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.
Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon
Publisher: University Of Minnesota Press
Publication Date: July 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The ancestors that walk with us, sing us our song. When we get quiet enough, we can hear them sing and make them audible to people today. In Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium, Marcie R. Rendon, a member of the White Earth Nation, summons those ancestors’ songs, and so begins the dream singing for generations yet to come. “The Anishinaabe heard stories in their dream songs,” Ojibwe author Gerald Vizenor wrote, and like those stories once inscribed in pictographs on birch-bark scrolls, Rendon’s poem-songs evoke the world still unfolding around us, reflecting our place in time for future generations.
Through dream-songs and poem-songs responding to works of theater, choral music, and opera, Rendon brings memory to life, the senses to attention—to see the moonbeams blossoming on the windowsill, to feel the hold of the earth, to hear the echo of grandmother’s breath, to lie on the bones of ancestors and feel the rhythms of silence running deep. Her singing, breaking the boundaries that time would impose, carries the Anishinaabe way of life and way of seeing forward in the world.
Marcie R. Rendon, White Earth Ojibwe, was included on Oprah’s 2020 list of thirty-one Native American authors to read. She has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including the Cash Blackbear mystery series, the third volume of which, Sinister Graves, was a 2023 Minnesota Book Award Finalist. In 2020, she received Minnesota’s McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, and in 2017, Rendon, with poet Diego Vazquez, received the Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship for their work with incarcerated women in the county jail system.
Talking Back to the Exterminator, Daniel Bourne
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Publication Date: July 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Poems, like politics, can be local and global, personal and cultural. In Daniel Bourne’ s Talking Back to the Exterminator, we see this interplay at work in these ruminations on place— our connections and disconnections to it— from Bourne’ s upbringing in southern Illinois to his later homes in Ohio, Poland, or the American Southwest. This connection certainly involves a sense of celebration, but also of anxiety and tension in realizing the fragility and impermanence of both self and surroundings. Yet, despite the opportunity as well as the challenge of memory— the way it is continually erased yet also continues to scribble in the brain— these poems also bear witness to how we push back against all the “ exterminations” in our lives.
Daniel Bourne was raised on a farm near the Little Wabash River in southeastern Illinois. He has worked in a tree nursery and rare book library, and traveled often to Poland, including as a Fulbright fellow for translation in 1985-87. Before retiring in 2020, he was professor of English at The College of Wooster in Ohio, where he edited the literary magazine Artful Dodge. The author of two previous books of poetry, his poetry and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Guernica, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, and The Yale Review.
mother, m.s. RedCherries
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: July 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
mother is a work rooted in an intimate fracture: an Indigenous child is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. As an adult finding her way back to her origins, our unnamed narrator begins to put the pieces of her birth family’s history together through the stories told to her by her mother, father, sister, and brother, all of whom remained on the reservation where she was born. Through oral histories, family lore, and imagined pasts and futures, a collage of their community emerges, raising profound questions about adoption, inheritance, and Indigenous identity in America.
Through poetic vignettes whose unconventional forms mirror the nonlinear, patchwork process of constructing a sense of self, m.s. RedCherries has crafted an indelible and utterly original work about the winding roads that lead us home.
m.s. RedCherries received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a JD from Arizona State University College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn.
Domestirexia, JoAnna Novak
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: July 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of “domestic” and “anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home.
Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to.
Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.
JoAnna Novak’s memoir Contradiction Days was published by Catapult in July 2023. Her short story collection Meaningful Work won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and was published by FC2. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and three books of poetry: New Life; Abeyance, North America; and Noirmania. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications.
Sisters of the Protectress—A Creation Story, Darlene St. Georges, Alexandra Fidyk
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: July 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
Lavish here. Let wash. We wee humans need images adequate to hold us open into this earth body of ours, and here they are, written out. Spaced. Placed. Hoarse cawed. This very same body as the Crows crow, the plants plant, the air offers. Sun-drenched jaws. Bears themselves dreaming us over ambles downhill. This book brooks words. Images. Dreams. darlene’s. alex’s. mine. yours, readers. Watch out, though. These possessive cases can easily betray us. These words and their readings are co-inhabitants with the full scatters and splays of breaths, of wonders. These seeds up yesterday morning, little heralds. Listen. This book will help you smell the sun in them. Let the spaces last exactly as long as you need. Slow over them. Let them be exacting. Me. My grandson in arms. Me in his, too. Look! Crow. Bear. Seed-springings. Thank you for this gathering up. I gather up, go plant. –David Jardine, Professor Emeritus in Retiracy, currently undergoing an Early Childhood Education
Darlene St. Georges is a creation-centred artist|scholar. She is associate professor of art education at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Her theoretical and practice-based research is rooted in emergent and generative knowledge and knowing that honours the inward and creative ways being and knowing––living literacies expressed through aesthetic translations of voice, breath, body, and spirit.
Alexandra Fidyk, award winning transdisciplinary scholar and teacher, serves as professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Canada. Through somatic, relational, poetic and creative-centred processes, her research engages with teachers and youth on issues of place, suffering, wellbeing, and love. Her writing continues to be influenced by the long sky of Saskatchewan.
When Mine Canaries Stop Singing, Nancy Avery Dafoe
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: July 26, 2024
Format: Paperback
When Mine Canaries Stop Singing is a lyrical warning for us to take better care of the Earth and all of her species or find ourselves in the extinction category. This poetry collection is centered around what we have failed to do, but also what we still could do to improve our prospects, reduce our carbon footprint, and extend life in all its glorious forms on our planet.
Poet, author, educator Nancy Avery Dafoe has 13 published books with her 14th coming out this year. Her most recent books include the poetry collection The House Was Quiet, But the Mind Was Anxious (FLP, 2022) a memoir Unstuck in Time (PWP, 2021), and a literary novel Socrates is Dead Again (2022). Her poetry won the William Faulkner/Wisdom award in 2016, and her prose poetry won a national award from the Soul-Making Literary competition. She is a member of the CNY Branch of the National League of American Pen Women and lives in Homer, New York.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/16 and 7/22 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/2 from Black Lawrence Press, LSU Press, Persea, Omnidawn, Bloodaxe Books and Central Avenue Publishing.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for June 2024 from Driftwood Press, Sheila-Na-Gig Inc., Diode Editions, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Finishing Line Press, Bottlecap Press and an Editor’s Pick from Tupelo Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/9 from Finishing Line Press, New Directions, Phoneme Media, University of Calgary Press and Curbstone Books.
July ‘24: A Fledgling Journal No More
We’ve completed our first volume, there’s a new featured chapbook poem, and we’re starting to look for a Poetry Editor to expand what we publish. Check out the editor’s note for July 2024.
Chapbook Poem: Whenua by Nicola Andrews
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for July 2024, “Whenua” from Māori Maid Difficult by Nicola Andrews, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/16 from Finishing Line Press, Soft Skull, Penguin Books, Regal House Publishing and University Of Minnesota Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/23 from Host Publications, W. W. Norton & Company, Carcanet Press Ltd., LSU Press, Finishing Line Press, The Song Cave and Wake Forest University Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/30 from Delete Press, Quale Press, Duke University Press, Seagull Books, Sarabande Books, Michigan State University Press and Alternating Current Press.
Southern Literary Tradition: On ‘Snake Lore’ by Jane Morton
In this essay, C.M. Crockford reviews “Snake Lore” by poet Jane Morton, a chapbook published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2024.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 8/6 from NYRB Poets, Belle Point Press, Finishing Line Press, Black Lawrence Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, Penguin Books, Bloodaxe Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Alice James Books, Mercer University Press and two Editor’s Picks from Coffee House Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Chapbook Poem: It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye by Amanda Rabaduex
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for August 2024, “It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye” from Resin in the Milky Way by Amanda Rabadeux, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for July 2024 from Seven Kitchens Press, Small Harbor Publishing, Belle Point Press, Orison Books, Variant Lit, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/13 from Querencia Press, Alice James Books, Finishing Line Press, University of New Mexico Press, Harbour Publishing, Knopf, Amistad, TriQuarterly and Red Hen Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/20 from Querencia Press, Finishing Line Press, McClelland & Stewart, Zephyr Press, Tin House Books, W. W. Norton & Company, Red Hen Press, Graywolf Press, Wesleyan University Press and an Editor’s Pick from Copper Canyon Press.