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.

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Chapbooks

East of the Sun, West of the Moon, Taz Rahman

Publisher: Seren
Publication Date: March 11, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Taz Rahman’s East of the Sun, West of the Moon follows a wanderer in the city who contemplates legacies of grief, intricacies of nature, improvisations of jazz, and the contingencies of language as a structure through which we seek to know the world.

Taz Rahman is a Cardiff based poet, writer, and literary content creator. He has been published in Poetry Wales, Bad Lilies, South Bank Poetry, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, Propel, Atrium, Abridged, The Lonely Crowd, Atrium, Planet – The Welsh Internationalist, Honest Ulsterman, Nation Cymru, Culture Matters, and various anthologies. He has been selected to be the Chairperson of Poetry Wales Magazine’s, Readers’ Committee from September 2022 and is editor of the climate emergency themed literary journal, Modron, alongside poets Zoë, Brigley, and, Kristian, Evans. He was one of the judges for the 2021 Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition. In 2021 he was awarded a place in the Literature Wales writer development programme Representing Wales, mentored by Zoë Brigley, and he was selected for the 2023 Hay Festival Writers at Work scheme., He had been shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. He founded the YouTube poetry channel ‘Just Another Poet’ in 2019, which is presently supported by the Books Council Wales and had previously received literary commissions from Literature Wales.

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snow of snow, Léon Pradeau

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Sometimes, snow happens to be snowing repeatedly and self-affirmingly, generously distributing its own essence. Sometimes it sticks for a long time. 

There is a story by Charles Perrault, Le Petit Poucet, where a little boy drops small white pebbles on his tracks so he can find his way home from Chicago to France. But what if it started snowing in the story?

snow of snow is about leaving messages in the snow, either to yourself or whoever you choose to spend the long winters with. Or perhaps they’re messages made of snow: read them before they melt, then move on to your next spring.

Leon Pradeau was born in France and has lived in Paris before moving to Chicago. He writes poems, and translates other poems, to and from his two languages. He is the editor in chief of Transat’, a journal of bilingual poetry and poetics; he also co-created a chapbook series called Sardines Confit. His work has been published in French and American journals (Mouche, FENCE, Asymptote, sitaudis.fr, The Atlantic…). His first collection of poems, Vaisseau Instantané/Instant Shipping, is forthcoming in 2024 (Paris: Les Murmurations).

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Full-length

Editor’s Pick

Modern Poetry, Diane Suess

Aiden Hunt says, “Diane Seuss’s latest collection of poetry continues to explore the poet’s unique midwestern milieu by engaging with and, at times, subverting formalism to create work true to her voice.”
Read Aiden’s full review of this book at NewPages.com.

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.

In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,” Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

Diane Seuss is the author of five previous poetry collections, including frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She lives in rural Michigan.

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Editor’s Pick
Read review at On the Seawall

Ward Toward, Cindy Joyoung Ok

Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

In the 118th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Ok moves assuredly between spaces—from the psych ward to a prison cell, from divided countries to hospice wards. She plumbs these institutions of constraint, ward to ward, and the role of each reality’s language, word to word, as she uncovers fractured private codes and shares them in argument, song, and prayer.
 
Using visual play in invented forms, Ok counters familiar narratives about mental illness, abuse, and death, positing that it is not a person’s character or will that makes survival possible, but luck, and other people. The poems disrupt expectation with the comedy of institutionalized teens, nostalgia after the climate crisis, tenderness in a nursing home, and the wholeness of faltering Englishes. How do pagodas, Seinfeld, ransoms, swans, and copays each make or refuse meaning? Ok’s resolute, energized debut shifts language’s fissures to reassemble them into a new place of belonging.

Cindy Juyoung Ok writes, edits, and teaches poetry. 
Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.

Aiden Hunt says, “After being introduced to Cindy Juyoung Ok’s work by Ugly Duckling Presse, I was delighted by the creativity and sensitivity with which the poet approaches important issues like mental health and anti-Asian violence. Chosen by Rae Armantrout for Yale’s series featuring promising younger poets, Ward Toward doesn’t disappoint.”
Our current issue will also feature Aiden’s review of Ok’s chapbook, House Work.
Links to the review-essay Aiden is working on for another outlet will be added when published.

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[…], Fady Joudah

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. 

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published six collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

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36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Nam Le

Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the form itself.

In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity—and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression, and historical trauma.

But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one’s home, country, culture, or language. And the complex violence—for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this—of language itself.

Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks, and camouflages, Le’s poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and the political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.

Nam Le’s poetry has been published in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Granta, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, The Monthly and other places. He has received major awards in America, Europe and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic, and is widely translated, anthologized, and taught. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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Silver, Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

This beautiful, slender collection—small and weighted like a coin—is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle—“part physics, part faith, part void”—that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award, Phillips has been a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

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Bad Mexican, Bad American, Jose Hernandez Diaz

Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Bad Mexican, Bad American, the minimalist, working-class aesthetic of a “disadvantaged Brown kid” takes wing in prose poems that recall and celebrate that form’s ties to Surrealism. With influences like Alberto Ríos and Ray Gonzalez on one hand, and James Tate and Charles Baudelaire on the other, the collection spectacularly combines “high” art and folk art in a way that collapses those distinctions, as in the poem “My Date with Frida Kahlo”: “Frida and I had Cuban coffee and then vegetarian tacos. We sipped on mescal and black tea. At the end of the night, I tried to make a move on her. She feigned resistance at first but then aggressively kissed me back. We kissed for about thirty minutes beneath a protest mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros.”

Bad Mexican, Bad American demonstrates how having roots in more than one culture can be both unsettling and rich: van Gogh and Beethoven share the page with tattoos, graffiti, and rancheras; Quetzalcoatl shows up at Panda Express; a Mexican American child who has never had a Mexican American teacher may become that teacher; a parent’s “broken” English is beautiful and masterful. Blending reality with dream and humility with hope, Hernandez Diaz contributes a singing strand to the complex cultural weave that is twenty-first-century poetry.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is the author of The Fire Eater and the forthcoming book The Parachutist. A 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow, his work appears in American Poetry Review, Border Crossing, Cincinnati Review, Circulo de Poesia, the Hooghly Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, the London Magazine, Missouri Review, the Moth, the Nation, Poetry, Poetry Wales, the Progressive, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, The Writer’s Center, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry mentor in the Adroit Journal‘s Summer Mentorship Program. He lives in Norwalk, California.

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Gay Heaven is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax, charles theonia

Publisher: powerHouse Books
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

Like meeting under a disco ball, or listening to Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax proposes reading as a form of friendship. Conversational, inquisitive, and scrutinizing, this book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they’ll never get to meet.

charles theonia is a Brooklyn poet, enthusiast, and transsexual without direction. They are the author of chaplet If a Piece Falls off the Poem, Keep It and other writings on zits, piss, and disco.

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In a Cabin, In the Woods, Michael Krüger, Karen Leeder

Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: March 7, 2024
Format: Hardcover

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Michael Krüger was suffering from severe shingles and just beginning treatment for leukemia. Because his immune system was so compromised that even a cough would have knocked him flat, he had to stay away from people. He retired to a wooden house near Lake Starnberg in Germany, and from there he dispatched his poetic messages. Krüger’s meditations from quarantine were printed for many months in the magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and met with an enthusiastic response. In a Cabin, in the Woods collects fifty tableaux of nature, images of the immediate surroundings of a restricted life that also look beyond the horizon. At the same time, these poems look inward to explore transience, illness, and death. Humorous and melancholy, these are studies of the world made with the tiniest compass—meditations on nature and the nature of self that touch us all.

Michael Krüger is a German writer, publisher, and translator. Krüger worked as an editor at the publishing house Carl Hanser Verlag and was its editor-in-chief from 1986 to 2014. He is the author of God Behind the Window and Seasonal Time Change, both published by Seagull Books. 

Karen Leeder is a writer, translator, and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford, where she works on modern poetry. For Seagull Books, she has translated works by Durs Grünbein, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Michael Krüger.

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Feeding the Ghosts, Rahul Mehta

Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

Find the beauty. In 2017, writer and educator Rahul Mehta began a writing practice to find solace and beauty—in the natural world, in their family and friends, and in everyday simplicities—during a time of political tensions, environmental disasters, a global pandemic, and personal disappointment. From the vibrant color of a blade of grass, to their dog sleeping quietly in the corner, to delicate petals fallen from a rose, a mindfulness of the beauty in their surroundings helped offset the feelings of fear, outrage, and helplessness. The result of this exercise is a profoundly moving poetry collection that explores Mehta’s South Asian and Appalachian culture, their Queerness, their relationships with self and others, race, privilege, and a deep admiration of nature and the spiritual realm.

With the ear of a poet and a novelist’s understanding of narrative motion, Mehta draws in the reader through humor, tenderness, and complexity. This debut poetry collection from the Lambda Literary Award–winning writer is a magnificent celebration of our own ordinary yet miraculous daily lives—an acknowledgment of the “messy beauty… ugly beauty” in the world.

Rahul Mehta is the author of the novel No Other World and the short story collection Quarantine. Their work has been awarded a Lambda Literary Award and an Asian American Literary Award and has appeared in numerous publications, including the Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgia Review, The Sun, and the New York Times Magazine. Born and raised in West Virginia in a Gujarati-American household, they teach creative writing in Philadelphia, where they live with their partner and their dog.

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Colorfast, Rose McLarney

Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She is coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is professor of creative writing at Auburn University.

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Twisted Pair, Gabriel Spera

Publisher: Able Muse Press
Publication Date: March 8, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

Gabriel Spera’s Twisted Pairs explores the complexities and contradictions of modern life through vivid, emotionally charged poems that grapple with themes of love, loss, illness, and the search for meaning.

Gabriel Spera’s Twisted Pairs explores the complexities and contradictions of modern life through vivid, emotionally charged poems. Spera probes both the radiance and ruthlessness of the natural world, finding glimpses of grace amidst grief. A runner-up for the 2022 Able Muse Book Award, Twisted Pairs paints a nuanced picture of the joy and sorrow inherent in the human condition.

Gabriel Spera has published two collections of poetry. His first, The Standing Wave, was a National Poetry Series selection. The book also received the 2004 Literary Book Award for Poetry from PEN USA-West. His second, The Rigid Body, was awarded the 2011 Richard Snyder Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles, where he lives. Read more at www.gabrielspera.com.

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ex traction, Lara Coley

Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Lara Coley delivers her debut poetry collection with a hunger that gnaws at the line between lust and love. It’s sexy, honest, and does not shy away from what makes us human: a yearning to love and be loved. Using a dichotomy of imagery in which sharp meets soft, or sweet is replaced with salt, ex traction explores how we sometimes mistake a red flag for a target, and run like hell at the man that’s ready with a saber to put into our back. How, sometimes, we make ourselves into red flags and wave until we become flames that burn down everything we wanted. Coley looks at loss and lust and how desperately we want to sculpt both of those into love, and how the less we get, the more we want, need, and demand. ex traction is an empowering, emotional, evocative read that you can’t miss.

Lara Coley is a San Francisco poet and educator with an MFA from SFSU. She is the recipient of the Daniel J Langton Poetry Prize, the League for Innovation Poetry Prize, and service awards for supporting underserved writing communities. Lara’s work is featured in journals including New American Writing, Visible Ink, Rogue Agent, Red Light Lit, Opium Magazine, and Transfer. She currently lives in France, working as an ESL teacher and trauma-informed coach while studying marriage and family therapy. Her debut collection, ex traction is forthcoming from Button Poetry March 2024.

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The Electron-Ghost Casino, Randolph Healy

Publisher: Miami University Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

Comprising forty-nine units, with a bespoke porch and optional exit through a bestiary, Randolph Healy’s The Electron-Ghost Casino has a décor ranging from the cerebral (all percentiles included) to the earthy. Notes of horror, intimacy, fractured histories, and joy echo from its chambers. Healy is the author of Green 532: Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Salt 2002) and other books and chapbooks celebrated by readers throughout the Anglophone poetry world. This is his first American book publication. Are some of his tunes unfamiliar?  Don’t worry, or do. We may be out of time, but there’s still space. Dance.

Randolph Healy was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1956. Looking back in time, his family tree expands, while the population of the planet contracts. Thus he has a vast number of relatives, at various distances. He has written books and his work has appeared in magazines and anthologies. He founded Wild Honey Press in 1997. His average density is slightly less than that of water, which enables him to float when required. He is currently preparing a paper on “Sisyphus and the Importance of Routine.”

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Somebody’s Daughter, Jasmine Games

Publisher: Eyewear Publishing
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

Double dutch, braided scalps, tender-heads, tears shed, bologna and white bread, childhood apparitions, buried dead, petal’s phenomenon: these are the images Games’s first collection of poetry leaves you with. With reverence for the confessional poems she wrote through the years, Games invites you to radically tell the truth through a lyrical reverie of remembering: “Do not forget the soil you grew in.” Somebody’s Daughter, the first full-length collection by Jasmine Games, is a necessary read for all those who seek to reckon with the facts of their life.

Jasmine Games (she/her) is a Black and queer spoken word poet and theatre practitioner from Houston, Texas. As a teaching artist, she uses drama-based pedagogy as a mode for self-introspection and positionality interrogation, partnering with schools and museums nationally. Recently, she produced, directed, and co-facilitated a ten week spoken word action-residency for high school youth, Courageous Cadence, which was celebrated with a final performance of shared poetry on race and gender (in)justices. She also partnered with GirlForward and The Blanton Museum of Art to co-produce, perform, and facilitate in Girl, Be Well!, a zoom interactive-play on wellness. She was a poet in residence at Black Box Writer Residency twice, where she initially published Double Dutch and earlier versions of Views from Wash Day and Winter Funeral, entitled “Over” and Dead of Winter. She is the 2021 Winifred Ward Scholar, awarded by the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. She holds a BA in English and Performance Studies from Texas A&M University (2018). Currently, she is an MFA candidate for Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities at The University of Texas at Austin (2022). Wielding her words, Jasmine is fiercely committed to complete and total justice for marginalized peoples in our society, especially youth of color. See more at jasmineigames.com

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Momently, Zach Savich

Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

Momently is a collection of meditative but probing poems that ask questions of the tangible and the ephemeral, in which the every day is given a new weight. The celebrated poet’s latest collection deepens his exploration of the delicate and the durable, of entropy and its remainders, offering an “ethics of deciding to see.” 

Momently stays alert to “the language you can stand when you can’t stand language,” cultivating insights and instances that may sustain us “here, where not even ruin lasts.”

Zach Savich is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Daybed, also published by Black Ocean, and two books of creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and in the PhD in Creativity at the University of the Arts.

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Medium, Johanna Skibsurd

Publisher: Book*Hug Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

These deeply resonant and performative poems share the lives and perspectives of women who—in their roles as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums—have helped to shape the course of history. Reckoning with the dominant historical narratives of each woman’s era, Skibsrud underscores the power of poetry to bring about new formulations for understanding the relationship between past and present, self and other. 

Helen of Troy, Anne Boleyn, Shakuntala Devi, Hypatia of Alexandria, Marie Curie: Medium interprets the voices of women vilified by history, silenced by famous husbands, forced into sex work, or wrongly accused.

Each exploration begins with a brief vignette inspired by the “vidas” that once began manuscripts of the troubadours. Both vidas and poems provide lyrical reinterpretations of real and imagined elements in the lives of scholars, scientists, computer engineers, mystics, entrepreneurs, artists, nurses, and other leaders.

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of multiple poetry collections and books—including the Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel, The Sentimentalists. An Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Arizona, Johanna divides her time between Tucson, Arizona, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

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I Could Have Been More Wrong, Kevin McCaffrey

Publisher: Four Winds Press
Publication Date: March 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The poems of I Could Have Been More Wrong come out of nowhere to proclaim eccentric half-truths with deceptive simplicity. Declaring that the spirit of life is the spirit of play, Kevin McCaffrey delights in confronting the cacophonies of experience and trying to make them rhyme. 

These verses, mostly set in traditional forms, draw energy from the joy of singing out, almost spontaneously, about the sometimes quirkily ordinary vicissitudes of being.

Kevin McCaffrey has published a novel, Nightmare Therapy, and a 2014 volume of poetry, Laughing Cult. His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, the Trib Talk section of the Texas Tribune, and Writer’s Almanac: all venues that became defunct not long after his work appeared. He lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Dana DuMont is an artist, illustrator, and educator based in Richmond, Virginia. She exhibits and teaches regionally, and enjoys collaborating on projects such as the 2018 paint restoration of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History RCA “Nipper” Window. When not communing with dogs, she might be found eco printing, repurposing thrift store media, or carving fruit.

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Tangled in Vow & Beseech, Jill McCabe Johnson

Publisher: MoonPath Press
Publication Date: March 8, 2024
Format: Paperback

Tangled in Vow & Beseech was named a finalist in the MoonPath Press Sally Albiso Poetry Award and Michigan State University’s Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Jill’s third full-length poetry collection is published by MoonPath Press.

Jill McCabe Johnson (she, they) grew up in the Pacific Northwest and spent her childhood digging for clams and geoducks, harvesting wild berries, and reading in poor light. Jill writes poetry and narrative nonfiction, plus occasional forays into fiction, with a deep social conscience and even deeper roots in nature and the natural sciences. Recent works have been published in Fourth Genre, Slate, The Brooklyn Review, Gulf Stream, The Southeast Review, terrain.org, Waxwing, Diode, Defunct, and more.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/5 to 3/11 here? Contact us to let us know!