We here at Philly Poetry Chapbook Review love poetry, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. We have a hunch that our readers do, too. Every Tuesday, we publish an update about what full-length poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Signs, Music, Raymond Antrobus
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Structured as a two-part sequence poem, Signs, Music explores the before and after of becoming a father with tenderness and care—the cognitive and emotional dissonances between the “hypothetical” and the “real” of fatherhood, the ways our own parents shape the parents we become, and how fraught with emotion, curiosity, and recollection this irreversible transition to fatherhood makes one’s inner landscape.
At once searching and bright, deeply rooted and buoyant, Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music is a moving record of the changes and challenges encompassing new parenthood and the inevitable cycles of life, death, birth, renewal, and legacy—a testament to the joy, uncertainty, and incredible love that come with bringing new life into the world.
Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney, to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of two other poetry collections, The Perseverance and All The Names Given. He is a recipient of the Ted Hughes Award, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, a Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize, Griffin Prize and the Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (judged by Ocean Vuong) for his poem Sound Machine. He has also published two children’s picture books, Can Bears Ski? and Terrible Horses and hosted a number of award-winning radio documentaries including “Inventions In Sound” (BBC Radio 4, 2021). He is a Cave Canem graduate in the US, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature in the UK, and divides his time between England and New Orleans.
The Twenty-First Century, Jacob Eigen
Publisher: American Poetry Review
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Lovers whisper to each other at summer camp. The vizier of an ancient kingdom recalls the pleasures of his youth. A cockroach in the distant future evolves to write poetry of his own. Chosen by Roger Reeves as the winner of the 2024 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, The Twenty-First Century guides us through a breadth of environments and worlds — from far off times and places to the poet in the present, leaving Costco, wandering through the mazy streets of Queens. Drawing from both fictional and autobiographical material, these poems treat a range of subjects: the joys and terrors of childhood, music, art, desire, love. Some are narrative prose poems verging on parable, others lyric meditations or lyric sequences. The language throughout is simple and plainspoken, but the mystery is vast. It is the mystery of time — the fact that we are here and then gone. How can this be, these poems ask again and again, in a chorus of voices and an array of forms, until the question itself becomes a kind of song.
Jacob Eigen was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn. He studied literature and philosophy at Deep Springs College and Yale and fiction writing at Hunter College. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and The Iowa Review. He currently lives in Chicago.
Want, the Lake, Jenny Factor
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
This book of fifty-two poems spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.
Jenny Factor is an archaeologist of object and mind, a feminist, a mother, and a dog-lover. An inhabitant of doubled geographies, Jenny helps to organize the monthly Caltech Poetry Lunch while studying 18-century women’s poetry networks at Brandeis University. Her first collection, Unraveling at the Name, won the Hayden Carruth Award and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Factor’s writing has appeared in more than a dozen anthologies, including Poetry 180, The Best American Erotic Poems, Prairie Schooner, the Gay & Lesbian Review, and the Paris Review. Her work has been supported by an Astraea Grant in poetry and acknowledged with a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg honorable mention. Jenny lectures Poetry at Caltech and is the former core faculty member in Poetry at the MFA in Creative Writing program at Antioch University. She divides her time between Pasadena, CA and Marblehead, MA.
Sons of Salt, Yaccaira Salvatierra
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sons of Salt poignantly captures the experiences of mothers who battle for their sons’ wellbeing, particularly when fathers are absent due to systemic oppressions.
Salvatierra’s verse breaks the bones of poetic form to bring attention to the failures of a conceptually western God who has categorically failed to protect His children, and gives birth instead to a god of nature.
Weaving self-made mythology, mourning, and maternal fear into visual and narrative poems, Salvatierra creates a collection that probes the deepest hurt to ensure the holiest redemption.
Born in Los Ángeles, California, Yaccaira Salvatierra is a poet, translator, and dedicated educator teaching for over 20 years while raising her two sons as single parent. She earned her BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MA at San José State University, and an MFA at Randolph College. She received the Dorrit Sibley Award for Poetry and the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize. She has been awarded the Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship as a fellow at the Community of Writers Workshop, and scholarships for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference, and Macondo. She is an organizer for the San Francisco International Flor y Canto Literary Festival and lives in Oakland, CA, where she teachers literacy and poetry to youth.
Dybbuk Americana, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
“How can I teach a prayer / I only know how to recite?” “America, whose death / didn’t you come from?” These are some of the questions that poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller wrestles with in his beautiful, gripping new collection. By turns experimental and documentary, Dybbuk Americana draws out the questions around Jewish identity in the United States, and what it means to pass on Jewish identity to one’s child. This hybrid text draws on art, mysticism, and history, taking the dybbuk, a figure from Jewish folklore, as its central metaphor. A dybbuk is a restless spirit who inhabits another’s body, and as a possessing spirit the dybbuk is often treated as a demonic force, but it can be read as merely trying to climb the ladder of the afterlife. In other words, a kind of striver. Enacting the idea of competing selves in one body, Dybbuk Americana plays with form via a series of text boxes that create a multi-channel effect on the page. The body of the poem can be read with surrounding and intercutting text boxes to generate multiple interpretations. This innovative poetic technique maintains a dialogue with Jewish literary lineages: Talmudic commentary and interpretation of the oral law, as well as the fragmented nature of geniza, a place where Jews store sacred documents when they fall out of use. Dybbuk Americana weaves together the father-son arc within a larger socio-political commentary and historical narrative. Poems move deftly between the ironic and the mystic, from aphoristic questioning and inventive narratives, to interview, oral history, and archival materials. In these lines, “the angels./ They get as close as they can.” Witty, curious, warm, and searching, Dybbuk Americana signals a fresh voice in Jewish-American poetry.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of The Art of Bagging (2023) and serves on the faculty at San Jacinto College. His work has also been published in Brooklyn Rail, Image, Poet Lore, Pleiades, and Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, among others.
Exit Opera, Kim Addonizio
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject—jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers—these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to “[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find” and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life.
Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, California.
Pills and Jacksonvilles, Jillian Weise
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this arresting collection, The Cyborg Jillian Weise navigates the intersection of disability and desire, wending her way through diners, bars, and dark living rooms lit by TV screens. Her words flit in and out of DMs, texts, and video chats, exploring the vital human thread that runs through the machines mediating our existence. Weaving personal narrative with cultural commentary and lyricism, these poems blur the line between flesh and technology, centering disabled and queer bodies and challenging our preconceptions of everything from opiate use to BDSM. In Pills and Jacksonvilles, Weise sharply claims “cyborg” as an identity of her own, embracing the space between human and technology and celebrating disabled culture and history.
Bold, sexy, and formally exciting, Weise’s poetry lays bare her most intimate self—pulling back the curtain on the loves, losses, and obsessions of a life.
The Cyborg Jillian Weise is the author of one novel and three books of poetry, the most recent of which, Cyborg Detective, won the 2020 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Cy’s work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Poetry, and elsewhere. She created and performed the fictional character Tipsy Tullivan for a web series that ran from 2016 to 2020. During the pandemic, Cy wrote and directed the video play A Kim Deal Party. Weise has been awarded residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Fulbright Program, and the Lannan Foundation.
We Live Here: Poems for an Ojibwe Calendar Year, Lois Beardslee
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
Anishinaabe author Lois Beardslee shares how a life is lived within two cultures, revealing a worldview shaped by language and customs and expressed through verse both playful and somber. This collection of poems is a lattice of traditional wisdom, wordplay, and cunning modernity that forms a distinctive creative voice. Experiences of duality overlay an Anishinaabe annual cycle, emphasizing the practical nature of traditions and their dependence upon the landscape in which they develop over time. Poems like “Waatebagaagiizis” and “Gidanimibiisaa na” reveal the fortitude that maintains traditions against the encroaching backdrop of modernity. Others such as “Namegosag” and “Minowichige” playfully connect a moment’s experience to the everyday practices that have endured, many through the author’s own eyes, and others through kin spanning generations and cultures. These poems not only evoke a sense of spirit that transcends boundaries but they also bear traditional knowledge, notions of the seasons, and conceptions of how the spirit is shaped by nature.
Lois Beardslee is an Anishinaabe author, illustrator, and poet from Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula. Her works have received several nominations and awards, and in 2021 she was the first Native American author to receive Michigan’s Notable Book Award for Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers (Wayne State University Press).
Motherlands, Weijia Pan
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Hardcover
Motherlands opens with a child drawn early to poetry. “In summer I write. Two lines at a time, two vying souls / running up the wall.” The collection follows this speaker-poet through a childhood in post-Maoist China and an eventual move to the United States, laying bare cultural and linguistic tensions in both historical and modern settings. He cites Chinese laborers toiling in American factories—an echo of the brutalities endured by those who constructed the Transatlantic Railroad—and speaks to anxieties around belonging, assimilation, and identity. “If I forget one character a day,” he writes. “I will have forgotten Chinese / by the end of 2042.”
In these attentive, imaginative poems, Weijia Pan questions the artist’s duty—his duty—as a chronicler of truth, especially through issues of displacement and global injustice. What can the poet do but observe? And yet, in unpacking ancestral traumas connected to Maoist China and modern-day bigotry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, he still finds himself turning to art as a way to understand both the self and the world at large. Through elegant juxtapositions, Pan crafts an emotional world that is at once regional and universal—Li Bai and Du Fu sit alongside Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter, pepper used to bless new roads is repurposed in the mace used against protesters, two languages compete on a single tongue. Lyrical and visionary, this collection embodies poetry’s capacity to ground us, teach us, and change us.
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a third-year MFA at the University of Houston, where he is a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.
City Bird and Other Poems, Patrick James Dunagan
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
Over a decade ago, Patrick James Dunagan stoically refused to be published in the Spotlight series, citing his desire to maintain critical independence as a prolific reviewer of contemporary poetry. Finally, he has been prevailed upon to turn over a manuscript, City Bird and Other Poems. Defying the media narrative of the city’s demise, the poems of City Bird celebrate the joys of San Francisco, invoking artists like Joan Brown and Jay DeFeo, poets like Bill Berkson and Lew Welch, and local landmarks like O’Farrell Street, St. Anne of the Sunset, and Thrasher magazine, all the while foregrounding Dunagan’s lightly worn erudition.
But the book stands on its lengthy title poem, a tour de force combining composition and collage, filtered through the poet’s laid-back lyricism. Unapologetically literary with its understated formal imperatives, City Bird is at once a self-referential poetics, examining itself unfolding, and a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Hugh, the nominal protagonist, seemingly engaged in eating a sandwich. Proustian in its sweep, even as it courts a ludicrous Beckett-like minimalism, the poem takes sidelong glances at our contemporary political malaise, while contemplating consciousness itself. If Ashbery had written “The Skaters” about skateboarders, it might have come out very like City Bird. A major achievement in contemporary American poetry, City Bird further confirms Dunagan’s reputation as the best-kept secret of San Francisco.
Patrick James Dunagan holds an MA/MFA in Poetics from the now defunct New College of California, where he studied with David Meltzer, Tom Clark, and Joanne Kyger. He’s author of many poetry collections, including Drops of Rain/Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), Sketch of the Artist (FMSBW, 2018), and After the Banished (Empty Bowl, 2022), as well as a book of criticism, The Duncan Era (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Additionally, he has served as editor for David Meltzer’s Rock Tao (Lithic, 2022), among other titles. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi, and works as a library assistant at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. He has lived in San Francisco for over 20 years.
Opium and Ambergris, Colin Dekeersgieter
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Opium and Ambergris is the haunting debut collection by poet Colin Dekeersgieter, whose lyric poems scrutinize a family’s history with addiction, death, and mental illness.
Reeling from the loss of his brother to a heroin overdose, Dekeersgieter grieves while doing his best to keep his suicidal mother alive and raise his family. As a result, these poems shift between historical retellings and urgent examinations of love. In the title poem, “opium” is associated with death and “ambergris”—a substance formed in sperm whales’ digestive tracts and valued by many cultures for over one thousand years—is associated with love. As family history, death, trauma, and duty become entwined with the acts of living, suffering, growing, and writing, these metaphorical categories become essentially interchangeable. Opium comes from the beautiful poppy; ambergris is an ingredient still used in high-end perfumes to help the fragrance last longer, yet it is extracted from dead whales. Thus, “opium” and “ambergris” come to represent the possible coexistence of love and loss.
With many poems written in emergency departments, behavioral wards, and intensive care units, Dekeersgieter does not just honestly chronicle a family crisis but seeks to survive through poetry.
Colin Dekeersgieter is a poet, editor, and teacher. His work has appeared in Brink, the Greensboro Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from New York University and is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Bad Weather Mammals, Ashley-Elizabeth Best
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
“The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing,” Ashley-Elizabeth Best writes in her second collection. Bad Weather Mammals navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, she traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance. In poems that explore a variety of formal constraints, such as the suite “ODSP 1, 2, & 3,” which infuses government forms with lyric poetry, she suggests all the ways the medical and bureaucratic systems can dehumanize and traumatize our most vulnerable citizens. By digging deep into her own experiences, Best has archived the ways we fail each other in our most desperate times — while at the same time outlining how we can show up to revel in disabled joy and community. Bad Weather Mammals disassembles dominant narratives about how disabled individuals should be and reconceptualizes the embodied experiences that recenter us in our own narrative.
Ashley-Elizabeth Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston, ON. Her work can be found in the Capilano Review, New Welsh Review, CV2, Ambit, Mslexia, and Chatelaine. Recently, she was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award for Poetry.
Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia, Emily Schulten
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia grapples with the tensions associated with being exiled to home, with the environment and gentrification when there is a lack of land, and what that does to family, history, and family history. It is about the personal islands we all inhabit. Nostalgia is deceptive and seductive. We live in a time of tumult, a time therefore where the past may be, perhaps too easily, romanticized. There is a tendency to fall for these deceptions. Not just our own, but those of the generation before us, as well as the nostalgia of the generations that came before them, that they fell for. On the small island where this manuscript is largely set, there is such transience and such dependency on the narrative born of tourism that the truth and fiction of a place’s history become skewed. As the water rises and the cost of living becomes such that working people and families rooted on the island for years cannot afford to live here, cannot risk staying, the distance to mainland seems lengthened. This is the perspective from which this book wrestles with the tough pull of nostalgia and the questions of what is real and what is not, how to preserve history and self in a changing landscape, and how to build roots where the ground does not accept them.
Emily Schulten is the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar, a 2023 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, and the forthcoming Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia, the 2023 White Pines Press Poetry Prize winner. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is currently a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys in Key West, where she lives with her husband and their son.
Stars Unseen, Greg Watson
Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Stars Unseen, Greg Watson fearlessly navigates a path through multi-generational trauma and grief, explores his Finnish-American heritage, and the joys and challenges of single parenting in the present age. It is a clear-eyed collection that seeks hope and redemption in the face of adversity, and manages to pin down the smallest moments for closer examination.
Greg Watson’s work has appeared widely in various journals and anthologies, and has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently The Sound of Light, published by Whistling Shade Press. He is also co-editor with Richard Broderick of The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood, published by Nodin Press. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Love Sick Century, Elly Bookman
Publisher: 42 Miles Press
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
What’s so wonderful about this book is the gorgeous precision of its grieving. Love Sick Century works like a slow boil on a flame made out of a sublime capacity for seeing the awful truths inside the worst of us. I mean, Bookman has this capacity, giving Love Sick Century this simmering quality that’s so rare these days it seems almost otherworldly. In poem after poem, Bookman’s keen-eyed speaker shows us what it feels like to be mesmerized by dismay. She looks unflinchingly at what the podcasters and pundits call “our current moment”—“dozens dead again.” She says in one poem: “doom, doom, doom”—and takes the horror there quite personally. That wounding makes the beautiful song that is this beautiful book. —Adrian Blevins, author of Status Pending
Elly Bookman grew up in downtown Atlanta and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2013, she has worked as an educator while consistently publishing her poetry in some of the most widely-read markets in the country, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review. She was the recipient of the first annual Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and the Loraine Williams poetry prize from The Georgia Review. She teaches middle and high school at The Paideia School in Atlanta.
Girl at the End of the World, Erin Carlyle
Publisher: Driftwood Press
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
“In Girl at the End of the World, her second, full-length collection published by Driftwood Press, one of Erin Carlyle’s speakers (an admitted shoplifter) asks, What must it be like/to be an honest girl?” It’s a provocative question appearing in a book that with precision and unflinching, clear-eyed honesty explores (among other things) the difficulties of global warming/wildfires, poverty, violence against women, and the loss of a beloved but complicated parent to addiction. Loss and hardship thread through these hard-hitting, spare and beautifully rendered poems, poems that again and again prove the power of language to transform suffering into art.” — Beth Gylys, author of After My Father: A Book of Odes
Growing up in rural Kentucky and Alabama, Erin Carlyle’s poetry often deals with the intersections of place, poverty, and girlhood. While poetry is her first love, she also enjoys film and music, and is an avid record collector. She teaches English and Georgia State University where she is also pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband, two cats, and one dog.
Sex, Love, and Black Lives, Dr. Mack Curry IV
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
Sex, Love, and Black Lives showcases poems that look into the mind of a young black man in his 20s (and early 30s). These poems include various perspectives on love, sex, family, race, and society. In addition to discussing different topics, these poems also exhibit mastery of ghazals, terza rimas, and a vast array of other formats and literary devices. This book shows a simultaneous growth and development of the author, his ideas, and the work he produces.
Dr. Mack Curry IV was born and raised in Bowie, Maryland. He started writing poetry at age 11, and he still enjoys writing poetry twenty years later. Mack received his Bachelors in English from Hampton University in 2013. He then received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University in 2016, where he completed a poetry thesis titled Sex, Love, and Black Lives. Mack also has Doctorate in Philosophy with a focus in Rhetoric and Composition from Georgia State University in 2020. His specializations are poetry, rhetoric and composition, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and he currently serves as a Lecturer of English at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, where he teaches various classes in composition, poetry writing, and literature.
I’d Rather Be Destroyed, Zach Goldberg
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
Earnest and darkly funny, this collection rebuilds the self from its broken pieces. Playing with dynamic and experimental forms, Goldberg explores modern Jewish identity, familial and cultural inheritances, and managing mental health. Its historical and religious allusions navigate modern and personal conversations, reflecting how we embrace and reject the legacies that shape us.
Sharp and captivating, I’d Rather Be Destroyed’s honesty and artistry make it a must-read.
Zach Goldberg is a writer, educator, and arts administrator from Durham, NC. He is the author of XV (Nomadic Press, 2020) and the winner of the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. A former member of the 2018 and 2019 Berkeley Slam Teams, Zach is also a proud co-founder of BuckSlam MN. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including AGNI, Pleiades, and RHINO. He lives on occupied Dakota land in Minneapolis, MN.
No More Flowers, Stephanie Cawley
Publisher: Birds, LLC
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Stephanie Cawley’s No More Flowers, poetry serves as a resistance against suffering—their own, their loved ones’, humanity’s. A protest against meaninglessness. An antidote. The poems in No More Flowers believe in their ability to affect consequences with language, while being self-aware enough to know how absurd that belief is:
“That was just words. You could make them do anything, but also it was hard to make them do anything. Kite against blue clouds. Tree with green leaves. Street sign cut off on one edge so it says Cum Street. This was the machine into which I poured my sadness. The words were dead and they were alive.”
These poems are a pleasure. And they insist that pleasure—and desire—are not an indulgence. They are a necessity to life: “I do want my friend to find / a place to sleep for longer than a few weeks. / I do want to put flowers in the mouths / of everyone I love and call it art.” The title declares No More Flowers, but inside the book, flowers proliferate. A queer, wild garden riots into bloom.
Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions) and they are a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow. Stephanie’s poems and hybrid writing have been featured in Poetry Daily, the PEN Poetry Series, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and have been published in journals including Protean, TYPO, and West Branch. They work teaching writing and as a union representative for adjuncts.
Wrong Heaven Again, Ryan Eckes
Publisher: Birds, LLC
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Format: Paperback
Wrong Heaven Again, says the rabbit to the real estate. The poem won’t go away. You drive the car to work for an earth of its excrement. When the boss says “flexibility,” the grave keeps singing. The grave keeps singing, who built this city, that city? Who speaks for you when you speak? The latest apple ad says “let loose.” Okay. Light is a capital blown apart. No spoilers. You write your name down on the envelope and it disappears. We discuss thirst. We discuss our service to the revolving door. To the wound. We smile and pretend to compete with each other for a while. The sun cracks open the street, waves of old work now seething free of “the work.” And what are we, stepping out of this mouth, one dream after another.
Ryan Eckes is a poet from Philadelphia. He is the author of Wrong Heaven Again (Birds, LLC, 2024), General Motors (Split Lip Press, 2018), Valu-Plus (Furniture Press, 2014) and Old News (Furniture Press, 2011), as well as several chapbooks. His poems have appeared in Prolit, Protean Magazine, Tripwire, Wax Nine Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. With Kim Gek Lin Short, he runs Radiator Press.
Opening Ceremony, Laura Marie Marciano
Publisher: Metatron Press
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
Opening Ceremony is the second collection of poetry from author Laura Marie Marciano. The book follows the speaker of her first book, Mall Brat, from the 2008 recession to the current hellscape of downward mobility for many aging millennials. Finding absurdity in the Fourth of July, backyard pools, surveillance mirrors, and Sol De Janeiro, the poems navigate the pain and promise of letting go of expectations as one seeks motherhood. Wet landscapes, missed fertile windows, Botox routines, quiet quitting rituals, political centrists, and text message banter are navigated by the author’s perfect balance of tenderness, pastiche, camp, and wit. Ultimately, the poems in this book reveal the glimmer that still exists in leaning from a collective state of drowning, into the birth of a child, breaking open our hearts to a soft landing and a queer future.
Laura Marie Marciano is an author, educator, and media artist. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media Arts, and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Rhode Island. Laura’s first book of poetry, Mall Brat, was released in 2016, from Civil Coping Mechanism Press.
Deep Dive, Karen Carter
Publisher: Querencia Press
Publication Date: September 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
Karen Carter’s Deep Dive reveals healing and hope. A memoir in poetry, these poems travel from the safe space of therapy in Oklahoma, where the poet plunges into an ocean of grief and hits rock bottom. She develops courage during decades of adulthood, exploring a path through redemptive suffering. In the sanctuary of her front porch in rural North Carolina and in the remote everydayness of a schoolteacher during COVID, she sits with sorrow. She takes a deep dive into the ordinary, natural world and experiences the inner and outer world joined together without shame. Finally, at the Outer Banks, North Carolina, the victim tosses the loss and the pain of violence done to her body and mind into the sea. Finding spiritual power to rise from trauma’s depth, the poet cherishes new life in the present and hope in all eternity.
Karen Carter is a poet, writer, and educator. With a B.A., M.Div. and PhD, she has taught at all levels of learning and presently teaches high school English and Creative Writing. Many poems in her debut collection, Deep Dive, have appeared previously in anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/17 and 9/23 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/3 from Press 53, Variant Lit, Orison Books, Red Hen Press, Signal Editions, Knopf, New Directions, Wesleyan University Press, Bloodaxe Books, Blair, Third Man Books, BOA Editions Ltd., Copper Canyon Press and University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chapbook Poem: Frank’s Shoebox by Daniel Damiano
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2024, “Frank’s Shoebox” from The Concrete Jungle and the Surrounding Areas by Daniel Damiano, along with a few words from the poet.
Poetry Chapbooks (August 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in August 2024 by Small Harbor Publishing, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/10 from Lost Horse Press, Curbstone Books 2, Finishing Line Press, Brick Books, Alice James Books, University of Georgia Press, Four Way Books, University of Pittsburgh Press, Hub City Press, Autumn House Press, New Directions, Grayson Books and Wave Books.
Check out new poetry books being published the week of 9/17 from Red Hen Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, The Kent State University Press, Tin House Books, Wesleyan University Press, W. W. Norton & Company, Ecco, ECW Press, American Poetry Review, Querencia Press, White Pine Press, City Lights Publishers, BOA Editions, Holy Cow! Press, 42 Miles Press, Driftwood Press, Finishing Line Press, Button Poetry, Birds LLC and Metatron Press.
Sept/Oct ‘24: ModPo, Renewal, and Expansion
Read a message from Aiden Hunt about Issue 5 content, the future of Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and the open online poetry course that inspired the creation of this journal.