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 full-length 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.
Instructions for the Lovers, Dawn Lundy Martin
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Dawn Lundy Martin’s poems read like a real-time excavation of what poetry can and can’t do,” writes Maggie Nelson. In Instructions for the Lovers, her most stripped down, direct work to date, Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system. With rigorously embodied vulnerability and virtuosity, Martin constructs moments of pleasure, humor, and sexiness woven with grief—a tender body to live in.
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Currently she is working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. She lives in New York.
If Today Were Tomorrow, Humberto Ak’abal, Michael Bazzett
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.
Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.
Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.
Humberto Ak’abal (1952-2019) was a K’iche’ Maya poet from Guatemala. His book Guardián de la caída de agua (Guardian of the Waterfall) was named book of the year by Association of Guatemalan Journalists and received their Golden Quetzal award in 1993. In 2004, he declined to receive the Guatemala National Prize in Literature because it is named for Miguel Ángel Asturias, whom Ak’abal accused of encouraging racism. Ak’abal, a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, passed away on January 28, 2019.
Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, which was long-listed for the National Translation Award and named one of the best books of poetry in 2018 by the New York Times. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.
Magic Enuff, Tara M. Stringfellow
Publisher: Dial Press
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
An electrifying collection of poems that tells a universal tale of survival and revolution through the lens of Black femininity. Tara M. Stringfellow embraces complexity, grappling with the sometimes painful, sometimes wonderful way two conflicting things can be true at the same time. How it’s possible to have a strong voice but also feel silenced. To be loyal to things and people that betray us. To burn as hot with rage as we do with love.
Each poem asks how we can heal and sustain relationships with people, systems, and ourselves. How to reach for the kind of love that allows for the truth of anger, disappointment, and grief. Unapologetic and unafraid in its nuance, this collection argues that when it comes to living in our full humanity, we have—and we are—magic enough.
Tara M. Stringfellow is a former attorney, Northwestern University MFA graduate, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee whose debut noveland national bestseller Memphis was a Read with Jenna pick and longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction. A cross-genre artist, the author was Northwestern University’s first MFA graduate in both poetry and prose and her work has appeared in Collective Unrest, Jet Fuel Review, Minerva Rising, Women’s Arts Quarterly and Apogee Journal, among others. After having lived in Okinawa, Ghana, Chicago, Cuba, Spain, Italy, and Washington, D.C., she moved back home to Memphis, where she sits on her porch swing every evening with her hound, Huckleberry, listening to records and chatting with neighbors.
Come Here To This Gate, Rory Waterman
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: June 27, 2024
Format: Paperback
Come Here to This Gate, Rory Waterman’s fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: ‘your silences were trains departing’. The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet’s rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a ‘doll left behind at Chernobyl’ must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.
Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up in Lincolnshire. He lives in Nottingham. Come Here to This Gate is his fourth collection of poems.
Coco Island, Christine Roseeta Walker
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: June 27, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Christine Roseeta Walker’s first book is set entirely in Negril, Jamaica. Coco Island presents a compelling cycle of poems, attentive to the undertow and hidden forces that shape a place and its people. In narrative poems, in songs, in fables, in comic scenes, ghost stories and vivid character sketches – especially of girls and women – Walker artfully lays bare how economic necessity, religious belief, illness and addiction reach far into the structures of family life and community. Piecing together the isolated lives of those left behind as the island modernises, her fearless, memorable poems chart the devastation of a world.
Christine Roseeta Walker is a Jamaican poet and novelist living on the outskirts of Manchester, England. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Salford and the University of Manchester. Her debut novel, The Grass is Weeping, is a revenge tragedy set in Jamaica. She also works as a commissioned poet with an archaeologist working in the Peak District, and she spends her time writing and organising poetry reading workshops in care homes for people living with dementia.
Not a Moment Too Soon, Frank Kuppner
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: June 27, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Frank Kuppner’s new (eleventh) book consists of three long, hilarious, philosophical, existential sequences, ‘The Liberating Vertigo of a Final Passage of Meaning’, ‘Not Quite the Greatest Story Never Told’ and ‘Not Quite a False Fresh Start Either’. Those ‘not quites’ are a keynote – what might have been and what actually is, the gap between being the space of the poem, its ironies, humour and wry heartbreak. The poems in the sequences are short, reminding us of his first book, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, where short ‘orientalising’ forms were first perfected. 216 poems through the second sequence, he interrupts himself with, ‘[I have almost said enough.]’ But that’s just short of the half of it. ‘Points weaved together / to make myself’ – these are the points of each poem, haiku or tanka or something else, the weave being uneven and richly suggestive. Words fill out unexpectedly, the ubiquitous Stars become Sta[i]rs. His subject matter is what lies beyond the window of his rented rooms. The world is an erotic and philosophical minefield. He is rather too fitful and feverish to relish it for what it is, what it might be or even what it might have been.
Frank Kuppner was born in Glasgow in 1951. He has written eleven Carcanet collections. The first, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Book award in 1984. Second Best Moments in Chinese History received the same award in 1997. A novelist as well as a poet, he received the McVitie’s Prize for his fiction in 1995. He has been Writer in Residence at the universities of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and Glasgow.
Water Sprite: Songs for the God of Small Things, Luo Ying, Denis Mair
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Paperback
Luo Ying is best-known for poems that give voice to his experiences during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when he was one of the “sent-down youth.” The poems in Water Sprite show us that despite his experiences during those years, his individual voice was not crushed beneath the weight of ideology. In poems that harkens back to the observations in classical Chinese poetry, Ying focuses on small and often unobserved aspects of the natural world. His words paint delicate pictures of a world, and a psyche, that remained intact—though not untouched—through turmoil and chaos.
Luo Ying is the pen name of Huang Nubo. Born in 1956 in Ningxia Province, China, he has published eleven collections of poetry and fiction. A successful Chinese real estate developer and entrepreneur, he is also founder of the Zhongkun Poetry Development Fund, the Sino-Japanese Poetry Fund, and the Sino-Icelandic Poetry Fund. He serves as Vice-President of the China Poetry Association and Standing Deputy-Dean of the China Poetry Institute at Peking University, where he started the first Poet-in-Residence program.
Denis Mair has translated the work of numerous Chinese poets into English, including the volumes Reading the Times: Poems of Yan Zhi and Selected Poems by Mai Cheng.
Charles Coe: New and Selected Works
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Coe writes like a man with polished wings, flying above it all while watching the high and low tides of life.” – E. Ethelbert Miller, co-editor, Poet Lore magazine
Charles Coe’s latest collection of poetry, Coe is renowned for his powerful readings and unusually warm and compassionate voice. Charles Coe’s poems speak to the heart and mind as well as the ear. Combining subjects as diverse as Afro-American history, myth, jazz, and family as well as surprising observations of those unexpected moments of joy to be found in a work-a-day inner city life. Above all, Coe’s poems touch upon what is essential in us all and speak of life as a gift that is far from perfect but all we have.
So What, Frederick Seidel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: June 25, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In So What, Frederick Seidel writes of speeding his racetrack-only Superbike across the island of Manhattan, “illegal river to river, wap wap wap WOW!” The poet hurtles toward the tenth decade of his life and into the sixth decade of his lightning-rod career, but the path from youth to old age is not a straight one. Throughout this book, Seidel smashes the boundaries of youth and age against each other and stirs up a surge of shotguns and wristwatches, late-blooming love and sex, and flashes of the naked face of American life. At its crest stands the poet, looking over the wreckage and creation, and he proclaims: so what.
Frederick Seidel has written many books of poems, including The Cosmos Trilogy, Ooga-Booga, Poems 1959–2009, Nice Weather, Widening Income Inequality, Peaches Goes It Alone, and Frederick Seidel Selected Poems. He lives in New York City.
Dressing the Bear, Susan L. Leary
Publisher: Trio House Press
Publish Date: July 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Winner of the 2023 Louise Bogan Award, Susan L. Leary’s Dressing the Bear is a collection of poems composed in the wake of her brother’s passing that explores the themes of love, loss, grief, longing, and addiction. Many of these poems come in the form of a direct address to her brother: how to speak to the dead now? How to convince herself of her brother’s continuation in the next life? Of equal concern is the matter of love: what kind of love exists between a brother and a sister, between the addict and those who love him? More than anything, however, these poems seek to unravel her brother’s wounds, to understand his pride and shame as a result of addiction, as well as to honor and illuminate his unique wisdom-his charm, his humor, and his creativity-that on even his most difficult days was always there.
Susan L. Leary is the author of three previous poetry collections: A Buffet Table Fit for Queens (Small Harbor Publishing, 2023), winner of the Washburn Prize; Contraband Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2021); and This Girl, Your Disciple (Finishing Line Press, 2019), finalist for The Heartland Review Press Chapbook Prize and semi-finalist for the Elyse Wolf Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Indiana Review, Tar River Poetry, Superstition Review, The Arkansas International, On the Seawall, Tahoma Literary Review, Cherry Tree, and Pithead Chapel. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies, and recently she was a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize; a finalist for the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize; a finalist for Midway Journal’s -1000 Below: Flash Prose and Poetry Contest; and shortlisted for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. She holds a B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from the University of Miami and lives in Indianapolis, IN.
The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983–2023, David Kirby
Publisher: LSU Press
Publish Date: July 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
The Winter Dance Party lays out, not someone’s entire life, but that person’s life as a poet. This enthralling, career-spanning book by the National Book Award finalist David Kirby is made up mainly of new poems along with a generous number of older ones alternating with one another in nine sections that proceed, not chronologically, but more like chapters in a surreal memoir, with long poems followed by short poems, exploratory formats next to more traditional ones, straightforward poems cheek by jowl with ones that are more allusive.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His many books include Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”
Feeling All the Kills, Helen Calcutt
Publisher: Pavilion Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Feeling All the Kills is a dazzling new collection that breaks the poet’s silence on what it means to experience and live in the wake of a violent assault and rape. Calcutt weaves stunning musicality with raw, unhindered storytelling, as the poems both collectively, and in their individual power, explore the distinctly connected, yet fractured selves of ‘sexual being’, ‘mother’ and ‘abused person’. Through the poems’ breathtaking and vital vocabulary Calcutt brings the physical, emotional, and sexual nuances of life to the foreground, with strength, subtlety and beauty, and courageously harnesses a sense of ownership over such a lasting trauma. At the heart of this collection is a personal desire to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self, to shamelessly ‘feel all’ — with authenticity and power.
Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist and choreographer based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet Somehow (Verve Poetry Press 2020) was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet, and Poetry School Book of the Year (longlist, 2020). Her highly acclaimed anthology, Eighty-Four (Verve, 2019) created in aid of the suicide prevention charity CALM, was a Saboteur Award shortlist, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year (2019). Her writing has been published extensively in journals and magazines, including the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court and many others.
Lapwing, Hannah Copley
Publisher: Pavilion Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing explores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems.
A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley’s second collection takes inspiration from John Gower’s brid falseste of alle and its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival.
Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. *Lapwing *asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.
Hannah Copley is a writer, editor and academic based in South-east England. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, and other publications and anthologies. Hannah’s first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine.
QuickFire, Slow Burning, Janette Ayachi
Publisher: Pavilion Poetry
Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Janette Ayachi’s second collection moves away from the personal and delves into the universal with poems often taking flight from the page to parachute into performance. Her hypnotic voice lifts from a keen observing stance to one that probes the chemical reactions in nature, and especially in the body. Fire is seen as an element; as something environmental, a natural disaster. But Ayachi also plays with fire as a fuel in relationships; a heat felt and subject to synergy within the cells and flesh, a cardiac pulse, a love that comes quickly and burns slowly, constantly rekindling hope for change, peace and renewal. There is a mystic undertow that exposes the materials, the lore of bones and anatomy, pilgrimages and prayers, superstitions and super galaxies that she explores with language. Lost landscapes and lost loves merge as she confronts loneliness at the same time as showing us new bloom is on the horizon – that nature will always will us another spark.
Janette Ayachi is a London-born, Edinburgh-based, Scottish-Algerian poet. She graduated with a Combined BA Honours in English Literature & Film Media from Stirling University and an MSc in Creative Writing from Edinburgh University. She’s a regular on BBC Scotland arts programmes and her work has been translated into several languages across a broad range of journals and anthologies. Her debut poetry book Hand Over Mouth Music (Pavilion) won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award 2019 and she is now working on her travel memoir Lonerlust. She collaborates with artists and works with poetry in public places, as well as regularly performing spoken word at festivals and events internationally.
The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World, Eva Skrande
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 28, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems in The Boat that Brought Sadness into the World address exile both literally and metaphorically. The book addresses the literal exile of the poems’ main speaker as well as the hard migrations of refugees. It discusses how exile might “swallow [one] whole” and the pain of refugees, whom the speaker imagines long to see their homeland once more. Metaphorically, it looks at life as a journey of and to exile. The book explores, for example, the journey from childhood through older ages and suggests that death is the ultimate exile as we leave the country of the body. These poems are incantations that challenge, refuse, and accept loss and longing.
Eva Skrande is the author of three volumes of poems, including My Mother’s Cuba and Bone Argot along with the chapbook, The Gates of the Somnambulist. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace the American Poetry Review, and other journals. She has received fellowships from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, the Inprint Foundation, and the Houston Arts Council. She teaches for Writers in the Schools in Houston. She is a faculty tutor at Houston Community College and is a writing coach and founder of Write for Success Tutoring.
Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker, Tony Wallin-Sato
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 28, 2024
Format: Paperback
Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker is an exploration of impermanence and the fragile dance between multi ethnic identities. These poems flow through the author’s Hapa experience without shying away from incarceration, overdoses, and heroin addiction, but also the multi generational trauma created from war, poverty and otherness. This collection is broken into three sections to reflect the interconnectedness of nature, emptiness and ancestry. We are taken from the backcountry trails of Northern California to protests in Paris, psych wards to jail cells, and the Japanese landscapes of the mind. Bamboo on the Tracks is an experience of meditation on the cushion and the attachments we face on the street simultaneously.
Tony Wallin-Sato is a Japanese American who works with formerly/currently incarcerated individuals in higher education. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach. His chapbook of poems, Hyouhakusha: Desolate Travels of a Junkie on the Road, was published in 2021 through Cold River Press. Bamboo on the Tracks: Sakura Snow and Colt Peacemaker was selected by John Yau for the 2022 Robert Creeley Memorial Award and his second book of poems, Okaerinasai, is forth coming from Wet Cement Press.
Quiet. . .The collected Poems, Sauci S. Churchill (1940-2011)
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 28, 2024
Format: Paperback
Sauci Churchill’s Quiet . . . Collected Poems brings us into a compelling voice that is distinctive in its presence, whether joyous, sad, tender, comic, reflective, or fearful. Whatever the subject, the poems are like lyric conversations, be they memories of growing up on Chicago’s streets in the 1940s and 50s; of the world about her — bats, for instance, “lie in dark places / our pulse pounds in fright // Help us to love them”; of religious belief — “I never had religion but/ revered the fine grain of wood / polished it with my soft rag to shine”; of travel,“ in “My First Time in Paris”: “Pont Neuf, hidden in shadows is wrapped. / Domes emerge and the city begins to dazzle;” and then of pain, which Sauci had much of and wrote about in the most evocative of ways: “Washed in the moon’s brightness / pain, like the night sky, is vast.” And, the poetry she wrote when she was dying stands by itself, particularly her last words, from which the title of the collection comes, prompted by a trapped sparrow in her porch: ” Quiet…. /That frightened sparrow/ could have been my heart.” The understated elegance of all these embracive poems is a welcoming invitation to share in their intimacy.
Sauci S. Churchill graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and took graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley. After teaching and working as a law librarian for more than three decades in a windowless inner core of a government building, she retired to work at Hillwood Museum and Gardens, where she asked only to be put into the light. She lived with her husband, Bruce Butterworth, and the third of their shelter dogs, Cloud.
I Will Get Up Off Of, Simina Banu
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: June 28, 2024
Format: Paperback
I Will Get Up Off Of is a book about trying to leave a chair. How does anyone ever leave a chair? There are so many muscles involved – so many tarot cards, coats, meds, McNuggets, and memes. In this book, poems are attempts and failures at movement as the speaker navigates her anxiety and depression in whatever way she can, looking for hope from social workers on Zoom, wellness influencers, and psychics alike. Eventually, the poems explode in frustration, splintering into various art forms as attempts at expression become more and more desperate. What is there to lean on when avenues promising help don’t help? I Will Get Up Off Of explores the role art plays in survival and the hope that underlies any creative impulse.
Simina Banu is a writer and musician living in Montreal. She likes investigating the inexpressibility of feelings, of anxiety and depression against the backdrop of capitalism, technology and the internet. I Will Get Up Off Of is her second book. She has also written POP (Coach House, 2020), and several chapbooks.
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