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

Fat For Our Stories, Vivian Faith Prescott

Publisher: Green Linden Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

“Vivian Faith Prescott’s poems powerfully interweave stories of family, place, and life with wild salmon. Rich with memory, Fat for Our Stories is an intimate and authentic portrait of the deep, meaningful relationship between wild salmon and people in Alaska—and of the ways the rhythms of that relationship are changing.” —Mary Catherine Martin, SalmonState Communications Director

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on the island of Kaachx̱ana.áakʼw, Wrangell, Alaska, in the Alexander Archipelago. She lives and writes as a climate witness in Lingít Aaní on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan at Mickey’s Fishcamp near Keishangita.aan, Red Alder Head Village. She’s a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA group on the island. She’s the author of three poetry collections, five chapbooks, a book of linked short stories, and a foodoir. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she co-hosts the award-winning Planet Alaska Facebook page and Planet Alaska column appearing in the Juneau Empire.

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Thoughts I Lost In The Laundry, Leia Butler

Publisher: Stanchion Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

A poetry chapbook dedicated to lost socks and anyone who’s feeling uncertain.

Leia Butler (she/her) is a poet from London who likes reading and writing about small moments. Her pamphlet Tear and Share was published with Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She is the founder and co-editor of Full House Literary. Leia is also a previous winner of a Streetcake experimental writing prize for experimental poetry. Other places where she is published include Acropolis Journal, Beir Bua, The Bable Tower Notice Board, Re-side, Streetcake, and Ice Lolly Review. Leia most loves cups of tea, laughing, and lemon cake.

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eternity poems, Katerina Kucher

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Poetry has followed me all my life. It is really a way of living, a way of thinking. When I was little, poetry was the easiest form for me to understand, it could instantly create a vivid image and each poem was its own world. Today I am attempting to create my own worlds and invite readers to do the same.

Eternity here refers to the concept that like the thought process, these poems are eternal, meaning that they have no beginning and no end. An eternity poem can be continued by the reader as they engage into a conversation with themselves. The poetic rhythm is designed to help a reader get into a certain immersive state where one can look inwards and awaken personal associations with the themes presented. The rhythm also resembles the kind of melody created by slowly moving from one key to another, think Erik Satie. The themes explore transformational life experiences and realizations like love, loss, faith, belonging, collective care etc. An eternity poem serves as an invitation to find the reflection of emotional states in the elements of nature, merging to become one.

Katerina Kucher is an emerging poetry writer based between Toronto and New York. Her poetry explores themes of various sensual and spiritual experiences following the transformations one goes throughout their life. Katerina’s personal search for a sense of home and belonging serves as a source of questions and revelations presented in the form of a poem.

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Nymphomania, Mia Altamuro

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Mia Altamuro’s debut chapbook Nymphomania is a collection of 10 poems pertaining to girlhood, adolescence, sexuality, and misogyny. These poems are meant to tell the story of a young girl coming of age, from beginning to end, discovering her identity and self esteem. They are also meant to explore wider social issues facing young girls, especially in terms of relationships and sexuality, and discovering their own desires.

The term ‘Nymphomania’ refers to excessive or uncontrollable sexual desire in women. This collection of poetry, in turn, subverts expectations for young women engaging with their sexuality for the first time, as well as challenges slut shaming and internalized misogyny. It instead aims to celebrate femininity, and girlhood as a social transformation.

Many of these poems were originally written while the author was a teenager, but were revised and edited over time to reflect her growing skill and perspective. They were based off of not only her own life, but the lives of those around her, and many of the poems take spiritual themes as well. These were written especially for young women and girls who have been told they are too much, too excessive, whether it is sex, food, their goals and ambitions, or their emotions; who are told that they are too loud, take up too much space, are too boisterous and obvious about their wants and desires.

Mia Altamuro is a twenty-year-old writer based in New York. She studies Journalism and Communications at SUNY New Paltz, where she is a Junior. Previous works include one act play What if the Clouds Were Gold?, and short story “Far From Saintly”. Poetry, as well as articles, have been published in Heroica, The Little Rebellion, Mixed Magazine, Toad Hall Editions, Lupercalia Press, and Handbasket Zine. She can be found on Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Youtube under the handle StreamofSocialConscience.

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Largemouth, Gabriella Heptinstall

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Largemouth, the debut chapbook from poet Gabriella Heptinstall, commemorates the emergence of a newborn voice through sensorial experiences of crisis, love, grief, sex, and growth. Instead of telling the emotions and thoughts of a wallflower during life-altering events, these poems awaken the impacts they have on the body through abstract descriptions, jarring imagery, and lush allusions to all things water.

Dive into the exploration of bodily experiences through intrusive and intimate pieces where carnal delight can meet odious despair in the same moment. As water shifts from rain to snow to steam, memories change their form through the seasons of life. What used to be a nightmare now may float in the conscious as a dream. Largemouth embraces these inconsistencies as a fundamental of being human.

Gabriella “Gabi” Heptinstall is an emerging author, artist, and poet with a passion for the abstract and unusual. She is currently studying for her BA in English and Creative Writing at Loyola University Chicago and is a resident poet of Chicago’s WNDR Museum. Largemouth is Gabi’s first publication, and she hopes to have many more in the future. She enjoys playing sports in the sunshine with her friends, engrossing herself in fantastical literature, and doodling in the margins of a notebook.

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keepsake, JH Grimes

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

keepsake is a hypothesis of the self as a progression shaped by losses. It holds memories as keepsakes from lives not currently lived. Memories as the temporary and posthumous attempted living of older selves. Remnants of phrases and scenes come to the speaker in waves of far-off years—a childhood pastoral landscape unfolds in a city center; a parent’s outcry comes to mind during a dinner many years away. From Berlin to the Blue Ridge, memories establish themselves as keepsakes for the dead. Each of Grimes’ poems presents as if on a film reel moments of interpersonal joys and grievances overlaid with anxieties concerning class, land, and ancestral histories. Each in a world increasingly preoccupied with and hurtling through environmental disaster. These poems are, at their core, an unfolding of the desire to hold loves and losses in the same hand, with the same body.

Born out of a fascination with David Hume’s thoughts on private property—specifically the contrariety of our passions and individualized economies—this collection questions, through real-life exposures, what it means to “keep” a thing, as to possess it, and to “lose” a thing, as to find it dispossessed. Underlying each poem are scattered attempts to answer the following questions: Where do lives go when they are unkept? Beside whom, or beside what, do remnants of past selves linger? How does sociopolitical turmoil, paired with the dangers surrounding queer identity, shape both material losses and losses within the self? In keepsake, Grimes reckons with the ever-expanding realization: there are “so many lives to have / & not many at all to keep.”

JH Grimes is a trans poet from southern Appalachia. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, poets.org, Devastation Baby, Meniscus, and others. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Norma Lowry Memorial Prize, and the Roger Conant Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. They live in Minneapolis by way of St. Louis, where they studied political theory at Washington University.

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the universe digests her stars, Ariel Friedman

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

“This chapbook offers an intimate look into the cosmos of family and motherhood. It moves symphonically across generations, charting how we are shaped by the losses, calamities, and tender daily realities of past and future generations. Many poems exist in the space between mother and child: the mother tries to narrativize the world for the child or enters transformative windows of play, where the world is remade because of the child’s perspective and presence. A spoon becomes a satellite, a truck becomes a god, a hand becomes a rotating planet, reality becomes a dream.

The space within the body, the womb, also becomes a living cavern, a deeply internal site to contrast expansive cosmological spaces. If a family is a universe expanding (as in ‘the latest science says’), the space inside the mother is also a complex, living system, as in the poem ‘Inside’, which views pregnancy through the framework of Jonah and the whale. Other stories and myths are used either as entry points for the child’s developmental understanding or as frameworks for the mother. The mother’s private world is present too, through poems that chronicle her life through music, poetry, family memories, nighttime prayers. Many of these poems examine the mother’s selfhood, building through pregnancy, the situation in which her selfhood shifts. Mother and child become celestial bodies for one another, orbiting each other, providing warmth and light, even if the world starts to place distance between them in ways both unknowable and inevitable. ‘little orbits that    over time     distort ever so slightly.   / until the distance from our suns / is so great we form our own’” —Sara Daniele Rivera, author of The Blue Mimes

Ariel Friedman is a multi-genre cellist, composer, and poet. Her poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, december, Literary Mama, Bodega, and Lucky Jefferson, among others. She is a winner of the 2023 Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She performs and tours with award-winning sister chamber-folk duo, Ari & Mia, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; was a winner of the 2020 Women Composers Festival of Hartford’s call for scores; and a recipient of New England Conservatory’s 2018 Alumni Award. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children. Visit her at arielfriedmanmusic.com.

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Full-length

The Blue Mimes, Sara Daniele Rivera

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Sara Daniele Rivera’s award-winning debut is a collection of sprawling elegy in the face of catastrophic grief, both personal and public. From the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election through the COVID-19 pandemic, these poems memorialize lost loved ones and meditate on the not-yet gone—all while the wider-world loses its sense of connection, safety, and assurance. In those years of mourning, The Blue Mimes is a book of grounding and heartening resolve, even and especially in the states of uncertainty that define the human condition.

Rivera’s poems travel between Albuquerque, Lima, and Havana, deserts and coastlines and cities, Spanish and English—between modes of language and culture that shape the contours of memory and expose the fault lines of the self. In those inevitable fractures, with honest, off-kilter precision, Rivera vividly renders the ways in which the bereft become approximations of themselves as a means of survival, mimicking the stilted actions of the people they once were. Where speech is not enough, this astonishing collection finds a radical practice in continued searching, endurance without promise—the rifts in communion and incomplete pictures that afford the possibility to heal.

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban/Peruvian artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque. Her poetry and fiction have been published in literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded a 2017 St. Botolph’s Emerging Artist Award and won the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. Her drawings, sculptures, and community-based installations focus on text-in-space as social intervention, and her public art projects are often developed in collaboration with youth.

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You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Ada Limon

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover

For many years, “nature poetry” has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what “nature” and “poetry” are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems. These include, most recently, The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Limón is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. Born and raised in California, she now lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yilin Wang

Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.

Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s  personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.

Yilin Wang 王艺霖 (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Puritan, the Toronto Star, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her translations have also appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and has been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.

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a little bump in the earth, Tyree Daye

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Tyree Daye’s a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the town of Youngsville, North Carolina, where Daye’s family has lived for the last 200 years, is reclaimed as “Ritual House.” Here, “every cousin   aunt   uncle    ghost” is welcome. Daye invokes real and imagined people, the ancestral dead, land, snakes, and chickens, to create a black town on a hill. Including dreams, letters, revised rental agreements, and “a little museum in the here & after,” where collaged images appear besides documents from Daye’s ancestors—census records, marriage licenses, and WWII Draft Registration cards—the collection asks if the past can be a portal to the future, the present a catalyst for the past. a little bump in the earth explores what it means to love someone, someplace, even as it changes, dies right in front of your eyes. Poem by poem, Daye is honoring the people of Youngsville and “bringing back the dead.”

Tyree Daye (he/him) was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (2024), Cardinal (2020), and River Hymns (2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Award. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an Amy Clampitt Residency recipient. Daye is an Assistant Professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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With My Back to the World, Victoria Chang

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Yesterday I slung my depression on my back and went to the museum. I only asked four attendants where the Agnes painting was and the fifth one knew. I walked into the room and saw it right away. From afar, it was a large white square.

With My Back to the World engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin, the celebrated abstract artist, in ways that open up new modes of expression, expanding the scope of what art, poetry, and the human mind can do. Filled with surprise and insight, wit and profundity, the book explores the nature of the self, of existence, life and death, grief and depression, time and space. Strikingly original, fluidly strange, Victoria Chang’s new collection is a book that speaks to how we see and are seen.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, to Taiwanese immigrants, Victoria Chang was educated at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford Business School and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Obit, which was named one of The New York Times‘s 100 Notable Books of 2020 and one of Time‘s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. She lives in Southern California with her family and serves as the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

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The Life of Tu Fu, Eliot Weinberger

Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

For over fifty years Eliot Weinberger has been celebrated for his innovative literary and political essays—translated into over thirty languages—as well as his trailblazing translations from the Spanish. In his exquisite new book The Life of Tu Fu, Weinberger has composed a montage of fifty-eight poems that capture the life and times of the great Tang Dynasty poet Tu Fu (712–770 AD). As he writes in a note to the edition, “This is not a translation of individual poems, but a fictional autobiography of Tu Fu derived and adapted from the thoughts, images, and allusions in the poetry.” Through lines as penetrating as a classical tanka and as fluid as a mountain stream, themes of endless war and ongoing pandemic surround the wandering life of the ancient Chinese master.

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.

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Isthmus to Abya Yala, Roberto Harrison

Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

“Abya Yala”—“land of life” or “land of vital blood”—is a Pre-Columbian term of the Guna people of Panamá and Colombia to refer to the American continent and more recently has signified the idea of a decolonized “New World” among various Indigenous movements. In Isthmus to Abya Yala, Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison summons a mythic consciousness in response to this political and spiritual struggle.

In his poems, with mystic fervor, Harrison finds phonetic unities concealing conceptual oppositions he must transcend. Invoking “mobilian” as an ur-language against racism and toward an all-inclusive humanity—in opposition to the “mobile” of phone-mediated existence—the poems of Isthmus to Abya Yala burn with a visionary ardor that overpowers rationality through an intensive accumulation of imagery. They even sometimes manifest as visual poems in the form of drawings he calls “Tecs,” opposing the dominance of technology to the advocacy of pan-Indian nationhood by 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh. “Tecumseh Republic” is the poet’s name for a new post-racial, post-national, post-binary, post-colonial, holistic and earth-oriented society with no national borders, with Panamá, the isthmus, as its only entry and exit.

Roberto Harrison‘s poetry books include Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s) (Omnidawn, 2021), Tropical Lung: Mitologia Panameña (Nion Editions, 2020), Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), Os (subpress, 2006), as well as many chapbooks. With Andrew Levy, Harrison edited the poetry journal Crayon from 1997 to 2008. He was also the editor of Bronze Skull Press which published over 20 chapbooks, including the work of many Midwestern poets. Most recently, Harrison served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology. He was the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2017-2019 and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife, the poet Brenda Cárdenas.

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Death Styles, Joyelle McSweeney

Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

In this follow-up to her award-winning collection, Toxicon and Arachne, Joyelle McSweeney proposes a link between style and survival, even in the gravest of circumstances. Setting herself the task of writing a poem a day and accepting a single icon as her starting point, however unlikely—River Phoenix, Mary Magdalene, a backyard skunk—McSweeney follows each inspiration to the point of exhaustion and makes it through each difficult day.  In frank, mesmeric lyrics, Death Styles navigates the opposing forces of survival and grief, finding a way to press against death’s interface, to step the wrong way out of the grave.

A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Joyelle McSweeney’s published works span poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights; and her most recent double-collection, her co-translation with Jack Jung, Don Mee Choi, and Sawako Nakayasu of Yi Sang’s Selected Works received numerous recognitions, including the 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. Her influential volume The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) counters conventional ecopoetics by locating aesthetic and political possibility in such signature Anthropocene phenomena as mutation, contagion, contamination, and decay. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her next collection, Death Styles, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

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The Span of a Small Forever, April Gibson

Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

With breathtaking lyricism and a vulnerability that pierces the heart, April Gibson journeys through the emotional abysses, the daily pleasures, the frustrations, and the joys of being a Black woman living with chronic illness. 

Gibson offers a unique perspective on “the body,” viewing disability and healthcare through both feminist and socio-economic lenses filtered by race and faith. Through gorgeous sensory language that migrates memories, from carefree innocence to the ravages formed in its absence, Gibson bears witness to grief, courage, and resistance to redefine herself on her own terms. 

Gibson presents her body as a “looking glass” that re-envisions illness, womanhood, motherhood, religious relics and collective loss through her physicality, through her lamenting, through her unearthing, reckoning and rebirth. Not only do we see her, but see the “we” in her. The Span of a Small Forever is both testimony and transformation—heart-shattering in its honesty, it ultimately offers us transcendent beauty, nourishment, and the strength we need to go on in our lives.

April Gibson is a poet, writer, and professor whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Rhino Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. April has won The Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She has been awarded residencies from Write On, Door County and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a fellow of the Poetry Incubator (Poetry Foundation), the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and The Watering Hole Poetry Retreat. April is also a Tin House and VONA Writing Workshop alum, and her research has received support from the National Endowment of the Humanities. She teaches in the Department of English, Literature, and Speech at Malcolm X College in Chicago.

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Migration Letters, M. Nzadi Keita

Publisher: Beacon Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In 55 poems, Migration Letters straddles the personal and public with particular, photorealistic detail to identify what, over time, creating a home creates in ourselves. Drawn from her experiences of being born in Philadelphia into a Black family and a Black culture transported from the American South by the Great Migration, M. Nzadi Keita’s poetry sparks a profoundly hybrid gaze of the visual and the sensory. Her lyrical fragments and sustained narrative plunge into the unsung aspects of Black culture and explore how Black Americans journey toward joy.

Propelled by the conditions that motivated her family’s migration north, the poems pull heavily from Keita’s place in her family, communities, and the world at large. They testify to her time and circumstances growing up Black in Philadelphia on the periphery of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Each poem builds upon an inheritance of voices: a panoramic perspective of an Easter Sunday service in a Black church gives way to an account of psychic violence in a newly integrated school; the collective voices of a beauty salon’s patrons fragment into memories of neighborhoods in North Philadelphia that have faded over time.

Migration Letters strives to tell a story about Black people that radiates across generations and testifies to a world that, as Lucille Clifton wrote, “has tried to kill [us] and has failed.” They interrogate how one’s present begins in the past, what we gain from barriers and boundaries, and what notions of progress energize our journey forward. Keita’s poems intimately reveal how Black culture can be inherited and built upon complex relationships where love and pain are inextricably linked.

M. Nzadi Keita is a poet, essayist, scholar and teacher. Her most recent poetry collection, Brief Evidence of Heaven—a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize—sheds light on Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s first wife and is cited by David Blight in his prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Keita’s work has appeared in A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology and journals including Killens Review of Arts and Letters and Poet Lore. A Cave Canem alumna, she taught creative writing, American literature, and Africana studies at Ursinus College. She was an adviser to the award-winning documentary BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez and has consulted with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Keita has presented poetry and scholarship at national and international conferences. Her prose will appear in the forthcoming When We Exhale: Reflections on Rest, Grief, & Intimacy from Black Freighter Press. Connect with her on IG: @nzadikeita

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Glass Jaw, Raisa Tolchinsky

Publisher: Persea Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Striking and big-hearted, Glass Jaw depicts the grit and glamor of women’s boxing based on the poet’s time training as a fighter in New York City. Beginning on the ropes, fighting back against the limitations of gender, Raisa Tolchinsky situates us within the dynamic context of the boxing gym, through both a chorus of named women boxers and a single fighter battling for her selfhood. In a Dantean reimagining, we follow the boxer as she descends into the hellish “rings” of an abusive relationship with her coach. In a count-down from 34 to 1, sputtering at times, the fighter gets closer and closer to the heart of her brutal, solitary metamorphosis. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, Glass Jaw explores a quest as spiritual as it is physical through poems that are muscular, musical, ecstatic.

Raisa Tolchinsky writes about love, grief, and the wisdom of the body. Currently, she is a student at Harvard Divinity School. Her debut book Glass Jaw is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2024. Raisa earned her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia and her B.A. from Bowdoin College. She is a recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee. She has previously lived in Chicago, Italy, and New York, where she trained as an amateur boxer. She was the 2022-2023 George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She is a partner, daughter, sister, teacher, and a forever student of the vastness.

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Mirror Nation, Don Mee Choi

Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback

Much like Proust’s madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi’s Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of the National Book Award winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several pamphlets of poems and essays. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize.

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Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana, July Westhale

Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Publication Date: April 4, 2024
Format: Paperback

The poems in Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana are a call-and-response. Part translation, part conversation, and part footnote, this collection considers how desire and divinity are intimately acquainted. Tactically, the experience of it is akin to reading someone’s private text messages; on one side July Westhale’s translations of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. On the other, Westhale’s response to them. There is something about both the process of translation and the process of coming into wholeness within queer desire that is akin: the seams of both show. Meaning is made through iteration, then reiteration. Through intimacy with, and intimacy without (other bodies, and people to translate them). At the end, what the reader has is a collection every bit as complex as how Sor Juana described her lovers: both “bedroom and bullring.”

July Westhale is a novelist, translator, and the award-winning author of six books, including Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called ‘stunning’ in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, and The Huffington Post, among others. www.julywesthale.co

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A Fate Worse than Death, Nisha Patel

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

A Fate Worse than Death is a stunning poetic investigation of the worthiness of disabled life as told through the author’s evaluation of her own medical records over the course of a decade. Living with treatment-resistant diabetes, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and complex chronic pain, Nisha Patel reveals how her multiple disabilities intertwine with her day-to-day life, even when care and treatments are not available. As she works through bouts of illness, neglect, and care, Patel reveals how poetry provides her a way to resist the sway of medical hegemony and instead offer complex accounts of pain, sickness, and anger, but also love.

Navigating the menial and capitalist systems of health care and paperwork, documentation, and forms, Patel uses clinical texts in visual poems that show how words like patient and client underscore medical access and denial of coverage more than words like person and care. Patel asks us to consider if her life is worth living—and saving. The future of her disabled body and her desire for it is a building meditation as the collection progresses, ending not so much with a finite ending of cured illness and disease than with a look at how we can embody hope and joy in a disabled body, as it is the body that, like time, goes on.

Nisha Patel is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Edmonton. An award-winning disabled and queer artist, she is a Canadian Poetry Slam Champion. She is a recipient of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal and the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund, and is the author of Coconut (NeWest Press).

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Dayo, Marc Perez

Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Dayo-a Tagalog word referring to someone who exists in a place not their own. A wanderer, migrant worker, exile or simply a stranger. At its core, the poems in Dayo interrogate whether belonging can exist in a society suffused with violence. Here, the poet, as a stranger, confronts the politics of recognition by offering his vision. Reflexive and lyrical, this collection embodies the true curiosity and tenacious spirit of a dayo seeking a place to replant, tend, and grow delicate roots.

Marc Perez is a Filipino poet and writer living in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT Magazine, decomp journal, CV2, PRISM international, Vallum, and Magdaragat, an anthology of Filipino-Canadian writing, among others. A recipient of grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, he has a BFA from the UBC School of Creative Writing. He is the author of the chapbook, Borderlands(Anstruther Press, 2020), and Dayo is his first full-length poetry collection.

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Women Twice Removed, Christina Lloyd

Publisher: Sixteen Rivers Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Christina Lloyd’s poetry, in Women Twice Removed, is intense and tautly eloquent. The poems are prominently tethered to Lloyd’s grandmother, Esperanza, whose name means “hope,” and who journeyed from Spain to the Philippines and on to California. Life, it is said, begins with a stumble, and so here begins the life of these arresting poems, which delve into what Christina and her grandmother experienced along the way. Lloyd’s poetry is like a tree that is well rooted and stands tall. Her poems speak quietly; her images are paintings. Read these poems slowly, and take the time to reflect, to savor each line, and to believe in hope.

Christina Lloyd was born in Hong Kong and raised in Manila and San Francisco. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her work appears in Canadian Woman Studies, Epoch, Poetry Ireland, SWWIM, and Westerly, among other journals. Women Twice Removed is her first full length collection. She lives in San Francisco.

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The Infinite Field, Alice Templeton

Publisher: Sixteen Rivers Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Writing from her “share of solitude,” Alice Templeton calls up beloved places and people from the infinite field of memory: the Memphis suburbs of her childhood, the family farm in middle Tennessee that was a touchstone for her adolescent and adult life, and the relatives with whom she shared those places. Templeton’s language conjures “the hour creatures draw close,” and within the bounds of these singular poems, time is arrested. The decline of her parents and the destruction of the family home by fire compel her to reinspect the past and fully claim her present life in California. Taken together, these poems tell a loving liberation story as the poet moves on from a way of life spent close to the land.

Alice Templeton‘s poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Bellingham Review,  Calyx, North American Review, Poetry, and other publications. Her work was a finalist for the 2020 Neruda Prize from Nimrod, and her chapbook  Archaeology won the 2008 New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry from Finishing Line Press. She is also the author of a critical book on Adrienne Rich’s poetics and scholarly articles on contemporary poetics, cultural criticism, and literary theory. Originally from Tennessee, Templeton has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2002.

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Being Reflected Upon, Alice Notley

Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In a New York Times review of Alice Notley’s 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that “the radical freshness of Notley’s poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet’s restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next.” Notley’s new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, “stream-of-consciousness” teasing out a lived physics or philosophy.

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California. She is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Disobedience (Penguin, 2001), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and most recently The Speak Angel Series. Her honors also include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives and works in Paris.

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Pitch & Glint, Lutz Seller, Stefan Tobler

Publisher: And Other Stories
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler’s childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents’ suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, “You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.”

Poet, novelist and essayist Lutz Seiler was born in Gera, Thuringia, in 1963 and today lives in Wilhelmshorst, near Berlin, and in Stockholm. After an apprenticeship in construction, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. Since 1997, he has been the literary director and custodian of the Peter Huchel Haus. His writing has won many prizes, including the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, the Ingeborg Bachmann and the German Book Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages. His volume of non-fiction In Case of Loss and the poetry collection Pitch & Glint are published in 2024 in English by And Other Stories. Some of his stories, poems and essays have appeared in English in journals and magazines including Granta, Modern Poetry in Translation, PN Review, Poetry, PROTOTYPE, the New Statesman, Shearsman, Stand, the TLS and The White Review.

Born in Belém, Brazil, to English and Swiss parents, Stefan Tobler is a translator and the founder of And Other Stories. Authors he has translated include Clarice Lispector, Raduan Nassar and Arno Geiger. He grew up in northern Brazil and southern England, and has now made his home in the Dark Peak.

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Beforelight, Matthew Gellman

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity, ultimately committing to the self’s authenticity as the highest form of devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative connections—familial, communal, and ancestral—as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to discover how not to “make a life out of pain.”

Matthew Gellman is the author of Night Logic, selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook Prize. The recipient of awards and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and Brooklyn Poets, he holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in Brooklyn.

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Tale of Ahmed, Henry Cockburn, Nelofer Pazira

Publisher: OR Books
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Author Henry Cockburn lives at one end of a long trail stretching from Afghanistan to the southeast coast of England. His home in Kent is close to where small, frail boats arrive bringing refugees on the last lap of their 6,000-mile journey from Kabul and the Hindu Kush. Meeting and talking with refugees, Henry became aware that even they themselves rarely understand the heroic nature of their odyssey. The journey’s never-ending risks have become second nature to them. For most other people, they are simply unknown. Correcting such misperceptions is one of the objectives of this powerful story.

Written in the form of an epic poem and richly illustrated by the author, Tale of Ahmed describes how its eponymous hero gets help from fellow travelers and finds unexpected friends along the way. But Ahmed is also exploited for money by crooks and cheats, as well as targeted as a pariah. This unusual and unputdownable fable recounts with great sensitivity the Afghans’ sufferings and their courage and resilience in making a grueling passage.

Henry Cockburn is an artist and writer who grew up in Moscow and Washington DC, where his father Patrick Cockburn worked as a journalist. He now lives in Canterbury, Kent. His life changed dramatically when he had a breakdown in 2002, after which he spent several years in mental hospitals. With his father, he wrote Henry’s Demons, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Costa prize.

Nelofer Pazira-Fisk was born in Kabul and was 6 years old when the Russians invaded Afghanistan. After a decade of war, Nelofer and her family escaped to Pakistan, and from there to Canada. She is an internationally acclaimed film producer and the author of A Bed of Red Flowers, which is a compelling portrait of the life of Afghan under occupation, and their resilience in the face of war.

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decompose, S. Fey

Publisher: Not a Cult
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Our life contains several lives as well as several deaths; we attempt to understand these little rebirths through poetry. 

decompose explores pruning our past to make room for future growth; the expanse we are offered through the crush of heartbreak, discovering family beyond our original home, finding new meaning in our own name – S. Fey picks these timeless themes like roses from a flourishing garden to compose a thorny and succulent bouquet of living, loss, and rebirth throughout the rejuvenating pages of their debut poetry collection.

S. Fey is a Lesbian and Non-Binary writer living in LA. Currently, they are the founder of the Luminaries Poetry workshop, and poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine. They love to be with their friends, but mostly, to beat them at Mario Party. They tweet @sofiafeycreates.

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Crying Dress, Cassidy McFadzean

Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The poems in Crying Dress, acclaimed poet Cassidy McFadzean’s third collection, explore the multiplicity of meaning that arises from fragmentation, rhythm, competing sounds, and ellipsis. Rooted in the tradition of lyric poetry, these strikingly original poems revel in musicality (rhyme, beat, and alliteration) while deploying puns, idiom, and other forms of linguistic play to create a dissonance that challenges the expected coherence of a poem. From the ghosts and gardens of Brooklyn and Sicily to the clanging of garbage chutes in Uno Prii’s modernist high rises in Toronto, to quiet moments of intimacy in domestic spaces, and the early days of sobriety and grief, Crying Dress explores the intersections between noise and coherence, the conversational and the associative, the architectural and the ecological, while reaffirming the poet’s sonic, vertiginous lyricism and gift for overlooked detail.

Cassidy McFadzean studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and fiction at Brooklyn College. She is the author of two books of poetry: Drolleries (McClelland & Stewart 2019), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, and Hacker Packer (M&S 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her crown of sonnets, Third State of Being, was published by Gaspereau Press in 2022. She lives in Toronto.

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Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, J. Drew Lantham

Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover

In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.

J. Drew Lanham is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts and The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award (National Audubon Society), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award (North American Association for Environmental Education), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation (Center for Biological Diversity). He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina in 2022. He is a bird watcher, poet, and Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He lives in Seneca, South Carolina.

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The Screams of War, Akram Alkatreb, Jonas Elbousty

Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: April 5, 2024
Format: Paperback

The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb’s verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere “murmurs engraved on stones,” long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At the heart of Alkatreb’s work lies a preoccupation with trauma and the profound burden of alienation that accompanies exile. Nascent memories are shrouded by the “scars of sleep,” and words find themselves nostalgic for destruction. The ubiquity of violence that Alkatreb channels into his poetry does not tolerate enclaves of innocence. The Screams of War is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a stark reminder of the harsh realities faced by those trapped in conflict.

Akram Alkatreb is a Syrian poet, residing in New Jersey. He has worked as a literary critic and journalist for over two decades, with numerous contributions appearing in many major Arabic literary magazines and newspapers. He has published six poetry collections in Arabic, and one in Spanish.

Jonas Elbousty is a writer, literary translator, and academic, whose latest book is Tales of Tangier.

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Sailing without Ahab, Steve Mentz, Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

We’re not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod’s American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant’s rage, the ship’s crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.

This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It’s not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It’s the turning that matters. It’s a blue wonder world that beckons.

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University and author of An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), Ocean (2020) and a poetry chapbook, “Swim Poems” (2022). He also writes and curates The Bookfish Blog at www.stevementz.com.

Suzanne Conklin Akbari is professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and co-host of the literature podcast The Spouter-Inn.

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Reversing Entropy, Luci Shaw

Publisher: Iron Pen
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

The poet’s own words best describe the heart of this pinnacle collection of new work by beloved writer Luci Shaw:

Entropy: A measure of the molecular disorder, or randomness, of a system, its lack of order or predictability, resulting in a gradual decline into disorder. 

Our universe, and the systems within it, constantly shift from their created states of order towards disorder, or chaos. The second law of thermodynamics asserts that entropy, or disorder, always increases with time. Creative human activities such as art, architecture, music, story or film are human efforts to halt and reverse this loss of meaning. Thus, smaller systems, like individual poems, become highly ordered as they receive energy from outside themselves, from the poet. They reverse entropy because they are moving from a state of disorder (all the random ideas, words and phrases available to the writer) into an orderly form designed by the writer to create meaningful images and concepts in the reader’s mind (which is where the word “imag-ination” comes from.) This transfer of images, concepts and ideas into the mind of a reader is the task of poetry and the calling of the poet. Just as a composer of music gathers rhythms, notes, melodies, or harmony, organizing them into fugues or sonatas or concertos, so poets work and write to discover ways of arranging their responses to the world in words that introduce meaning and beauty in the mind of the reader. 

Which is what I’ve been trying to do for most of my life.

Luci Shaw was born in London, England, in 1928. A poet and essayist whose writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals, in 2013 she received the tenth annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. The author of over thirty-five books of poetry and creative non-fiction, since 1986 she has been Writer in Residence at Regent College, Vancouver. She lives with her husband, John Hoyte, in Bellingham, WA.

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Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2024, Beau Adler

Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

A collaborative effort between poets from all corners of the world and all walks of life, The Central Avenue Poetry Prize presents a collection of poetry like no other. Rife with heartache, longing, laughter, and life, this book captures the spark of creativity and the vastness that is the human soul within its pages. This collection contains stories that are funny, some that are sad, some that are beautiful—and all that are true. 

Diverse in content and rich in talent, this is a testament to the art of poetry, and a reminder that the act of writing comes from the act of living, and when we create, we allow ourselves to see and be seen.

Working beside the sea in the Pacific Northwest, Beau Adler has worn many different hats, but his fervent passion for literature led him to the publishing world—where he intends on staying. When he isn’t reading and writing emails, Beau is jogging, hiking with his dog, or binge-watching sitcoms on Netflix. Beau is the editor of the 2024 edition of the Central Avenue Poetry Prize.

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Seraphim, Angelique Zobitz, Grisel Y. Acosta

Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Seraphim, Angelique Zobitz’s debut collection, radiates with light and wonder. These poems reveal how Black womxn and girls carve out, create, and pass along that lightness in their daily lives. Zobitz pays homage to an array of Black womxn, including bell hooks, Roberta Flack, and Megan Thee Stallion. If you’ve ever wondered how Black womxn can glow so incandescent, this collection is the answer. This isn’t about pain, despair, or the indomitable strength of Black womxn, but rather a vibrant celebration of the love and joy at the forefront of their lives. Seraphim speaks in many voices—sensual, angry, defiant, soft, vulnerable, and continuously reborn.

Angelique Zobitz is the author of the chapbooks Burn Down Your House from Milk & Cake Press and Love Letters to The Revolution from American Poetry Journal. Her work has appeared in the Journal, Sugar House Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora, and many others.

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New and Selected Poems: Marie Howe

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover

Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe is “a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” (Dorianne Laux).

Marie Howe is the former poet laureate of New York. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

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The Principle of Rapid Peering, Sylvia Legris

Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of “rapid peering.” Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in verse. Here is “where nature converges with words,” as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.

Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her collection Garden Physic was chosen as one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year by The (London) Times and CBC/Radio-Canada. Her other poetry collections include The Hideous Hidden, Pneumatic Antiphonal, and Nerve Squall, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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Midway, Kayla Czaga

Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

“I feel like the crud / I accidentally touch sometimes, whatever it is / that collects under cushions on my couch,” writes Kayla Czaga in her third collection, Midway, an exploration of grief in all its manifestations. In her search for meaning in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Czaga visits the underworld (at least twice), Vietnamese restaurants, the beach, London’s Tate Modern, Las Vegas casinos, and a fish textbook. Honest, elegiac, characteristically strange, and frequently funny, these poems take the reader through bright scenery like carnival rides with fast climbs and sudden drops. The meanings and messages Czaga uncovers on her travels are complicated: hopeful, bleak—both comforting and not. Along with the parents the poet mourns, this collection showcases a varied cast. A suburban father-in-law copes with a troubling diagnosis. Marge Simpson quits The Simpsons. Death is a metalhead who dates girls too young for him. Midway is a welcome and necessary collection from one of the most celebrated and accomplished poets of her generation.

Kayla Czaga is the author of two previous poetry collections-For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019). Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Frequently anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series, her writing also appears in The Walrus, Grain, Event, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

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Scientific Marvel, Chimwemwe Undi

Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Firmly grounded in the local, the arresting poems in Chimwemwe Undi’s debut collection, Scientific Marvel, are preoccupied with Winnipeg in the way a Winnipegger is preoccupied with Winnipeg, the way a poet might be preoccupied with herself: through history and immigration; race and gender; anxieties and observation. Marked by rhythmic drive, humour and surprise, Undi’s poems consider what is left out from the history and ongoing realities of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the west. Taking its title from a beauty school in downtown Winnipeg that closed in 2017 after nearly 100 years of operation, Scientific Marvel approaches the prairies from the point of view of a person who is often erased from the prairies’ idea of itself. “I mean my country the way / my country means my country / and what else is there to say? / I am bad and brown / and trying. Nothing here / belongs to me or could / or ever will.”

This is poetry that touches on challenging topics—from queerness and colonialism to racism, climate rage, and decolonization, while never straying far from specific lived experience, the so-called ‘smaller’ questions: about self, art, dance parties and pop culture, relationships and love.

Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, editor, and lawyer living and writing on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her work has appeared in Brick, Border Crossings, Canadian Literature and BBC World, among others. She was the recipient of the 2022 John Hirsch Emerging Writer Award from the Manitoba Book Awards, and she is the Winnipeg Poet Laureate for 2023 and 2024.

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Blue Atlas, Susan Rich

Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Blue Atlas is a lyrical abortion narrative unlike any other. This one-of-a-kind collection follows a Jewish woman and her ghosts as they travel from West Africa to Europe and, finally, to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The speaker searches repeatedly for a new outcome, seeking answers in a myriad of mediums such as an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, and a curriculum vitae. The raw, often far from idyllic experience of a global love affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy is examined and meditated upon through a surreal prism. The Blue Atlas, a genus of the common cedar tree first found in the High Atlas of Morocco and known for its beauty and resilience, becomes a metaphor for the hardship and power of a fully engaged life.

Susan Rich is the author of eight books, including Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems, as well as Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. Her poetry has earned her awards from Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, and the Times Literary Supplement (London). Individual poems appear in the Harvard Review, New England Review, O Magazine, and Poetry Ireland, among other places. Susan is co-editor with Kelli Russell Agodon of Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems. She teaches at Highline College and directs Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women from Seattle. Susan currently resides in Seattle, Washington.

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Bridestones, Miranda Pearson

Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see. The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment. Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt. Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

Miranda Pearson has taught at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Bridestones is her sixth book of poetry. Her previous collections include Rail and The Fire Extinguisher. She lives between England and Canada.

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twofold, Edward Carson

Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

The poet Charles Simic wrote, “Short poems: be brief and tell us everything.” Edward Carson’s extraordinary new work gathers concise diptych – or twofold – poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence. Within the two sections of twofold, “dialogues” and “binaries,” the form of the diptych shapes language and meaning as paired poems engage each other across the margins of facing pages. Caroline Bem, author of A Moveable Form, writes: “The diptych, you see, is beautiful. It is symmetry and difference, doubling and mirroring, binarism and seriality. It is the form of paradox, both open and closed, free and contained.” Negotiating surprising twinning combinations, comparisons, and outcomes, the poems in twofold are lively, thought-provoking, and playful interchanges that are also mischievously literate, questioning, and intuitive.

Edward Carson is the author of several poetry collections including moving parts, whereabouts, Look Here Look Away Look Again, and Knots. He lives in Toronto.

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Nonbinary Bird of Paradise, Emilia Phillips

Publisher: University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Nonbinary Bird of Paradise shakes its tail feathers, reveling in a body that cannot be contained in gender binaries. Its opening sequence re-imagines the Judaeo-Christian Eve as a queer person who, instead of eating of the proverbial forbidden fruit, conjures a femme lover: “God made man / in his own image, / so they say. / So I made a beloved / in mine,” she says. Eve’s power triggers a jealous God to manipulate Adam toward behaviors of toxic masculinity and to exile the two humans from the Garden of Eden. This retelling, accompanied by other retellings of classical and biblical narratives, indicts the ways in which religion and myth have created and buttressed compulsory heterosexuality. Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips delights in the autobiography of their imagination, the rendering of self after self after self. “Would you stay // & watch me,” Phillips asks in the titular poem, wondering if the beloved will deem them desirable, even though they are masculine without being a man, “even / though / I have no blue velvet / skirt or ruby-raw / throat?”

Emilia Phillips (they/them/theirs) is the author of four previous poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, including Embouchure (2021), and five chapbooks. Their poetry, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared widely. They are an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English; MFA in Writing Program; and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNC Greensboro.

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Something About Living, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Publisher: University of Akron Press
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

“It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that. Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence. Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed to the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed. This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities. In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act. Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first.” —Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Water & Salt (Red Hen Press) and Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House Press 2023). She has received honors including the 2018 Washington State Book Award, the 2019 Robert Watson Literary Prize, 2020 Best of the Net for nonfiction, and the Goldstein Prize for Poetry. Tuffaha was the 2022 curator of the translation series Poems from Palestine at the Baffler magazine. She lives in Redmond, Washington, with her family.

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