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.
Good Dress, Brittany Rogers
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Brittany Rogers’s Good Dress documents the extravagant beauty and audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, community, class, luxury, materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming of age, this collection witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences. With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community. They also nudge tenderly toward curiosity: What does it mean to belong to a person, to a city? Can intimacy and romance be found outside the heteronormative confines of partnership? And in what ways can the pursuit of pleasure be an anchor that returns us to ourselves?
Brittany Rogers is a poet, educator, and lifelong Detroiter. She has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Four Way Review, Underbelly, Mississippi Review, Lambda Literary, and Oprah Daily. Brittany is a fellow of VONA, The Watering Hole, Poetry Incubator, and Pink Door Writing Retreat. She is editor-in-chief of Muzzle magazine and co-host of VS Podcast.
Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them.
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha’s poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.
apparitions: (nines), Nat Raha
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) in its “charred golden minidress,” ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of “niners,” a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.
Dr. Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work focuses on transfeminism, LGBTQ+ genders and sexualities, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonization, and critical theory, across poetry, print cultures, art, politics, liberation movements and hi(r)story. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems, Kimiko Hahn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Opening with forty-three new formally inventive poems and leading the reader back in time through selections from her ten previous volumes, The Ghost Forest offers a contemplative and haunting narrative of a writer’s artistic journey through craft and form while illuminating her personal history. Exploring the mysteries of science, nature, and the experiences of contemporary womanhood, Hahn both reinvents classic Japanese forms and experiments with traditional Western ones. Braided into the poems and narrative thread, a series of photos transforms the new-and-selected into a hybrid autobiography. This arresting collection derives new beauty from long-gone remnants.
A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Kimiko Hahn has published more than ten collections on subjects ranging from Asian American identity and zuihitsu to rarified fields of science. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and, most recently, the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She teaches in the MFA program for Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.
We Play Here, Dawn Watson
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles.
Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalized violence, poverty and neglect.
This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class girlhood that rings of Elena Ferrante’s studies of female friendships in the Neapolitan novels, Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims, and Annie Ernaux’s The Years. It is a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships, the kind of skewered space before an imposition of gender, or before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known. Innocence is tinged here with a kind of hidden menace.
Dawn Watson is a writer from Belfast. Her poetry pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher (2019) is published with The Emma Press. She currently teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, where she is completing her PhD. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has appeared in literary journals including Granta, The Manchester Review, The Moth, and The Stinging Fly. She was selected as one of the 2018 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series poets, is a former national tabloid sub editor of 15 years and lives in Belfast.
The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver
Publisher: Acre Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”
Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble. Her most recent chapbook is Night Ocean. Born in Buffalo and raised in Ohio, she now lives with her family in Massachusetts. Her website is carolynoliver.net.
Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, E. Hughes
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, a debut collection by E. Hughes, marries personal narrative with historical excavation to articulate the intricacies of Black familial love, life, and pain. Tracing the experiences of a southern Black family, their migration to the San Francisco Bay area, and the persistent anti-Blackness there (despite the state’s insistence that it is/was not involved in the US’ projects of imperialism or chattel slavery), Hughes illuminates the intersections of history, grief, and violence.
At the book’s heart is “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant,” a persona poem written from the perspective of the formerly enslaved abolitionist and financier Mary Ellen Pleasant who is thought to have helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Alongside this historical account, Hughes deftly weaves in the story of a contemporary Black family navigating the generational trauma resulting from the Great Migration: domestic violence and racialized violence, familial love and loyalty, the work of parenting, and the work of being a child. Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water reveals in its pages that, while many things have changed over time, ultimately the question of what “freedom” meant and looked like for Black people in the early 20th century retains the same murkiness and contradictions for Black people today.
E. Hughes’ poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Guernica, Poet Lore, Indiana Review, and Gulf Coast Magazine—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. In 2021, they received their MFA+MA from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University studying black aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism.
An Authentic Life, Jennifer Chang
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.
Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the “despite-ness” of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin “to unlearn everything.”
Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.
Yard Show, Janice N. Harrington
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, this collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity.
Harrington’s speaker is a chronicler of yesterdays, using the events of the past to center and advocate for a future that celebrates pleasure and self-fulfillment within Black communities.
Janice N. Harrington’s writing reflects her interest in cultural history, the natural world, visual arts, and African American life in the South and Midwest. Her latest book of poetry, Yard Show, grows out of her three earlier books of poems: Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, The Hands of Strangers, and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin. Harrington is also an award-winning children’s writer. She is a Cave Canem fellow and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
No Signal No Noise, A. Jamali Rad
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero.
A Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise, epic poem, and experimental novel. It is the first installment in The Self-Inscribing Machine series, a speculative history of the binary and its prototypes, that traces concepts of Self and Other as well as the mathematical, cultural, and philosophical foundations of the machines that drive the contradictions of capital.
A Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently living on the Traditional Territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and Lūnaapéewak Peoples. They have published two full-length books of poetry: for love and autonomy (Talonbooks, 2016) and still (Talonbooks, 2021). Their most recent work is the chapbook WHAT I WANT (Model Press, 2022). Jamali Rad also co-founded the journal About a Bicycle and the small poetry publisher House House Press.
DADDY, Jake Byrne
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
DADDY is a powerful look at patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire that seeks an unravelling of systems of control to reclaim vulnerability. At once confessional, playful, and sonically meticulous, Byrne’s poems seek conversation with a voice in the mind that won’t quiet. Cruel father figures dissolve into leather-clad muscle daddies on popper-scented dancefloors; the pain of the past sows the seeds of a joyful exploration of queer desire.
Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2‘s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.
The Hormone of Darkness: A Playlist, Tilsa Otta
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Tilsa Otta’s The Hormone of Darkness, we find a queer, Latinx person who has lived through iterations of authoritarian rule, and who answers these conditions by creating poetry that doubles down on a life force that precedes and exceeds received notions of the poetic. Here poetry is bawdy, fabulist, and spiritual—in short, it is alive. Otta has created a heaven where readers can go after they die.
Drawing from four volumes spanning Otta’s career, translator-poet Farid Matuk has curated a playlist we can dance and dream to, one that honors Otta’s drive toward liberation through both perreo in the club and transdimensional wandering among the stars.
Tilsa Otta has published five collections of poems and the queer novel Lxs niñxs de oro de la alquimia sexual. A multimedia artist, Otta works across video, illustration, and text. She lives in Mexico and Peru.
Farid Matuk has authored several books, and their translations have appeared in Kadar Koli, Bombay Gin, Translation Review, and Mandorla. They have received fellowships from the Headlands Center for the Arts and United States Artists. They live in Arizona.
Slashing Sounds: A Bilingual Edition, Jolanda Insana, Catherine Theis (tr.)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Jolanda Insana’s Slashing Sounds uses invectives, fragments, epigrams, and epigraphs to construct poems that pulse with the texture of an idiosyncratic Sicilian dialect. The poems in this collection are ferocious, irreverent, strange, snarky, and otherworldly. Insana’s commitment to contentiousness, her brutal and skeptical eye, and her preoccupation with language make Insana’s poetry particularly arresting. For Insana, there is no subject more worthy of our interest than language’s misfires and contradictory impulses—language being the ultimate arrow, forging a direction in the world and forcing a turn toward whatever reality appears in front of you.
The first book-length collection of Insana’s poetry published in English, Slashing Sounds is a powerful offering that addresses a lack of female Italian voices in Anglophone poetry publishing.
Jolanda Insana (b. 1937, Messina, Italy; d. 2016, Rome) is the author of several volumes of poetry, beginning with Sciarra amara in 1977. In addition to writing poetry and teaching classics to high school students, Insana was also a prolific translator of Greek and Latin, including works by Sappho, Euripides, and Martial. Insana won the Viareggio Prize for poetry for La Stortura in 2002 and the Premio Pascoli Prize in 2009.
Catherine Theis is the author of the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep and the play MEDEA, an adaptation of the Euripides story. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
Moving the Bones, Rick Barot
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.
For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.
By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.
Born in the Philippines, Rick Barot grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. His previous books are The Darker Fall, which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. His fourth book of poems The Galleons was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. It was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Barot has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Tacoma, Washington.
Salms, Aaron McCollough
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication Date: October 17, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough’s style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems’ sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration.
Aaron McCollough is copublisher of SplitLevel Texts, and is author of Rank (Iowa, 2015). He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Wherever We Float, That’s Home, Maya Tevet Dayan, Jane Medved (tr.)
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In the tradition of magical realism and with the age old appeal of a Quest, Wherever We Float, That’ s Home is infused with myth, fable and family legend. Maya Tevet Dayan’ s poems transport the reader to a world where past, present and future all want a seat at the table. The speaker is a wife and mother, but also a nomad and a wanderer, continually searching for her place in the world. Accompanying her on this journey are generations of women: grandmothers, daughters and her own mother, who died from cancer. They advise, admonish and applaud her. They hand down wisdom, then suggest that the speaker might want to wash the floor. In language that is deceptively simple, Tevet Dayan traverses the seen and the unseen with equal dexterity. She reminds us that the universe is perched precariously, there are unequal measures of light and dark, but that we ourselves can remain “ immaculate and wondering.”
Maya Tevet Dayan is the author of a novel (One Thousand Years To Wait – 2011) and three books of poetry: Let There Be Evening. Let There Be Chaos (2015), Wherever We Float, That’ s Home (2018) and Coping Mechanisms (2021). Tevet Dayan is the recipient of the Israeli Prime Minister award for literature for 2018 and an honorable mention the Kugel Poetry Prize for 2016. Her latest book, Feminism, as I Told it to My Daughters (2023) is a memoir in essays based on her columns published in Haaretz magazine. Her forthcoming book is a translation into Hebrew of the American poet Dorianne Laux. Jane Medved is the author of Wayfarers (winner of the Off The Grid Prize 2024) and Deep Calls To Deep (New Rivers Press 2017). She is the poetry editor of The Ilanot Review, and a visiting lecturer in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
Windows 85, Chris Campanioni
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
If this is a book about the body, it is about what happens when the body disappears—dispersed across a range of formats and mediated through multiple screens. If this is a book of poems about want, it is an ode to desire that necessarily exceeds the physical. Windows 85 explores self-commodification, networked intimacy, and epistolary affect within our tenuous media infrastructures in pursuit of a migratory ecopoetics, channeling both the generative frictions of today and an adolescence prior to our contemporary obligations wrought by always-on media.
Steeped in digital cultures and multimedia and multilingual teaching and learning as so much of the poet’s research and publications are, alongside his work with students—a corpus of Chris Campanioni’s artistic practice, pedagogy, and scholarship that has been christened by other writers as “post internet”—Windows 85 is less a collection than a cyberspace opera, admitting not autobiography but the traffic of immediacy and distance, attachment and dispersal, the serendipitous or systematized encounters that emerge between bodies, not all of which are human. Memory, proximity, and imminence entangle in these liminal exchanges as languages adjoin and subject(s)/positions commingle in polyphonic rhapsody.
Rather than understand what follows as a narrative in the conventional sense, readers are invited to enter into this book—a portal, a window—as an experience, and the experience as immersion. Continuous and discontinuous, a relation of our everyday that is not linear but synchronous, layered, looped, cut, copied, dragged… and recorded.
Chris Campanioni is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays. His work on regimes of surveillance, queer migration, and the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary work and a Mellon Foundation fellowship.
Data Mind, Joanna Fuhrman
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Joanna Fuhrman didn’t grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from “You Won’t Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now” to “We’ll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It,” the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six previous poetry collections, most recently To a New Era. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Slowdown podcast, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and a coeditor of Hanging Loose Press.
When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, Derek Mong
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
When the Earth Flies into the Sun weighs digitalization and ecological disasters against the joys of domesticity. Poems speak back to mass shooters and in the voice of cloud storage. They leap from Greek ruins to intergalactic finales, Nebraskan highways to Paleolithic Hominins first learning to speak. At the book’ s center are two long poems, “Midnight Arrhythmia” and “ A Poem for the Scoundrel Lucian Freud,” that ground these concerns— for art, the other, and the earth— in bodies. The former, addressed to the poet’ s son, is part lullaby and part letter. It tries, like a will, to quantify what we leave behind. The latter, addressed to a painter, considers Caesarian birth, ekphrasis, and the casualties of parenting, for both Freud and the poet himself.
Derek Mong is the author of two previous poetry collections from Saturnalia Books—Other Romes and The Identity Thief— and a chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist, from Two Sylvias Press. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely: the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Free Inquiry, & the New England Review. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, received the Cliff Becker Translation Award for The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxin Amelin (White Pine Press). Together they run the literary journal, At Length.
Resemblance, Jonathan Chou
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Through experiments in form and syntax, Resemblance/? builds structures of (un)recognizability and (il)legibility in its attempt to create spaces where new meanings, new uses of language, and new selves may emerge. In the process, Chou uncovers his family’ s relationship to traumatic moments in Taiwan’ s modern history, in particular the period of martial law known as the White Terror and the “ 228 Incident” of February 28, 1947, in which as many as 28,000 civilians were killed by soldiers of the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek. Throughout the collection, Chou draws on archival research and images, including a discovery of a misattributed image, to critique the role of photography and visual culture more broadly in both mediating access to and misrepresenting buried histories and generational trauma. Sweeping in scope and filled with fragments, beyonds, and restricted areas, Chou’ s debut collection longs less for facts than a renewed relationship to loss and longing itself.
Jonathan Chou is an Asian American poet, psychiatrist, and educator. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Pomes, which was selected as a semifinalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. His writing has appeared in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, The Healing Muse, and elsewhere. He teaches in the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine Program at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. He grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
War at Home, Chris Brunt
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
A child trapped in a house of pandemonium where all the phones are fish. Brothers playing war games against an enigmatic foe. The modern-day son of Odysseus hiding in a cloud of blunt smoke in the garage while predators lurk within and without. In his debut collection, Christopher Brunt deploys a restlessly inventive array of forms and voices, from the philosophical to the feverishly surreal, giving us artists who overdose on their own desire, prophets who sing the kingdom’ s collapse from strip club booths and from behind the bars of death row. These poems are allegories and fables of selves in crisis, and in the desperate throes of transformation. In flashes of lucid narrative or high-wire lyric inquiry, they seek to clarify the most urgent of personal truths out of the chaos and overflow of memory, out of secrecy and shame, out of wonder and mourning. More than an exploration of masculinity, power and authority, whiskey, guns, and dread, the addicts, religious criminals, soul-poisoned lovers, deviant saints, and lost brothers in this book forge their transformations via rhetorics of self-scrutiny— in the excavation of memory, they glimpse justice, are sometimes even visited by grace. Alcoholics wade shivering into the sure current of recovery. The dead witness the living in all their bewildering freedom and grief. Voices shed their bodies and wander the city at night, delivering sermons on being and time, asking inappropriate questions. New fathers watch their babies sleep or learn to walk, and hear the orphic languages of mothers, two, or seven, or a multitude issuing from the dimensions of eternity, pitying the whole world its cruelty. Profane, ecstatic, vulnerable, and fluent in as many literary registers as there are angles in a mirrored room, War at Home is autobiography written in myth.
Christopher Brunt’s poetry, fiction, and essays have been featured in Ploughshares, The Nation, Oxford American, Fugue, Meridian, Copper Nickel, the Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. He has been a finalist for the Alma Book Award, the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, and the St. Lawrence Book Award, and shortlisted for the Christopher Smart Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, he has an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Syracuse University.
In The Thaw of Day, Cynthia Good
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: October 18, 2024
Format: Paperback
Good’s poetry collection chronicles the speaker’s escape from an abusive marriage and coming to terms with trauma experienced over the course of a lifetime, and the journey to recover while finding deep meaning and joy in the smallest things earth offers: …the ocean, sky, dirt and air, and space // between my cells… Believing it’s essential to express what burns inside us, even at the risk of ridicule, the author grapples with big questions including impermanence and why we are here, how the wind off the Seine /crawls under your scarf. The black / and white photo from the museum, / an image of Basquiat between us / tells me Basquiat is dead, / and in this photo, all of us are memory. The collection is bursting with the natural world, filled with whales and wild mushrooms, taking the reader from Paris and Mexico to Los Angeles, Atlanta and the moon. The book looks at grief following the loss of the poet’s long marriage, the death of her mother, and her father to suicide, while always finding something to be thankful for, even if it’s, the way a leaf / still shudders after the wind.
Cynthia Good is an award-winning author, journalist and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Good’s poems have appeared in many acclaimed publications such as Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Penman Review, Awakenings, and Terminus Magazine.
Now We Drink Alone In The Dark, Matthew DeGroat
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: October 18, 2024
Format: Paperback
Set against the backdrop of humanity’s dwindling days, Now We Drink Alone In The Dark is a meditation on the existence of the plagued and the hopeful; on human resilience in the face of dizzying madness. DeGroat’s poetry reads as part travelogue and part journal; park black comedy and part avant-garde ramblings, touching on themes of love, loss, depression, american politics, life across the pond, pandemic one night stands, and laughing while crying. A collection to be revisited time and time again, this is the first book of many from DeGroat that will continue soothe the reader’s soul, as we collectively approach the precipice of time.
Matthew DeGroat is a writer and musician, currently based in New York City. His poetry is emotionally bittersweet, poignant and honest and when not writing or performing with his band, LUV DOT GOV, DeGroat can be found vagabonding around Europe, or seeking out his next favorite scotch whisky in a dark and quiet Manhattan pub.
The Lost Parables of Jesus, Carl Winderl
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: October 18, 2024
Format: Paperback
Christened in the Polish National Trinity Catholic Church and baptized in the Church of the Nazarene, Carl Winderl is the beneficiary of his grandmothers alternately ferrying him one Sunday to a Catholic mass and the next to a Protestant worship service. “The Lost Parables of Jesus” is a reflection of those combined influences over the years. He earned a Ph. D. in Creative Writing from New York University and an M.A. in American Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Chicago.
Formerly, Windrel was a Professor of Writing in the LIT/JRNLSM/WRIT/LANG Dept., at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Taking early retirement from PLNU in January, 2018, he embarked on a series of 2-year mission assignments in Zagreb, Croatia; Kyiv, Ukraine; and Przemysl & now Krakow, Poland, where he serves in a similar assignment.
American Crow, Jennifer Browne
Publisher: Beltway Editions
Publication Date: October 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In American Crow Jennifer Browne has crafted a formidable and fascinating sequence of work that deftly navigates land mines, lifelines, history, reverence, harm and mystery while excavating meaning from the blood and bones of a people.Browne has an observational acuity and way with language that makes me wantto return and return to her work. If I could only re-read one book this year, I would make it American Crow.- John Burroughs, 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate
Jennifer Browne is a creature of curiosities. She is the author of Whisper Song (tiny wren publishing, 2023) and The Salt of the Geologic World (Bottlecap Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in Steel Jackdaw, Gargoyle, One Sentence Poems, and Humana Obscura. She lives in Frostburg, Maryland, where she serves as director of the Frostburg State University Center for the Literary Arts
Don’t see a poetry title published between 10/15 and 10/21 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.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/24 from Finishing Line Press, Papillote Press, At Bay Press, University of Iowa Press, Nightwood Editions, Andrews McMeel Publishing, House of Anansi Press, Carcanet Press Ltd., Red Hen Press, Perugia Press, Caitlin Press, NYRB Poets, University of Chicago Press and Scribner.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/1 from Galileo Press, Cardboard House Press, Press 53, Yorkshire Publishing, Book*hug Press, Lucid House Publishing, University of Arkansas Press, Eris, Roof Books, Polygon, University of Chicago Press, BOA Editions, Wave Books, Coach House Books, Button Poetry, LSU Press, CavanKerry Press, Tupelo Press, The Backwaters Press, Fulcrum Publishing, Wesleyan University Press, Persea, Liverlight, New Directions and Nightboat Books.
Poetry Chapbooks (September 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in September 2024 by Small Harbor Publishing, Factory Hollow Press, Wesleyan University Press, GASHER Press, Querencia Press, Black Ocean, Flume Press, RADIX, Red Ogre Press, Bloodaxe Books, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/8 from Green Writers Press, Unbound Edition Press, Finishing Line Press, Etruscan Press, Talonbooks, University of Arizona Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Knopf, LSU Press, Princeton University Press, Alice James Books, Wave Books and Copper Canyon Press.