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.
The Day’s Hard Edge, José Antonio Rodríguez
Publisher: Curbstone Books
Publication Date: July 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his fourth poetry collection, José Antonio Rodríguez investigates how one constructs a relationship to the self, to community, and to poetry itself. The Day’s Hard Edge is composed of three sections, the first of which situates the reader in the speaker’s world, one marked by multiple forms of trauma. Here are the contours of the Texas/Mexico borderlands where the speaker’s initial sense of self and community emerges. The second section broadens in scope and considers the potential and limitations of poetry as a site for meaning-making. The third section brings the speaker to a new understanding of the poem as it relates to the transformative and destabilizing experience of trauma. Ultimately this book lays bare an individual and, in doing so, shows how poetry acts as a place of succor and vulnerability for one’s very identity. Together these poems explore what it means to be queer, immigrant, and Chicano.
José Antonio Rodríguez is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, Backlit Hour, and The Shallow End of Sleep and the memoir House Built on Ashes. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he teaches writing at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.
Invisible Lives, Cristalle Smith
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: July 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Invisible Lives chronicles cycles of dysfunction and domestic violence. Using experimental hybrid poetry, Cristalle Smith breaks generational silence in lyric resonance, reflecting on a childhood rife with upheaval and poverty, the invisibility of single motherhood, and the silence of domestic violence. These poems sing memory across divides of time and space, breaking the patterns of absence and denial and challenging what is kept unseen.
Associative leaps chronicle the daughter of a family always on the move. Family secrets thaw in spring mud. Invisible Lives delivers poetic meditations collaged with pop culture and impossibly colliding landscapes. The prairies of Alberta collapse into the sinkholes of northern Florida in a cacophony of lyric layering.
Smith’s fierce and electric voice breaks taboos and challenges the status quo. She sings poor and working class lives, young lives, the lives of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters, the lives of veterans, lives that have endured layers of intersecting trauma and violence. Invisible Lives is an interrogation of power and intimacy that gives a new voice to the people who survive.
Cristalle Smith has been published in ARC Poetry, CV2, subTerrain, and more. She won the Lush Triumphant Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2020 and has a chapbook with Frog Hollow Press. She lives in Calgary, Alberta with her son. Invisible Lives is her debut poetry collection.
Refugee Number 33,333 : Selected Poems, Farhad Pirbal, David Shook (tr.), Pshtiwan Babakr (tr.)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: July 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Like his contemporary Abdulla Pashew, this poetry is a chronicle of exile and displacement, longing and not belonging. Poetry in turns wistful and disoriented, Refugee Number 33,333 reflects Pirbal’s role as dissident and persecuted prisoner, drawing on four different collections originally written in Kurdish. “Poéte maudit” of Kurdistan, Pirbal is known as well for his highly publicized antics as for his prolific literary output. Pirbal, born in 1961, “may be the greatest innovator of Kurdish literature in the twentieth century, in both poetry and prose” (Shook, Poetry Foundation).
Farhad Pirbal is a Kurdish writer, philosopher, singer, poet, painter and critic. He was born in the city of Erbil in Southern Kurdistan. He studied Kurdish language and literature in the University of Salahadin in Hewlêr. In 1986, he left Kurdistan to France, where he continued his studies in University of Sorbonne in the field of Kurdish literature. After going back to Southern Kurdistan, in 1994, he established the Sharafkhan Badlisi cultural center.
Chimera, Phoebe Gianissi, Brian Sneeden (tr.)
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: July 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her third collection in English, Phoebe Giannisi lays out her vision for a chimeric poetics that blends field recordings, state archives, and ancient texts. The center of Chimera engages with a three-year field research project on the goat-herding practices of the Vlachs, a nomadic people of Northern Greece and the Southern Balkans, who speak their own language. In these poems, day-to-day activities such as shearing and shepherding mix with snippets of conversations, oral tradition, and song—locating a larger story in this ancient marriage between humans and animals. Through her poetry and fieldwork, this mytho-historical connection between metamorphosis and utterance takes form in what the Greek newspaper Kathimerini calls “a bold achievement….a studio wherein poems and other texts, other voices, become exhibited.”
Phoebe Giannisi was born in Athens in 1964 and is the author of seven books of poetry, including Homerica (chosen by Anne Carson as a favorite book of 2017 in The Paris Review). She is a professor of architecture and cultural studies at the University of Thessaly.
Brian Sneeden is a poet, literary translator, and editor. His translations have received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and other recognitions.
Shadows of the Pines, Sheppard Ranbom
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: July 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
Shadows of the Pines, a comic novella in verse,introduces readers to Harold Rava, a poet who teaches poetry in a storefront juku during the day and in a rundown restaurant, the Pines of Rome, at night. Leading the franchise is a struggle for Harold. There is no money in poetry. The audience is roughly the size of the number of practitioners. But the subversive Rava School—which teaches students to make what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “great strokes of havoc”—could change all that. Unfortunately, the school’s mission—creating an audience of millions of enthusiasts, one person a time—is beyond its grasp. To be successful. Harold must get the help of his teachers, the ghosts of poets and thinkers—Auden, Borges, Buber, Montale, Saba, J.B. Yeats, and others—who visit him each night at the Pines, And he must learn to better treat the words he writes, who rebel against him. Harold ultimately recognizes that it will not be the United States but Albania where poetry will flourish. Readers unfamiliar with poetry can simply enjoy the ride and be taken by the book’s rhythm and riddles, its characters and comedy, for it is all Dreamland, a poetic narrative where anyone can enter.
Sheppard Ranbom is a poet based in Washington, DC where he lives with his wife, Mary-Mack Callahan. He is the author of King Philip’s War, I Didn’t Know Kyoto, and Shadows of the Pines.
Rituals for to Call Down Light, Amanda Rachelle Warren
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: July 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
These interlinked poems will set their hooks in you. “Take a pull from this bottle” Warren writes, “it won’t hurt long.” Set in an Appalachian river-town of floodgates and corn stalks, side yard fridges, clay grit, unmarked roads and Jesus, the speaker grapples with god and with the ghosts of a place both beautiful and cruel. Rituals for to Call Down Light casts its spell against darkness, not to banish it, but to find the light within it. –Melissa Tuckey, author of Tenuous Chapel and editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology.
Amanda Rachelle Warren‘s work has appeared in Tusculum Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Anderbo, and the Beloit Poetry Journal as well as other journals. Their chapbook Ritual no.3: For the Exorcism of Ghosts, was published by Stepping Stone Press in 2010. They are the 2017 recipient of the Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors. They teach at the University of South Carolina Aiken with their colleague/partner Roy Seeger.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/9 and 7/15 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.