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.
Kitchen Hymns, Pádraig Ó Tuama
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Kitchen Hymns opens with a question: “Do You Believe in God?” — but the bee, “gone extinct,” cannot answer, and the grass calls believe “a poor verb.” This collection trades belief for language, and philosophy is grounded in form and narrative. Kitchen Hymns is structured like a ghost mass, where even if God is a “favorite emptiness,” longing still has things to say: Jesus and Persephone meet at Hell’s exit and discuss survival; someone believes more in birds than belief; hares carry messages from the overworld to the underworld. A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns speaks to a shifting “you”: an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Large themes are informed by and contained in a poetics of observation, humor, trauma, dialogics, lament, rage and praise. Delivered in finely honed melodies, shaped with force and conviction, Kitchen Hymns “reckon[s] with the empty,” and becomes “busy with a body / not a question.”
Pádraig Ó Tuama (b. 1975) is from Ireland. The host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound podcast, and editor of the anthologies of the same name, he splits his time between Belfast and New York City. His writing includes both poetry and prose, and his work been featured on national radio stations in Ireland, Britain, the US, Australia and New Zealand. Profiled by The New Yorker, his poetry has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry Ireland, the Kenyon Review, and The Harvard Review. Kitchen Hymns is his fourth collection of poems.
Foxglovewise, Ange Mlinko
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Foxglovewise is, at its core, a response to the singular experience of the loss of one’s parents. It begins at an Eastern Orthodox Epiphany ritual in Florida and ends in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Yet, as with Ange Mlinko’s other books of poetry, the collection uses geography as a trope for the ways in which we try to map out our lives and make them legible, even as poetry, music, and paintings suggest that much of what happens, or matters, to us is “not on the maps” (not to mention “the apps”). Whether it’s Europa borne over the waves, or gravestones bearing aliases rather than birth names, or books bequeathed to us by relatives in languages we can’t read, we live “up in the air” or “on the wing” and not in fixed coordinates.
Mlinko’s poetry is suffused with wit, erudition, beauty, and boundless energy. As Declan Ryan wrote of her work in The Times Literary Supplement, “A reader could be merely dazzled by all this surface stylishness . . . but then they would miss the heart beneath it all.” Foxglovewise is a direct line to the author’s heart.
Ange Mlinko is the author of several books of poetry, including Distant Mandate, Marvelous Things Overheard, and Venice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, and she has served as poetry editor for The Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Nation, London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and Parnassus. Educated at St. John’s College and Brown University, she has lived in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently a professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she lives.
Prettier Grit, John Godfrey
Publisher: Station Hill Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2025
Format: Paperback
Prettier Grit by John Godfrey is a daring exploration of the contrasts and textures of modern life, weaving through the streets of personal and societal landscapes. This collection reflects Godfrey’ s keen eye for detail and his profound grasp on the rhythm of urban existence, merging the ordinary with the extraordinary. From the reflective solitude of “ Drunk on Horizon” to the poignant urgency of “ A Million Sandals for Myanmar,” Godfrey’ s verse traverses a broad emotional and thematic spectrum. “ Scofflaw SCOTUS” delivers sharp, unyielding commentary on contemporary politics, while “ Juicy Fruit” captures the gritty, raw undercurrents of city life. Each poem in the collection is a tapestry of nuanced observations, philosophical musings, and stark realism, marked by Godfrey’ s signature lyrical prowess and intricate imagery. Prettier Grit invites readers into a world where the visceral and the sublime coexist, challenging them to perceive the beauty in the harshness and the truths hidden in everyday facades— a testament to Godfrey’ s ability to speak profoundly to the human condition through the lens of poetry. Ideal for those who find poetry in the pavement cracks and in the whispers between city lights, this collection is a compelling journey through the vivid landscapes crafted by a masterful poet.
John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014 (Wave Books, May 2016). He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.
Don’t Do It, We Love You, My Heart, Jonathan Fink
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
In Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart, Jonathan Fink interweaves a welcome range of poetic styles including expansive, narrative poems, shorter, lyrical poems, and intricate one-sentence poems that are sustained over multiple pages to deliver his most intimate collection to date. Charting changing national and personal landscapes, Fink’s writing explores such diverse subjects as growing up in West Texas at the conclusion of the Cold War; ekphrastic poems about the paintings of Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft; the intuitive language he shares with his infant daughter on a quiet evening before she falls asleep; and the famous story of a suicide prevented on the George Washington Bridge—the jumper stayed by the man who tells him, “Don’t do it–we love you, my heart.” The imperative, urgent compassion conveyed in the stranger’s command thrums through all the poems in this collection, compelling the reader outward to deeper connections and lived empathy.
Jonathan Fink‘s Don’t Do It–We Love You, My Heart, his third full-length book of poetry, is his most intimate and expansive collection to date. His lyrical, personal, immersive, and historical writing has led him to projects around the globe. His most recent project centered on Gram Parsons’s life and death for Joshua Tree National Park. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the state of Florida, among many others, and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications from Poetry and The New York Times Magazine to The Journal of the American Medical Association and Slate. Born in Lubbock, TX, Fink currently lives in Pensacola with his wife and daughters and teaches at University of West Florida.
Phases, Tramaine Suubi
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Both intimate and intricately structured Tramaine Suubi’s remarkable work is inspired by the moon—its phases’ effects on water, the Earth, and our bodies. Phases relishes in the beauty of change, even that caused by heartbreak. Suubi’s refreshing, vulnerable verse begs to be underlined, memorized, and shared; each of her poems operate as love letters to the cyclical healing that occurs in nature, in our bodies, and in the bodies that have come before us.
Tramaine Suubi is a quadrilingual multi-hyphenate Bantu writer hailing from Kampala. They are a graduate of Wheaton College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yellow Arrow Writer-in-Residence, and the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Suubi is the editor of Writivism magazine, and their poems have appeared in Brink Literary Magazine and Solstice Literary Magazine, among other publications.
The Flesh of Ice, Garry Gottfriedson
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: January 31, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Secwé pemc term le estcwicwe´ y? (the missing) was given by Secwé pemc elders who dedicated their knowledge and time to guide the community through the hell they were forced to endure in May 2021. Garry Gottfriedson’s The Flesh of Ice picks up the thread of his 2021 collection, Bent Back Tongue, describing the history and relationship of Indigenous people in Canada with the Canadian government and the Catholic church. Here is the story of those who survived Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS), and stories of descendants of KIRS who remembered “the missing” in the wake of the discovery of unmarked graves at the KIRS. Here, in hauntingly visceral poems, are the living conditions, policies and practices of the school itself, the stories of those who lived there, and the names of practitioners of the school, called out and cursed. Lastly, personal stories are given space to reclaim the narrative, taking readers on a journey of resilience, survival, pain and joy.
Garry Gottfriedson is from Kamloops, BC, an is strongly rooted in his Secwé pemc (Shuswap) cultural teachings. Gottfriedson has thirteen published books, including Skin Like Mine, Clinging to Bone, and, most recently, Bent Back Tongue, and has presented his work across Canada, United States, South America, New Zealand, Europe, and Asia. His work has been anthologized and published nationally and internationally. Gottfriedson’ s work unapologetically unveils the truth of Canada’ s treatment of First Nations.
Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, Amber McCrary
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In a voice that is jubilant, irreverent, sometimes scouring, sometimes heartfelt, and always unmistakably her own, Amber McCrary remaps the deserts of Arizona through the blue corn story of a young Diné woman figuring out love and life with an O’odham man. Reflecting experiences of Indigenous joy, pain, and family, these shapeshifting poems celebrate the love between two Native partners, a love that flourishes alongside the traumas they face in the present and the past. From her ethereal connection with her saguaro muse, Hosh, to the intricate tapestry of her relationships with Diné relatives and her awakening to the complex world of toxic masculinity, McCrary brings together DIY zine aesthetics, life forms of juniper and mountains, and the beauty of Diné Bizaad to tell of the enduring bonds between people and place.
Journeying from the Colorado Plateau to the Sonoran Desert and back again, Blue Corn Tongue invokes the places, plants, and people of Diné Bikéyah and O’odham jeweḍ in a deeply honest exploration of love, memory, and intimacy confronting the legacy of land violence in these desert homelands.
Amber McCrary is a Diné poet and zinester. She is Red House Clan born for Mexican people. She received her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Mills College. This is her first book. www.ambermccrary.com
The Late Season, Patti Sinclair
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Late Season dives into how death re-stories our lives. It surges with the extraordinary tide of bereavement alongside the daily, ordinary rhythms of life, exploring how the natural world echoes our human experience, as we move through the season of death’s initiation. With words and story that honour and vividly reflect how we may retrieve ourselves, and with tender heart, the late season, encourages us to … be as graceful as you can be, and that is good enough; how like the mirror of the sea, it can bring us back to ourselves, wave after wave.
The Late Season leads the reader down to to tidal river of what remains, in the stirrings of death, as it stuns, carries, and sings.
Patti Sinclair gratefully creates on the land of the People of the Papaschase First Nation (Edmonton, AB). Author of one memoir and five poetry chapbooks, most recently, The Rightful Skin, with Rose Garden Press, a featured poem, ‘The Brine’, forthcoming with Capital City Press and poetry in We’Moon: The Growing Edge, patti’s poetry attempts to ground fierce and beautiful impulses found in private moments and collective rituals. She relishes sharing her works out-loud, having performed in poetry, music, and art festivals.
M. C. Joudrey, Canadian writer, artist, and designer. His collection of short stories, Charleswood Road: Stories, received a Manitoba Book Awards nomination for Most Promising Writer. He has been a member of the selection committee for the CBC Short Fiction Prize and a jury member for the Manitoba Book Awards. He is also a bookbinder with works held in various galleries internationally.
Travel Poems: Portugal, Karen Clavelle
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2025
Format: Paperback
An intimate collection of playful, travel poems set in Vila Nova da Baronia, in the Portuguese Alantejo. In translation, especially, the songs / canções sing their way into a rich musical and lyrical love song to place and meu querido – poems truly from the heart.
Karen Clavelle, poet, writer, playwright, educator. Her work has been published in Border Crossings, CVII, Prairie Fire, and the At Bay Press Fiction Annual, Secrets and Lies (2017). Long interested in small (chapbook) presses, Karen is the founder of atelier78 press and a founding member of the enigmatic and somnambulant pachyderm press.
On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, Jennifer Nelson
Publisher: Fence Books
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
Faced with the asymmetrical warfare, incessant pandemics, and climate calamities of the 2020s, these poems offer no simple solace. With wit, they plumb the wrecked relations between academic knowledge practice and any sort of liberatory praxis. They reject the manic digital buffet proffered as antidote to the poet’s anger, guilt, and grief by late techno-capitalism’s cultural productions.
Gazing into and grappling with the act of seeing, these poems blaze a path through forests of data and life, the ensnarled techno-webs of information and plunder. Here, the poet allows us to see beyond what and whom first meets the self’s eye. Here one may press into the “loam of the forest floor, / the ongoing of those—unremembered / and those remembered wrong.”
Though it may be the case that “the world is dying,” this book’s hope is that we may, at least, persist in a form of radically productive negativity: “Let being and making/be the fullest/forms of grief.” Jennifer Nelson’s deep knowledge, care-for-the-world, and capacious attention infuse this collection and the reader with wavelengths of bracing and inclusive light.
Jennifer Nelson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Harm Eden (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). They are an associate professor of early modern art at the University of Delaware, and also the author of two art historical monographs, most recently Lucas Cranach: From German Myth to Reformation (Reaktion, 2024). They live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The Law of Truly Large Numbers, James Kimbrell
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
The Law of Truly Large Numbers is a book about coming to terms with loss and the arrival of unexpected, perhaps undeserved, love. Based on the statistical principle that in a truly large sample set, anything outrageous is likely to happen, this book explores the outrageous things that have already happened; the loss of siblings and parents, loss of home, friends and relatives, the weight of illness and physical aging, but also the discovery and re-discovery of friendship as well as romantic and familial connections. Often locating themselves where mourning and celebration, grief and humor intersect.
James Kimbrell’s poems have appeared in anthologies including the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has received the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, The Nation / Discovery Prize, a Whiting Award, the John and Renee Grisham Fellowship, the Florida Book Award, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine. Also, the recipient of an Florida Arts Council fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, his most recent collection is Smote . A native of Mississippi, he is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.
tether & lung, Kimberly Ann Priest
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Set in rural Michigan, tether & lung embraces a level of honest sensuality and vulnerability as a heterosexual woman grapples with the needs of her own body while her closeted homosexual husband seeks solace in the animals he loves—his horses—directing the othering he feels within himself towards his wife and children. These poems probe the nature of relationships where emotional extremes are often held in tension and betrayals are not easily healed or resolved. Here, compassion and contempt face one another, asking difficult questions concerning gender, alienation, child-rearing, domestic violence, and divorce.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells and the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications), finalist for the 2021 American Best Book Awards. Her chapbooks include The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press) and still life (PANK) and her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Birmingham Poetry Review as well as the second edition of Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic. She is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University and a volunteer teaching artist for young writers at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine.
To Pay for Our Next Breath, Alfonso Zapata
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
In tackling music, art, television, family, and environmental & health crises, To Pay for Our Next Breath confronts the human need to make sense of love and disaster by processing them through the work of others, with art helping push people through difficult times. Through analyzing the place of art in our lives, Alfonso Zapata examines the give-and-take nature of creation, empowering the artist, while simultaneously uplifting the reader/viewer/listener in giving art meaning beyond the mortal boundaries of the artist.
Alfonso Zapata is a poet living in Lexington, Kentucky. He received his MFA in poetry at The University of Kentucky, and has attended The University of Toledo and The University of Southern Mississippi, where he obtained his master’s degree in poetry. He is the recipient of the Jim Lawless IV Poetry Prize, and the 2022 & 2023 University of Kentucky MFA Poetry Awards. His work has appeared in Sho Poetry Journal, and he is the author of the chapbook, Together Now (Belle Point Press, 2024). He can be found editing and re-editing supposedly finished poems in various coffee shops in the area.
Ghostlit, Theodora Ziolkowski
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Intimate, urgent, and relentlessly inventive, the poems in Ghostlit reflect upon mythology and feminist pop culture and contemporary ideology as they may become embedded in the psyches and even the bodies of their inheritors. Through visceral and sometimes gothic-inspired images, mythological allusions, and the assemblage of strands of narrative, the poems in this collection chart the ways in which manipulative emotional strategies on individual and cultural levels inflict lingering harm upon minds and bodies. Throughout, the poems peel back the layers of what it means for an abuse survivor to reclaim a sense of self—long after the damage has been done. “It turns out that the years I believed myself lucky/were partly responsible for my thinking/there was something deeply wrong with me” could be understood as a refrain for the speaker in Ghostlit or as a shorthand for a cautionary tale about how many survivors may be encouraged to deny the reality of abuse.
Theodora Ziolkowski is the author of the novella, On the Rocks, winner of a Next Generation Indie Book Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Prairie Schooner, no tokens, Oxford Poetry (UK), and Short Fiction (England), among others. She teaches creative writing as an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
6 Lineage Poems, Fernando Trujillo
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
6 Lineage Poems is a debut poetry collection rooted in the body and the world. Half the collection is lush and evocative, lingering in both sensuality and sentimentality. The other half sits in stillness and calm. There are poems that embody old lovers while looking forward to new ones, and there are poems that sit back to observe a lake, garden, or the sky. All in all, this collection is a little offering for the altar of poetic lineage, and it calls on poets from Li Bai to Megan Fernandes. “Make of me a song,” Trujillo states and implores. And make of himself a song, he does.
Fernando Trujillo is a native of El Paso, TX. His work has appeared with Passages North, The Cortland Review, Michigan Quarterly Review (Goldstein Prize in Poetry), and elsewhere.
River Hymnal, Cody Smith
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
River Hymnal offers rivers as connective tissue binding Louisiana, Washington, and Florida together. Poems are set in all these locales, and their landscapes shape and contain different permeations of the poet’s life and sensibilities. The book’s themes of discovery and loss, progress and regress, future and past, are all rivers that the poems alchemize into a confluence of water that currents the poet continually around the next bend in his life and memory.
Cody Smith is the author of Gulf: Poems (Texas Review Press) and Delta Summers (Yellow Flag Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in central Florida with his wife and two children.
Lanterns in the Night Market, Mary Morris
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Weaving diverse cultures, vast landscapes, and ecological concerns, crossing beauty with danger, these poems are an invitation to the realm of possibility and enchantment. A flamenco dancer seduces his audience in Spain, and lovers travel through Istanbul. Writers live in exile while a menu for a dictator endangers the earth. The full moon shines over the Serengeti as nocturnal animals gather. Glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro melt too quickly. A poet writes from his house near the beached skeleton of a whale. Lanterns in the Night Market is a love letter to the world.
Mary Morris is the author of three previous books of poetry: Enter Water, Swimmer (runner-up for The X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize), Dear October (Arizona-New Mexico Book Award), and Late Self-Portraits (Wheelbarrow Book Prize). Her work has been published in Boulevard, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. A recipient of the Rita Dove Award, Western Humanities Review Prize, and the National Federation Press Women’s Book Prize, Mary has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress, which aired on NPR. Kwame Dawes selected her work for American Life in Poetry from the Poetry Foundation.
Proprioception, C. Prudence Arceneaux
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Proprioception tastes of a feral urgency to time, to presence, a need. The poems move through ideas of race, of fear, of sexuality, of life already lived in low-level terror now amplified, of the weight of responsibility, of the burdens of age—trying to find a way to breathe every day in a now permanent upset of an already shaky imbalance, to find new position in spaces erupting with old hate, old jealousies, old greeds.
C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry—DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.
Civilians, Jehanne Dubrow
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: February 3, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The final volume in Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel. Set amid America’s seemingly endless conflicts, Dubrow’s poems confront pressing questions about the process of transitioning to a new reality as a noncombatant: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language changed? His geography? And what happens to a wife once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war?
Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections and three books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Exhibitions: Essays on Art & Atrocity. She is professor of creative writing at the University of North Texas.
One Little Room, Peter McDonald
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems in One Little Room enter and explore confined spaces in history and personal memory. The spaces prove not to be as small as they seem from the outside: they expand and interconnect to produce new and dazzling perspectives out of the limits of concentrated meditation and formal shape alike. Poems inhabit the surroundings of a Belfast childhood, pushing these into dimensions where time and space play tricks on memory and circumstance. Boxes, lost travelling trunks, and small volumes enclosed in the dark are transformed into bright gateways to freshly imagined realities. Public and private histories undergo radical reconstruction in the sequence ‘Centenary’, where a hundred years of Northern Ireland and the century since the birth of the poet’s father coincide to produce a different kind of history; a series of discursive poems addressed to different women mark, like standing stones, the book’s developing engagements with past, present and future. In this, his eighth collection, Peter McDonald effects transformations of memory and history, loss and love.
Peter McDonald was born in Belfast in 1962. His first book of poetry, Biting the Wax, was published in 1989, and since then seven volumes of his verse have appeared, including his Collected Poems (2012). He has written four books of literary criticism, including Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), and has edited Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems (2007) and most recently three volumes of the Longman Poems of W.B. Yeats. He is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish Poetry at Oxford University.
Looking for Cazabon, Lawrence Scott
Publisher: Papillote Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2025
Format: Paperback
Looking for Cazabon is the first poetry collection by the Trinidadian novelist Lawrence Scott and was inspired by the paintings of Michel Jean Cazabon, Trinidad’s most famous 19th-century painter, and the subject of Scott’s novel, Light Falling on Bamboo. The poems – written while Scott was working on the novel – celebrate love, friendships and the island’s natural beauty but it is a wonderment undercut by violence, both historical and contemporary.
Lawrence Scott is an award-winning Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. Three of his books have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in London.
Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April, Spring Ulmer
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Phantom Number listens for an absent voice. To survive and answer to her best friend and fellow poet April Freely’s death, Spring Ulmer rips meaning apart in her poems, then repairs it, only to rip it up again. Words bend, meaning shifts—abstraction a tool Ulmer wields to better get at the question at the heart of Phantom Number: How might a white friend write in protest of intimate Black death at a time when the push is to write Black joy as antidote to the commodification of Black trauma? Ulmer understands her position is suspect yet cannot shirk her love or rage. Ulmer asks the reader to do the work or else. Her abstracted poems vibrate, emotion emerging from a poem made rag. Ulmer’s abecedarium long form holds these fragments, inviting lines into an order of alliteration and words into an otherwise coherence, a belonging that has nothing to do with their origin. Phantom Number finds in abstraction a radical wail.
Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles, The Age of Virtual Reproduction, and Bestiality of the Involved. She lives in upstate New York with her son.
Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin
Publisher: Exile Editions
Publication Date: February 1, 2025
Format: Paperback
Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, by Lillian Allen (a dub poet, reggae musician, writer, and Juno Award winner), Gary Barwin (poet, writer, composer, multimedia artist, performer, and educator), and Gregory Betts (whose writing explores the boundaries between self, other, and alien – the radical other) is a collaborative collection that crackles in its exploration of land, language, and page space. Combining the intensity of Dub Poetry with the intricacies of experimental poetics, Muttertongue presents a sonorous soundscape echoing with the question of where (and why) is here (hear).
The book opens with a dialogue between the three authors, and concludes with an Afterword by Kaie Kellough. The release also coincides with a new music album by the three authors – and the book will be available to patrons as the show/performance concert tours Canada.
Lillian Allen is the City of Toronto’ s seventh poet laureate. She is a dub poet, reggae musician, writer, poet, and Juno Award winner. Lillian is also a creative writing professor at OCAD University (Toronto). A pre- and post-language innovator, she works at the intersection of dub, sound, and rebel poetics.
Gregory Betts is an experimental poet, editor, scholar, and professor from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He has published five books of poetry, including If Language (a constraint-based project of 56 perfect paragraph-length anagrams), and The Others Raisd in Me. He has also published a history of experimental writing in Canada titled Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations; and (with Exile Editions) the superb book on Canada’ s great Group of Seven Painter, Lawren Harris, titled Lawren Harris: Inside the Ward: His Poems and Paintings (carried perennially at the AGO).
Gary Barwin is the author of 26 books, including a Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy – which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and Bird Arsonist Award (with Tom Prime) – and his national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal for Humour, and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, while also a finalist for the Governor General’ s Award for Fiction, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
NADAÍSMO, Gonzalo Arango, Javier Arango (tr)
Publisher: Insert Press
Publication Date: January 28, 2025
Format: Paperback
NADAÍSMO: Gonzalo Arango presents the force, humor, prescience, and beauty of Arango’s prose and verse in their first English translations. His language bursts at the seams with energy and dynamism, with a revolutionary fervor that shows off the author’s belief in the radical potentiality of the written word. He also exhibits astonishing variety, both in form and tonal character: from the politically and philosophically charged pronouncements of the First Nadaist Manifesto, to the lyrical verse of “My Resurrection”; from the surreal morbidity of “Diary of a Nadaist,” to the elegant power of “Providence.” NADAÍSMO showcases a writer of radical originality, committed to dismantling the confines of received literary forms. His rebellion against the conservative social order of mid-century Colombia—against what he saw as a stagnant literary tradition in Latin America—had both a political and an aesthetic dimension.
Nicknamed “the Prophet” by his companions at school, Gonzalo Arango Arias was born in 1931 in Antioquia, Colombia. A writer, poet, and journalist, he led the Nadaist movement that flourished in Colombia from 1958 to 1964.
Javier Arango is a translator and graduate student in the Philosophy Ph.D. program at UCLA. He has a focus in philosophy of language and logic, and has published translations of fiction from Spanish and French by authors including Mario Bellatín and Michèle Audin.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/28 and 2/3 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Book Excerpt: Further Thought by Rae Armantrout
Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2025, “Further Thought” from Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, along with a few words from the poet.
Read five poems by poet A.L. Nielsen, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “When We Walked”.
Chapbook Poem: The Poem as an Act of Betrayal by Benjamin S. Grossberg
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2025, “The Poem as an Act of Betrayal” from As Are Right Fit by Benjamin S. Grossberg, along with a few words from the poet.
Jan. ‘25: Year One: What worked, what didn’t, and what to expect
Editor Aiden Hunt looks back at our first year and discusses changes to Philly Poetry Chapbook Review in 2025.
Three Poems by Shelli Rottschafer
Read three poems by poet Shelli Rottschafer, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2025 issue, along with a few words about the poem “Because We Remember.”
Dancing With the Dead: On Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance by Todd Dillard
“Todd Dillard successfully transgresses the unspoken cultural embargo on work that grapples with life during the COVID-19 pandemic in his new chapbook, Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance.”