Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings will be published at the end of each month, beginning with Issue 3 (May/June 2024). This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during June, 2024.
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.
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Bottlecap Press
When the Ocean Comes to Me, Alex Gurtis
When the Ocean Comes to Me is a collection dripping with the anxiety of the Anthropocene. Salt water rises along Florida’s coast as inhabitants watch a clock’s “hands chase each other/ along their predestined path.”
These poems meditate on how “education is a type of trauma” and ask how we can cope with the knowledge that our planet is changing before our eyes. Imagist studies of built environments come unraveled as late-stage capitalism erodes cities and natural landscapes alike.
Confrontation, Camilla MacKay
This is a chapbook full of emotion–which is to say, it is a short journal overflowing with feelings. The common theme amongst this collection is their origin, which is me. My experiences have resulted in a biblical diary, which you will read after you (fingers crossed) purchase my book. Writing has served as a therapy for me to romantically regurgitate my lessons learned and anxious hypotheticals overthunk. Some of the poems are fiction, some are not, but the factuality of poetry is oftentimes the least interesting and inspiring aspect.
Ghost Ship, Robert J. Howe
Ghost Ship is a collection of poems about looking into the abyss and seeing a familiar face; loss and the private language we invent to remember. The work that comprises this chapbook was mined from the seam where the inner self touches the outer world, and so is a museum of contusions and lacerations collected over decades.
From birth we are preparing for departure from the world, but in the Anthropocene, the world is also departing from us. The signals are attenuated as we pull apart—news of each other is slow, fragmentary, and prone to misinterpretation.
New Orbits, Kaitlyn Anderson
These poems are inspired by a series of loving observations, encounters, and reflections. Movement, dance, and the outdoors are key threads that hold them together. I wanted to write a series of healing poems that would nourish me while writing them, as well as hopefully the reader. The poems encourage finding and sipping your creative juice, listening to your inner callings, and taking the gentler path.
Corazón Coalesced, Alexis Jaimes
Corazón Coalesced is the debut chapbook by Alexis Jaimes who weaves together the tender and the tumultuous, offering readers a journey through the struggles and beauty found in exploring love, identity, and heritage. With poems that dance between English and Spanish, the essence of growing up in an immigrant family is captured, painting a vivid portrait of a breaking family, an endeavor to recover one’s culture, and the relentless pursuit of healing.
Time in Shenandoah, A.R. Williams
Time in Shenandoah by A.R. Williams is a chapbook deeply embedded in the rich tapestry of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia (USA). Williams’ poetic voice is characterized by its imagery, introspection, and profound connection with the natural world, all conveyed with a delicate lyricism that captures the human experience and environmental consciousness. His work reflects a keen observance of nature, family, and the passage of time, themes explored with simplicity yet profound depth.
overworked anthologies, Jamie Anthony
This chapbook is a culmination of works written throughout youth and adulthood. It visits topics of trauma, of generational patterns (some broken, some not), of identity searching, of mental anguish, of the mundane, and of love – when prompted. Writing is an effective coping mechanism, and finally a healthy one. These poems have been written through each dark time, and have brought enthusiasm through each positive. In the endless quest for acceptance, it has been found within these poems.
Prisms, Eden Arielle Gordon
Traversing the sacred and profane, the ecological and prophetic, and the real and imagined, Prisms embarks on a journey from New York to California and back again. Written over the course of three years, these poems trace the evolution of both an individual and the collective amidst the seismic shifts of the 2020s while exploring the many deaths and rebirths we all must undergo as we move through time.
Triple Point, Heather Flescher
This book takes its name from the scientific term describing a substance which is simultaneously liquid, solid and gas. It collects an assortment of poems which cover an extensive range of subjects, yet all are connected.
The first section is a cycle of largely autobiographical pieces exploring the poet’s relationship with water, growing up by the ocean and finding tangible comfort and spiritual solace there. The second section explores issues of identity and performance, with parallels between the struggles of the poet’s personal transgender journey and the stresses and rewards of public creative endeavors. The final section expands the scope by weaving together common threads of puppetry, popular music, women’s history, drumming as therapy, and the possible end of the Universe. Collectively, these works form a progression that takes the reader on a journey both challenging and uplifting, vast and intimate.
Sing Me Appalachia, Sam Arthurs
Sing Me Appalachia is a heartfelt collection of poems that vividly captures the essence of the Appalachian experience. Through the eyes of an Eastern Kentuckian, each poem immerses the reader in the unique landscape and culture of this storied region, delving into the daily lives of its inhabitants. Verses reveal the hardships of those who toil in the coal mines, resonating with their struggles and resilience, as well as the beauty of the region, and how it feels to struggle with loss in a place where the earth reclaims everything.
How to Grow Blurry, Nathan Metz
Nathan Metz’s debut chapbook How to Grow Blurry incorporates ekphrasis, the lyrical essay structure, and various other established and invented forms to explore the distance between the name of a thing and the touch of a thing. The poems survey aspects of visual art (including paintings by Mark Rothko), touch, history, religion, memory, story-telling, and family, seeking intersections, divergences, and parallel lines. Thus, How to Grow Blurry turns memory into “nothing but touch / and repeated touch”, history into “layers of projections of past touches touching” and language into layered and scrapable paint.
In the shadows cast by whatever pain we’ve caused, john sweet
John Sweet comes from the post-punk school of contemporary poetry. He ignores trends, he ignores schools of thought, he remains true to his original intent – truth before beauty. His influences are periphery; they hover in the background and in the middle distance, and they are not writers. They are the Surrealist painters, the Dadaists, the Abstractionists. They are the musicians and bands who walked away from their careers after struggling in obscurity, and they are the ones who continue despite this struggle.
Eyes at the Edge of the Woods, Lois Perch Villemaire
The joys and wonders of nature are ever-present but sometimes it takes an catastrophic event like Covid to turn our attention to these marvels. Remaining indoors for what seemed like endless months, the author couldn’t help but notice the dramatic changes in the woods behind her house, especially that first spring of Covid. This collection of poems was for the most part inspired by this unprecedented period of time when windows became important connections to the world.
Viscera, Sadee Bee
A journey through digging out of the deep well of bad love steeped in shame. Wishing that person could understand the depths of what you are going through. See the pain you are constantly facing. Yet, you don’t feel they deserve to know. The person you loved has become a stranger to you, in ways you never anticipated, coming to terms with that is the one of the hardest things you will ever have to do.
Sea of Troubles and other Poems, Stuart Stromin
Sea of Troubles imagines what happens to Hamlet while he is off-stage during Act 4 of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.
The long, dramatic poem offers a rich, lyrical depiction of Prince Hamlet’s journey at sea, his betrayal by his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his harrowing capture by pirates, before setting the stage for his perilous return to Denmark to confront the king.
Excellent Eggs and Hot Dogs, Joe Knapp
Excellent Eggs and Hot Dogs is both a polemic on a civilized life, and an escapist’s cry of despair. Beginning in a dreary Midwest, the reader will follow an uncomfortable narrator as they attempt to find for themselves a more fulfilling existence. Exploring themes of industrialism, impermanence, aesthetic dissonance, and ultimately dereliction, this collection of poems amounts to little more than the whinings of a tired vagrant.
My Best Friend Named Nostalgia, Park Pehrson
My Best Friend Named Nostalgia is a collection of reflection, defining those conflicting emotions you could never comprehend until it was too late. A look back on childhood, attempting to piece back together where everything fell apart. Within these seven poems is a life story dissected to understand and to heal.
Although life can unfortunately never be that simple, it can be heard. The screams into the void do not have to go silent, but can find refuge in the words of another. To have lived is to have been known, for the worst parts of yourself, to the days a smile could not leave your face. You can feel both pain and love and still matter to what could be seen as a cold world. There is still sunshine to be felt. My Best Friend Named Nostalgia gives a place to see, feel, and read the complications and simplicities of this life.
cowboy, kaitlin venneman
in cowboy, neon signs in the desert are the harbingers of gloom, fingertips a silent hymn. here, certain facets of americana are absorbed and turned back out as a landscape of queerness. freddy krueger, travis bickle, and robyn dance into scenes of liminal desire and gory daydreams.
through exterior forms, the body is made invisible, yet another mark in the pavement that goes unseen by all but the minute. despite its harrowing compulsions, cowboy is a love letter to the ominous spaces, eternal cravings, and desert oddities of the author’s birthplace of nevada—however warped that love may be.
Pilate Suite, Lance Le Grys
By turns satiric, elegiac, and willfully grandiloquent (or all at once), Pilate Suite engages the ambiguous figure of Pontius Pilate in a series of phantasmagoric visions loosely arranged as a suite of variations on a theme.
Widely divergent in tone and narrative detail, employing a wide range of verse forms, from a rambling free verse to strict rhyming quatrains, the poems observe the imperial official writing poetry, drinking and lusting at a jazz-age soiree, struggling to achieve philosophic serenity amidst what he considers his barbaric surroundings, interviewing a hanged man, and interrogated by the Greek god Silenus, who arrives intrigued by reports of an unruly god who claims his blood is wine.
A Phrase Which Becomes Us, Jon Lawrence
Jon Lawrence’s debut chapbook A Phrase Which Becomes Us, takes an honest and meditative look at the relationship between student and teacher. By providing a kaleidoscopic exploration of images surrounding educational systems and social strife, the poems in this collection aim to shed light on the deeply personal connection teachers create with their students.
Lawrence’s poems give voice to the current state of being a teacher: At times, an almost apocalyptic fight to teach students how to survive in a world where education has been at the focal point of controversy and debate, with a hopeful bend into what many teachers do on a daily basis: give a survival plan to students to make grades seem less like a grave.
I’m Getting Hungry (So Are You), Murphy Jaymes
I’m Getting Hungry (So Are You) begins as a bottomless yearning for connections with others and contemplates the role one has outside of relationships. This collection compares love, and the desire to be loved, as necessary, nourishing, and sticky as food. Love becomes making food, love becomes eating food, and love means one is the thing to be consumed.
A wonderful and terrifying thing to love and be loved, I’m Getting Hungry (So Are You) puts a twist on horror characters like zombies and vampires and makes them your human partner and at times the reader themselves. Separated into three parts, this chapbook encourages the reader to be a part of this frenetic relationship and reflect on the power we give others.
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Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 6/1 and 6/30 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/2 from Black Lawrence Press, LSU Press, Persea, Omnidawn, Bloodaxe Books and Central Avenue Publishing.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for June 2024 from Driftwood Press, Sheila-Na-Gig Inc., Diode Editions, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Finishing Line Press, Bottlecap Press and an Editor’s Pick from Tupelo Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/9 from Finishing Line Press, New Directions, Phoneme Media, University of Calgary Press and Curbstone Books.
July ‘24: A Fledgling Journal No More
We’ve completed our first volume, there’s a new featured chapbook poem, and we’re starting to look for a Poetry Editor to expand what we publish. Check out the editor’s note for July 2024.
Chapbook Poem: Whenua by Nicola Andrews
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for July 2024, “Whenua” from Māori Maid Difficult by Nicola Andrews, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/16 from Finishing Line Press, Soft Skull, Penguin Books, Regal House Publishing and University Of Minnesota Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/23 from Host Publications, W. W. Norton & Company, Carcanet Press Ltd., LSU Press, Finishing Line Press, The Song Cave and Wake Forest University Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/30 from Delete Press, Quale Press, Duke University Press, Seagull Books, Sarabande Books, Michigan State University Press and Alternating Current Press.
Southern Literary Tradition: On ‘Snake Lore’ by Jane Morton
In this essay, C.M. Crockford reviews “Snake Lore” by poet Jane Morton, a chapbook published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2024.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 8/6 from NYRB Poets, Belle Point Press, Finishing Line Press, Black Lawrence Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, Penguin Books, Bloodaxe Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Alice James Books, Mercer University Press and two Editor’s Picks from Coffee House Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Chapbook Poem: It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye by Amanda Rabaduex
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for August 2024, “It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye” from Resin in the Milky Way by Amanda Rabadeux, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for July 2024 from Seven Kitchens Press, Small Harbor Publishing, Belle Point Press, Orison Books, Variant Lit, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/13 from Querencia Press, Alice James Books, Finishing Line Press, University of New Mexico Press, Harbour Publishing, Knopf, Amistad, TriQuarterly and Red Hen Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/20 from Querencia Press, Finishing Line Press, McClelland & Stewart, Zephyr Press, Tin House Books, W. W. Norton & Company, Red Hen Press, Graywolf Press, Wesleyan University Press and an Editor’s Pick from Copper Canyon Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 8/27 from Carcanet Press Ltd., Beltway Editions, Finishing Line Press,, LSU Press, Milkweed Editions, Tupelo Press, Guernica Editions, University of Nebraska Press and Texas Review Press.
Resistance and Resignation in Will Russo’s Glass Manifesto
“Glass Manifesto is a meditative collection of poems that call to resist the powers that move the world at times, or resign and offer oneself up to them at others.” Review by PCR contributor, Drishya.
Meet our contributor, Drishya, a writer and artist based in Kolkata, India, publishing under a single name to protest India’s caste system. Read about his writing life and other work.