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 ohis site, links will be included.
Call This Mutiny: [uncollected poems], Craig Santos Perez
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: July 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
The seventh book from award-winning Chamoru author Craig Santos Perez, Call This Mutiny brings together poems that were originally published in journals and anthologies from 2008 to 2023. Throughout these selected poems, Perez offers critical explorations of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current home of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. Perez’s poetry draws on the power of storytelling to share Indigenous history and culture and to offer healing from the trauma of colonialism and injustice. As he writes, “If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.”
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the coeditor of six anthologies; the author of poetry collections including Habitat Threshold and his ongoing from unincorporated territory series; and the author of the monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. He is professor in the English department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. Perez has received the National Book Award for Poetry, American Book Award, Pen Center USA/Poetry Society of America Literary Prize, Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council Award, Nautilus Book Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs.
b o y, Consuelo Wise
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: July 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
In this hybrid of lyric poetry and essay, Consuelo Wise utilizes repetition, fragmentation, and syntax to construct a form that repeatedly falls apart. Breaks in lines and fragmented stanzas are followed by accumulative rushes, slashes, brackets, and words pushed together.
Throughout this book-length poem, Wise composes a meditation and an investigation into loss and identity. Moving between sound and image, aggression and subtlety, b o y pries open memories that resist understanding but also refuse to be forgotten. Wise peels back layers of mourning, considering how it can be experienced as a personal, inherited, environmental, social, and historical phenomenon. Throughout, the protagonist in b o y reenvisions ways to process a great loss, listening closely and searching for words while “the earth is shaking and the silence is pressing down.”
Consuelo Wise is a Guatemalan-American poet, writer, and visiting scholar at Portland State University in Oregon.
Underscore, Julie Carr
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: July 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
Julie Carr’s deeply intimate collection, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac, tender, and at times erotic or bitter, these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living as well as the dead. Carr’s lyric poetry expresses the intricate many-layered relationships between individuals who are constantly shifting in their roles with one another. She considers otherness and nature while remaining deeply invested in human relationships and exploring the conflict of maintaining one’s own interiority amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
Julie Carr is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including Climate, cowritten with Lisa Olstein; Real Life: An Installation; Objects from a Borrowed Confession; Someone Shot My Book; and 100 Notes on Violence. She lives in Denver where she teaches at the University of Colorado and helps run Counterpath, a press bookstore, gallery, and community garden space.
Whosoever Whole, Elizabeth Scanlon
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: July 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poetry in Elizabeth Scanlon’s Whosoever Whole asks how we arrive at and nurture a sense of self amid a culture that wants us only to consume. Navigating the fractal and often fractured experiences of a citizen, a parent in the time of climate change, and a woman in an embattled era, Scanlon invites the reader into an interior space filled with anger, joy, wonder, and hope. Employing metaphor and metonymy, these poems portray a series of courageous portraits of the many faces a woman must wear to survive in today’s culture. Whosoever Whole is an anti-capitalist love song to all who refuse to be torn apart by the market valuation of their lives.
Elizabeth Scanlon is the author of Lonesome Gnosis and Odd Regard. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Boston Review, Bennington Review, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland. She is the editor-in-chief of the American Poetry Review and lives in Philadelphia.
music from behind a stone wall, Steven Rood
Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: July 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems in Steven Rood’s newest collection take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist who remains preoccupied with the tonalities of daily life. Each poem in music from behind a stone wall comes together to build a multi-layered symphony that reveals the delights and travails of family life and moments of intimate connection with animals and plants. At the core of the book are poems considering the overwhelming task of trying to communicate the essence of musical experience via the written word. This is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, vivid images, and formal variation.
Steven Rood is a practicing trial lawyer and poet living in Berkeley, CA. He is the author of Naming the Wind, also published by Omnidawn. His poems have been published in Periodicities, Sporklet, Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, Marlboro Review, Atlanta Review, Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere.
The Penny Dropping, Helen Farish
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
Distance and maturity give retrospective access to moments of revelation which went fatally unacknowledged or unheeded at the time and which now return with an insistence impossible to ignore. But if the penny drops years too late, these poems are their own implicit argument for the value of revisiting our pasts if only in order to acquire a fuller, more complete presence in the now.
Hovering over the collection is Eliot’s final question in The Waste Land: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ And as Helen Farish applies herself to the task, her unflinching yet compassionate voice has never been more in evidence. From the elation of the opening ‘Things We Loved’ to the acceptance and humour of ‘Of All My Losses’, much is at stake on every page.
Helen Farish was born in Cumbria where she now lives. Her debut collection, Intimates (Cape, 2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: Nocturnes at Nohant: The decade of Chopin and Sand (2012), The Dog of Memory (2016), which was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year 2017, and The Penny Dropping (2023). Helen Farish was also a Writer of the Year Finalist in the Cumbria Life Culture Awards 2017.
Her Him and I, Christian Weissmann
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Introspective, vulnerable, and tantalizing, this is a love letter to queerness — capturing the joy, grief, ecstasy, and hope that accompany it. The poems tackle the complexities of infatuation, heartache, sexual assault, and toxic masculinity.
Across three acts, Weissmann offers readers an unfiltered view into his psyche through several romantic relationships. These poems magnify the reality of exploring emotional and physical intimacy with multiple genders, all while navigating the journey of self-love.
Her, Him & I is a coming-of-age celebration of heartbreak and healing.
Christian Weissmann is a writer, actor and poet from Chicago, Illinois. He’s appeared on shows such as Saved By The Bell, Dear White People, and Girl Meets World. Weissmann got his start publishing essays in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and Byline on topics like queerness and toxic masculinity. He lives in Los Angeles with his extensive record collection.
Crystal, Ellen Cranitch
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a highly original poetic act of reclamation, it plunders the drug itself and makes of it an overarching conceit to articulate the devastating impact of living with a loved one who is utterly changed. Deeply felt, tirelessly inventive, this collection gives voice to addiction’s explosive effect within a family. At the same time it speaks universally and with urgency of the power of poetry to take one through the darkest of times.
Ellen Cranitch was born in London of Irish parents. She holds an MA in English Literature from Cambridge University and a PhD from the University of St Andrews. She has taught literature and Creative Writing at a number of universities and currently teaches Masterclass and Advanced Poetry Workshop at the City Lit Institute, London. Crystal is her second collection.
American Analects, Gary Young
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: July 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
American Analects uses the Analects of Confucius as an inspiration to mediate upon the life, death, and the subsequent loss of the poet’s influential, beloved mentor—the painter Gene Holtan. These poems are juxtaposed with poems about other losses—of parents, of friends and friends of friends. Some of these deaths were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, others by age and the inescapable journey we all take. Still, this is not a dour book. Many poems celebrate our ability to inspire, to comfort, and to nurture one another, and the collection is leavened with poems about family, about poetry, and about the healing influence of landscape and of nature. In the end, American Analects is about resiliency, about moving on from personal loss, from the pandemic, and from catastrophic fires, to rejoice in what remains. These poems encourage us to acknowledge the fragility of our lives and of those we love, while we celebrate those who guide us, even in memory.
Gary Young is a poet and artist whose many honors include recognition from the Poetry Society of America, from which he has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award (2013), the Shelley Memorial Award (2009), the William Carlos Williams Award (2003), and the Lyric Poem Award (2001). He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and the Vogelstein Foundation among others. He was the Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year (2012) and the first Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County (2010-2011). He has also received numerous prizes including a Pushcart Prize, and various fellowships and residencies. Gary is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently That’s What I Thought (2018), the 2017 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror (2018), translations of the calligraphy and poems of Kobun Chino Ottawa Roshi, from White Pine Press.
Candy, Dan Albergotti
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 3, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Dan Albergotti’s Candy is a book steeped in sound and silence. Sound in the form of song, of chaotic cacophony, and of the drone (sometimes natural, sometimes manufactured) that creates the ambient soundtrack of history and the seemingly apocalyptic present. Silence in the sense both of the void’s innate quietude and of the failure to speak—of people either dumbstruck or in denial, not speaking because they cannot or will not. Throughout this collection, these sounds and intermittent silences provide the rhythm for poems that question the nature of truth and myth, and that restlessly search for meaning in a reticent universe, ultimately unwilling to take no for an answer as they strive to find an ever-elusive yes.
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads and Millennial Teeth. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and have been reprinted in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He lives in Tampa, Florida.
Draw Me without Boundaries, Margaret Gibson
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: July 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Powerful love between a grandmother and a granddaughter animates the voices in this poignant series of inner monologues set against the backdrop of global climate crisis and the COVID pandemic. Margaret Gibson’s Draw Me without Boundaries lays bare the integrity and depth of inquiry it takes to make life and death choices in a broken world. This luminous book—innovative, suspenseful, deeply moving—reflects in conjoined poetry and prose the profound issues of our time.
Margaret Gibson, the poet laureate of Connecticut from 2019 to 2022, is the author of fourteen collections of poems, including The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her honors include the Lamont Poetry Selection, the Melville Kane Award, and two Connecticut Book Awards. She is the editor of Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis.
Tectonic Tongues/Lenguas Tetonicas, Stephanie Sherman
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: July, 2024
Format: Paperback
In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. Tectonic Tongues/Lenguas Tetonicas was originally selected for publication by Nomadic.
Stephanie Sherman is a Jewish, queer, bilingual, bicultural, interdisciplinary feminist poet, choreographer, dancer, artist and activist who has lived between the Bay Area, Mexico City, Quito, and New York. She has published her poems in various San Francisco anthologies, including The Best of Mission at Tenth: 2009-2019, Mission at Tenth Vol. 7, and Poetry in Flight / Poesía en Vuelo: Anthology in celebration of El Tecolote, and Editorial Carishina published her book Alucinando en Quito in Ecuador in 2007. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Dance from NYU, a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College, and has received two Fulbright Awards (Mexico, Postdoctoral, 2018; Ecuador, 2006).
The Fault, Marcela Sulak
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: July, 2024
Format: Paperback
Marcela Sulak’s The Fault sings to a universe in verse that mournfully and beautifully accounts for its fault lines, its rift, its broken notes. Reading Sulak feels like watching a poet “tunneling out from the weeds in the garden” with a secret in her arms. Something pulled from the root. Something wounded and exquisite. Something that could even feed us. —Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily
Marcela Sulak’s fifth title with Black Lawrence Press, a novella-in-verse, The Fault, is forthcoming in 2024. Her previous four titles include three poetry collections, City of Skypapers, a 2021 finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, Decency, and Immigrant, as well as her lyric memoir, Mouth Full of Seeds. She’s co-edited with Jacqueline Kolosov the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (University of Texas Press). Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and Gulf Coast online, among others. Marcela Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. She also edits The Ilanot Review.
Infodemic, Carol Guess
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: July, 2024
Format: Paperback
I left my blue heart in the cat claws of this collection. This speaker who asks all the right questions: “My dude / why are you still a jerk didn’t tragedy change you?” Carol Guess’s Infodemic will make you laugh in public. It will hold you tenderly through haunted scenes of Bachelorette fantasy suites and neighborhoods that smell “like white collar crime.” I’ve never read a collection that stares so boldly at pandemic life, queer divorce, ghosts of this moment. This little fox who doesn’t bank online. Even in the face of such trauma and frustration, she jokes, “Did you know that if you marry someone and bring them coffee every morning and commit to having sex with only one person, you will both die?” Part of what distinguishes Guess is how she plays—her furiously unwavering way of writing dragons to tear off the prison gates. –Taneum Bambrick, author of Intimacies, Received
Carol Guess is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. Recent Black Lawrence Press titles include Doll Studies: Forensics and With Animal (in collaboration with Kelly Magee). Forthcoming books include a short story collection, Sleep Tight Satellite (Tupelo Press), and a hybrid collaboration with Rochelle Hurt, Book of Non (Broadstone Books). A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches Queer Literature and Creative Writing.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/2 and 7/8 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.