlecap Press, Nightwood Editions, Harbour Publishing, McClellan & Stewart, Carcanet Press, University of Regina Press, At Bay Press, Guernica Editions, Beltway Editions, University of Georgia Press, Lost Horse Press, University of New Mexico Press, University of Massachusetts Press, Book*Hug Books, Haymarket Books, Archipelago, Autumn House Press, Hat & Beard Press, Tigerlily Press, and GASHER Press.
Meet Our Contributor: Francesca Leader
Meet our contributor, Francesca Leader, a Montanan living elsewhere who writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Read about her writing life in her Contributor Q&A.
April ‘24: Of SPD, Genocide, and Book Reviews
Editor Aiden Hunt writes about distribution woes, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and what we have coming during April in the Editor’s Note.
New Poetry Titles (4/2/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/2 from Bottlecap Press, Green Linden Press, Stanchion Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Small Harbor Publishing, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf Press, Wave Books, Arsenal Pulp Press, New Directions, Invisible Publishing, Brick Books, Sixteen Rivers Press, Penguin Books, City Lights Publishers, And Other Stories, BOA Editions Ltd, OR Books, Not a Cult, Copper Canyon Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Beacon Press, Biblioasis, Nightboat Books, Amistad, House of Anansi Press, Hub City Press, Seagull Books, Fordham University Press, Iron Pen, Persea Books, Central Avenue Publishing, CavanKerry Press, W. W. Norton & Company, University of Akron Press and Red Hen Press.
Contributor Poem of the Month: Self Portrait
Read the Contributor Poem of the Month for April 2024, “Self Portrait” by Mike Bagwell, along with a few words from the poet.
On Cindy Juyoung Ok’s ‘House Work’: A Review Essay
Editor Aiden Hunt’s essay reviews Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poetry chapbook, ‘House Work’, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in March 2023.
New Poetry Titles (4/9/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/9 from Faber & Faber, Small Harbor Publishing, Bottlecap Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Green Writers Press, Loom Press, Paraclete Press, Able Muse Press, Caitlin Press Inc., Stephen F. Austin University Press, University of North Texas Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, University of New Mexico Press, Curbstone Books, Milkweed Editions, Red Hen Press, Wave Books, Alice James Books, Paul Dry Books, Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, powerHouse Books, Dial Press, Knopf, Nightboat Books, SUNY Press, Belle Point Press, White Stag Publishing, and Anhinga Press.
New Poetry Titles (4/16/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/16 from Bottlecap Press, Knopf, HarperOne, Small Harbor Publishing, Red Hen Press, Copper Canyon Press, Nightwood Editions, Southern Illinois University Press, Seren, Sarabande Books, Phoneme Media, BOA Editions Ltd., W. W. Norton & Company, JBE Books, White Stag Publishing, ECW Press, knife | fork | book and McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Chapbook Poem of the Month: Study of Daylight
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2024, “Study of Daylight” from Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez, along with a few words from the poet.