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

Comment Card, Jim Daniels

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

Comment Card offers up a world of juxtapositions, searching for equilibrium between the sublime and the mundane: a man watching young lovers kiss while poisoned ants rain down on his porch. A Christmas tree-needle collection and Jimmy Durante. The litter of a three-hole punch and a daughter leaving for college. Tamarinds and the International Space Station. A crushed snail and the Holy Trinity. These poems wonder, how did we get here, and, by the way, where are we?

Jim Daniels has published numerous collections of poetry and fiction. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

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An Accounting of Days, Charles Seluzicki

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

An Accounting of Days by Charles Seluzicki gathers poems drawn from moments in his personal history. Structurally, the poems move along a chronological timeline, starting with early memory and following the stepping stones of experience.

Charles Seluzicki was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He has been an antiquarian bookseller and fine press publisher since 1977 when he began to issue books under the imprints of Charles Seluzicki Fine Books, Trace Editions, and Editions Plane. His publishing archive is held by Emory University, Atlanta.

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Night in My Mourning Dress, Shannon St. Armand

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

Night in My Mourning Dress enters into grief as it unfolds in everyday life. Mourning here is expressed not in the abstract or theoretical but in the smallness of what can be held in the hand. In these poems, the loneliness of grief becomes something almost physical, a place to commune with the self, others and the divine.

In a world moving too fast to vulnerably admit pain, these vivid snapshots lift up a cry for the burdens each of us must carry alone, but that intimately connect us all. In this book, hope and despair, closeness and separation, fury and affection, exist in harmony—and shimmer with the conviction that there is not only light at the far end, but right in the midst.

Shannon St. Armand lives in the Pennsylvania town in which she grew up and writes poetry in-between read alouds, big feelings and forest walks with her four small, tornado children. She loves black tea, her husband’s laugh and the rain. Some of her poems have appeared in Relief Journal, Dappled Things and Appalachian Review.

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HATE, DANCE, PJ Lombardo

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

Dripping with photographs in the unforgiving wind! HATE, DANCE sharpens its scope on the alienation embedded in contemporary American life. A speaker wrestles cyclically with bitterness, confusion and the scarcity imposed by hostile architecture. Sun Opener tea was traditionally prepared by leaving a bowl of water mixed with fresh flowers in the sun for a day, at least. Now- the commons are gone.

Each of these poems applies a crystalline lens to the fragmentation and precarity that corrupts everyday life. HATE, DANCE does not offer an end to suffering. Instead, this sequence seeks to explore the tactile, emotional and political contours of that suffering. It is an invitation in your own vitriolic cloud.

PJ Lombardo is a poet from New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he worked as a publishing assistant for Action Books. Currently, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland and co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetry. Read his writing in KEITH LLC, Mercury Firs, The Quarterless Review, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere.

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The Bird is Gone, Darren Higgins

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

Once there were billions of passenger pigeons. Massive roiling flocks swept across North America like a storm, billions of pigeons, so many that they darkened the sky, passing in a roar, so many that branches cracked and crashed beneath them wherever they came to rest, so many that their excrement would lay a foot deep by the time they moved on. Their abundance was indescribable, almost mythical, their numbers seemingly inexhaustible. And yet, by 1914 there was only one passenger pigeon left. Martha, old and unwell, sat alone in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo—and when she died on September 1 of that year, there were none.

What happened? Overhunting, railroads, telegraph lines, development, the pigeons in their billions didn’t stand a chance.

But what did it feel like, being alive then, looking up in panic at the sky, the sun gone black? The poems in The Bird Is Gone drop readers into the storm, the awe and fear, the greed, the waste, the odd lingering quiet after a hunt—“ruins everywhere / ruined.”

Darren Higgins is a writer and artist living in Vermont with his two sons and whichever chipmunks, woodchucks, or skunks happen to be living under his barn. His poems, stories, interviews, and reviews have appeared in The Iowa Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jacket2, Numéro Cinq, Tupelo Quarterly, Bloodroot, The Rupture, Split Rock Review, Atlas and Alice, NOON, Poetry International, The Channel, and elsewhere. Find out more at his website, darren-higgins.com.

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Doll Parts, Julia Herndon

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

Doll Parts, a delicate yet visceral interpretation of a paper doll blueprint, explores the struggle of self distinction under a veil of competing expectations. The collection acts as an exposé on growing up as a child of divorce as well as on the condition of daughterhood. From top to bottom, every aspect of the speaker is assigned a parent, a pose, and an intended use.

Incredibly raw and sentimental, Doll Parts illustrates what it means to be an amalgamation of spare pieces. It tracks the speaker as she grapples with childhood ideals and her current state of being, showing the friction that comes in moments when they are realized and in the moments when they aren’t. Beyond this, though, the collection is an ode to stolen parts and all of the people that they came from.

Julia Herndon is currently studying Visual Media Arts at Emerson College where she will be graduating in the fall of 2024. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Herndon has always had an overwhelming passion for writing in every form, using poetry specifically as a way to reconnect with her home, her past, and her identity. Doll Parts will be her debut publication.

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Full-length

This Insatiable August, Maureen Clark

Publisher: Signature Books
Publication Date: February 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

August is an insatiable month. Whether it is a dry spell, drought, or simply parched with want, or filled with thunderstorm, deluge, destruction of property or ideals, it is the place of scarcity or cloudburst, beginnings, or endings. The month of August is the focal point of what this author describes as insatiable. In these poems, she identifies the numerous places in our human experience where we face insatiability, where we are ravenous with desire for greatness, passionate for education, even if, like Vesalius, we get it wrong. We lust after partners we cannot have; yearn for true love; we are voracious for sex. We fall in love with language, buttons, umbrellas, light, and silence. We live in agony and rage at the death of a loved one, or even obsession with a child lost in the mountains whose body is never found. We are insatiable in religious belief, even when it drains us of our time, our creativity, even our own souls. Our appetites direct our lives even if we think we have a foundation of basic beliefs to keep us afloat. In these poems, what we know and what we think we know come down to a thin string of possibility.

Maureen Clark is a writer and poet living in Bountiful, Utah. She has recently retired from the University of Utah where she taught writing for twenty years. During that time, she spent four years as the director of the University Writing Center. She received her BFA at Westminster College in 1995 and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah in 2003. She was the president of Writers @ Work from 1999–2001. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and Sugarhouse Review.

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Deviant, Patrick Grace

Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 22, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, Deviant makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.

Patrick Grace is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columba, EVENT, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CV2 and PRISM international, and in 2020, his poem “A Violence” won The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for poetry. He has published two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (2023), and Dastardly (2021), both of which explore aspects of love, fear, and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, his first full-length poetry collection, continues to explore these themes. Follow him on IG: @thepoetpatrick.

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Northerny, Dawn Macdonald

Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 22, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up in a cabin down a dirt road without electricity or running water. She studied applied mathematics and physics at university, and went to her scholarship interview wearing shoes she had found at the dump. Her summer student projects in space physics involved numerical modeling of the northern lights. Her poetry appears in magazines such as The Antigonish Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, FOLIO, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Nat. Brut, OxMag, Strange Horizons, and Vallum: A contemporary poetry, among others. Northerny is her first book.

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Beached Whales, Stedmond Pardy

Publisher: Mosaic Press
Publication Date: February 22, 2024
Format: Paperback

Stedmond Pardy’ s first book of poems The Pleasures of this Planet Aren’t Enough was published by Mosaic Press in 2020 and launched his career as a boundary-pushing literary and poetic voice. His devoted readers can’ t get enough of his compelling YouTube and Soundcloud spoken-word performances. Stedmond lives by his own dicta: “ An artist is an instrument through which the Universe reveals itself and word poetry is for every man, but soul poetry, alas, is not heavily distributed.”

Stedmond Pardy is a self-educated, left-handed poet of mixed ancestry (Newfoundland and St. Kitts/Nevis). Originally from the Mimico area of Toronto, he now resides in Dionysus knows where… He has performed his work around the Greater Toronto Area and has appeared on stages in Montreal and Washington State.

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That Audible Slippage, Margaret Christakos

Publisher: University of Alberta Press
Publication Date: February 22, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

That Audible Slippage invokes a poetics of active listening and environmental sound to investigate the ways in which we interact with the world, balancing perception and embodiment alongside a hypnagogic terrain of grief and mortality. Audibility is a primary theme of this collection—what can be heard, what is obstacled, and what remains unheard. Many of the poems included in the collection try to hold spaces open for the slipperiness of the heard and unheard and the not-yet heard and their associated problems: error, insufficiency, loss, incompleteness, and other affects such as fear and avoidance. “A Branch of Happen,” the opening section of award-winning poet Margaret Christakos’ collection, explores interior listening to both the self as sensation machine and the collaged external soundscape we both hear and fail to hear within the assailing violences and inequities of the news. A second suite, “Heart is a Guest Whippet Resting on a Firm Trunk,” is troubled by memories of deceased loved-ones amid the North Saskatchewan River valley and the many-layered history of amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton). The fragmentary “Listening Line Notebook” multiplies the treatment of listening as a situated perceptual, sensory, and ethical process. A final long poem called “The Incubation” navigates ideas of being asleep and awake, altered and attuned, as well as spiritually dis/located in time and space. Poised within and beyond both established and emergent traditions of ecocriticism, contemporary feminisms, and experimental lyric, this intriguing and probing work of sound-illuminated poems welcomes readers into its overlapping worlds with grace.

Margaret Christakos‘ recent poetry titles include charger and Dear Birch. Previous books include Excessive Love Prostheses, Sooner, Welling, Multitudes, the novel Charisma, and a multimodal memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies. Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos, edited by Gregory Betts, was published in 2017 and several of her collections have been nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Christakos has served as writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities, including the University of Alberta (2017-2018). Born and raised in Sudbury, she has worked as a writer, poet, instructor, and event organizer in Toronto since 1987.

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Her Breathe of the Window, Karenmaria Subach

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

Karenmaria Subach’s Her Breath on the Window reflects upon longing in its range of forms, moving in rich lyrical detail through history and the world of fantasy/mythos. Through formal poems, riddle, and sustained lyric contemplative expression, Subach offers her own “blue perfume flask with a gold band,” the “trade” of art, hard-won through what the writer has survived. 

In these poems, Hadrian and Antinous, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Snow White and the Prince, as well as a range of separated lovers and characters divided by war, death, and family trauma are explored in their often-desperate predicaments. These poems are narratively dense, voice- and image-driven, full of passion and rage, and they draw on the poet’s training in literature, languages, and history.

Karen Subach grew up outside of Philadelphia. Mysteries, her chapbook of poems, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. Subach is a long-term faculty member of the Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City and also teaches for the Prague Summer Program. She lives in Salt Lake City.

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Accounting for the Dark, Peter Cooley

Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback

In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.

Peter Cooley is emeritus professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. His books include The One Certain Thing, also published by Carnegie Mellon. He is poetry editor of Christianity and Literature.

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Yaguareté, Diego Báez

Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: February 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Baéz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

Notably, this raucous collection also wrestles with Guaraní, a state-recognized Indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. Guaraní both structures and punctures the book, surfacing in a sequence of jokes that double as poems, and introducing but leaving unresolved ambient questions about local histories of militarism, masculine bravado, and the outlook of the campos. Cutting across borders of every kind, Baéz’s poems attempt to reconcile the incomplete, contradictory, and inconsistent experiences of a speaking self that resides between languages, nations, and generations.

Yaguareté White is a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions.

Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.

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said the Frog to the scorpion, Matthew E. Henry

Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Publication Date: February 13, 2024
(Late notice)
Format: Paperback

From conversations in public school classrooms and faculty meetings, to arguments in restaurants and folding tents, said the Frog to the scorpion blurs the lines between pedagogy and prejudice, romance and anti-racism. In poems referencing a ubiquitous “She,” Matthew E Henry’s latest collection explores the options left a Black teacher in a white system when love is met with empty promises and toxic amnesia. Henry’s frog survives the initial encounter and slowly, painfully, “his slick, perforated back” begins to understand: a scorpion will always be exactly who She is—someone who can’t tell Asians students apart, who equates accountability with gaslighting, who thinks Goldilocks was the hero of the story, who makes wishes on the rubbed heads of magic negroes She’s dated. said the Frog to the scorpion attempts to decode Her mind, and the fallout of the relationship,while asking what’s the difference between a breakup and resignation letter.

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six collections, including the Colored page (Sundress Publications, 2022) and The Third Renunciation (NYQ Books, 2023). He is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes and Rise Up Review. The 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Prize, MEH’s poetry appears in Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Worcester Review among others. MEH is an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 2/20 and 2/26 here? Contact us to let us know!