Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during December, 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.
Akashic Books
KUMI: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Kwame Dawes (Ed.), Chris Abani (Ed.)
The limited-edition box set is a project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks every year by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.
The nine poets included in this box set are: Nurain Oládèjì, Sarpong Osei Asamoah, Claudia Owusu, Nome Emeka Patrick, Qhali, Connor Cogill, Feranmi Ariyo, Dare Tunmise, and Adams Adeosun.
Kattywompus Press
A Car Named Emily, Van G Garrett
Just when we are famished for spiritual nourishment, here comes Van Garrett, flinging the door wide with his latest series of kwansabas, those perfect bite-size praise poems.
Another New Calligraphy
Muse, Kelsey L. Smoot
Muse finds Kelsey L. Smoot illustrating the zeitgeist of their current personal, social, and political orientation in poems decidedly southern and melancholic. These discordant freedom songs explore people, places, and events Smoot loves, reveres, and reviles. Conceived as the culmination of their “freshman year” writing season, Muse is the chaotic fraternal twin to the debut collection we was bois together—a timestamp of their work and life in increasingly challenging times.
Finishing Line Press
Beyond the Noisy Membrane, Mary Imo-Stike
The poems of Beyond the Noisy Membrane identify and celebrate the connections between what’s on the everyday roadways we travel and in the vast worlds that encompass us.
They embrace the complex simplicity of the natural world juxtaposed with our human desire for understanding our place in it. They strive to extract and reveal stories from the life-ground we walk on, from the sight of a single kernel of yellow corn or the full moon, expansive in a winter night sky.
Harbor Editions
As Are Right Fit, Benjamin Grossberg
Grossberg’s As Are Right Fit takes on the complex, messy work of trying to make sense of a parent’s life on the occasion of her passing. What moments were pivotal? How did her struggles, obsessions, and ambitions play out? And what legacy she has left for those who loved her? This collection opens with the poet’s mother dying of cancer, but ranges widely: to her sixteenth birthday as she holds out her hand to admire a new charm bracelet; to decades of motherhood and work; to late middle age, swirling ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka—and finally to her as a ghost, “dragging the gray lace of itself /across hardwood floors.” With wit, invention, and rich detail, these poems remind us that grieving is also a quest for understanding, and that it involves celebrating the joy, humor, and particularity that make each of us, in the hearts of those who love us, indelible.
When I Was Straight: A Tribute To Maureen Seaton, Dustin Brookshire (Ed.)
The world lost the light that is Maureen Seaton in August 2023. Maureen was the author of more than two dozen books of poetry and one memoir. Her many awards included the Iowa Poetry Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, and more. Maureen’s friend and fellow poet, Dustin Brookshire, brought 23 poets together to create an anthology to honor Maureen.
Querencia Press
Penultimate Again, Morgan Driscoll
Penultimate Again is an exploration in poetry of the themes of middle age and the task of finding meaning in an increasingly absurd existence. The poems chase a sense of substance in brief moments of love, family, interaction with nature, and frequently an undertone of humor that the author finds in spite of existential confusion. The title refers to living on the edge of what seems to be significant history but what for the author always ends up as just more moments that don’t make much sense. Ultimately the poems insist that it is the very mystery of confusion that hope can be found within.
i have wrestled with the way clouds weep, Judy Nahum
“When we cannot decide [whether] to face the mundane terrors of the world or to flee into the lonely woods altogether, may we turn to this chapbook, for herein Judy stares down both, fierce and gentle. Nahum is at the treeline: a mouthful of growing flowers, remembering love, and yearning to seed a heaving world.”
– Ken Yoshikawa, author of Monster Colored Glasses
Voices of the Sea, Patricia Feinman
Pat Feinman’s Voices of the Sea drew me into its half-lit world where thoughts and memories drift into dreams, a place where there is both a danger and a comfort in seeking refuge. With the deceptive simplicity of a tone poem, the art and words merge into a rhythmic tide of images of loss and longing, and that most encompassing of human traits, our search for meaning. Like the sea itself, the story is seductive, melancholy and ultimately, mesmerizing. —Hudson Talbott, author of A Walk in the Words
Bottlecap Press
Self-Centered, Mona Mehas
Self-Centered is poetry in the center of the page and it’s mostly about me. If it isn’t about me the writing speaks to things I care about. The majority of poetry books are either left justified or, less common, a combination of left and center. I had a discussion about this with a couple people and wondered how it would look with everything centered. When I put the chapbook together, I was surprised how much I love the look.
In Self-Centered I include poems in several different forms as well as free verse. Two of the poems are shaped like what I’m writing about. The forms include viator, rictameter, nonett, etheree, palindrome, and others. The first poem in the book, “My Face is a Force of Nature” is meant to resemble a face with the placement of words and lines for facial features. In “Atmospheric River” the poem winds in the center of the page the way a river might.
Rainbows & Unicorns, Jenny Morelli
Memories and yesterday’s ghosts are shifty little creatures that love to mess with the muse and memoirist, but black and white and all the grays betwixt are real when they’re conjured and channeled from mind through hand to paper, so within these pages lie the harsh and heartfelt truths I’ve recalled in my nether state writing, where all the magic and mayhem happens.
Rainbows & Unicorns is a poetic collection of memories with universal truths and traumas that I hope can help provide validation and healing to my readers through the power of words.
[Postcards from Nowhere], Antino Art
Written over the span of two years in twelve different cities all over the world, this odyssey of a project is a love letter to solo travelers. It includes word-pictures I’ve sketched on trains, awkward small-talk I’ve made with coffee shop strangers, single dad misadventures in airport terminals, attempts to say hello in other languages, deleted IG posts that were too long to be captions, tourist recommendations for points of interest off the map, and the occasional Kerouacian rant after too much solitary time on the road.
Alone, Nataliya Delvalle
Alone is a moving collection of poems that dives into the raw emotions surrounding isolation, self doubt and the struggle for finding independence. With themes of heartache, self-worth, and the heaviness of unspoken fears, each poem shows a journey through pain and growth. From the suffocating feeling of being discarded to the bittersweet longing for connection, the author captures the complexity of emotions that come with feeling lost, misunderstood, and alone.
sanguine, TaJuan Immanuel Skai
This chapbook serves to be another step towards that journey, as these poems set to reconcile with the past that bruised me, the scars I created and caused along the way, and the healing that I discovered through immersing myself into poetry. I can only pray that a reader can enter and leave these pages with newfound strength despite their struggles, a refined faith in their future, an uproar from their inner child, for that is what these poems have provided me.
heads held low, Corey D. Cook
The 24 haiku and senryu in Corey D. Cook’s latest chapbook, heads held low, will usher you through the changing seasons. Interwoven throughout this small collection are also poems about the declining health and loss of the author’s elderly family members and friends.
These three-lined poems are concise, impactful, and imbued with feeling. Perhaps one of Corey’s favorite poets, Donald Hall, is to thank for this as Hall was often quoted as saying that he viewed poetry as a “school for feeling.”
No Choice but Forward, Rae Greenwood
What do you do when you are encased in the throes of grief and depression? Do you sink further into the abyss’ cool grasp? Or do you embark on the painful journey that will lead to peace and light? Each step is agonizing and exhausting, but the light at the end of the tunnel glimmers in the distance.
Grief and depression are terrible yet very human events in one’s life. A loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or a job opportunity that slipped away could plunge even the most strong-willed soul into a depressive state. However, do we linger in a depressive state for eternity or take the first shaky step forward?
My Mother’s Armoire, Rina Shamilov
My Mother’s Armoire is a debut chapbook collection that delves into the connection between bodies and their multitudinous parts. Told from multiple perspectives—experimental, frantic, tender, and deeply emotion-driven—the collection crafts a biological landscape that bridges the physical and the immaterial.
In this work, the body is both beautiful and grotesque, focusing on the primordial and intimate: the connections between sinews, veins, and fluids. At its core, the body emerges as an inherited vessel, passed down from parent to child, serving as a central point of connection between the author and her mother.
Cold Is Cold Is Cold, Brian Baumgart
The poems in Brian Baumgart’s Cold Is Cold Is Cold take aim at the fraught relationship between the desire for connection and the insecurity that comes with a world on edge, often bridging the interior with the weight of the sociopolitical. At once anxious and hopeful, these poems ask questions of themselves as much as they provide answers.
While the poems are disparate in structure and approach, taking a look from many angles, they come together to create a conversation, one in which no voice is given more volume than the others. As with any good conversation, Cold Is Cold Is Cold arrives at its conclusion by exposing secrets and letting the ghosts that inhabit the poems haunt beyond the page.
The Fine Lines, Liv Iacono
Some bonds are broken. Others are torn apart. The Fine Lines tells the story of a slow rip.
This collection chronicles the detriments of being the apple of the wrong eye. It is an exploration of the tugging between preservation and destruction, the looming grief before the loss, the bending of girlhood, and the folding of man that manifests when you walk the fine lines between decorum and desire.
The 8 Ancient Geek Words for Love, c3 Crew
Plato’s entire body of work has survived 2,400 years. But did c3 Crew consult Plato when he was waking every three hours to feed his underweight newborn? Of course not—Crew was shipping two police detectives in his murder-of-the-week procedural. Aristotle laid the groundwork for modern science. But when c3’s dad was dying of a brain bleed, did he get Aristotelian? No. He invoked invisible hobbit spiders. Ancient Greek influence may be everywhere, but it’s Crew’s favorite idiot boxes that have been in the room where his most human endeavors happened.
The Terrible Man on the Plane and Other Poems About My Mother, E. Laura Golberg
The Terrible Man on the Plane paints a portrait of my mother, Dr. Bea Klempman. It starts with the story of how she came to study medicine in England during World War II, and her passage, by ship, in late 1943, back to South Africa. This is followed by poems about her marriage and her time in England after the War.
My family moved to America in 1967 and my mother, age 51, had to pass medical exams in order to practice. She did so and became the Director of the Albany, N.Y. VD Clinic. My mother, so conservative as she was in her attitude to sex, was totally nonjudgmental with her patients.
Two Shipwrecks Holding Hands at the Bottom of the Ocean, Timothy Froessel
You’ll see a lot of things when you can see nothing but the ocean. Below you, there will be the octopus who can’t quite master playing bass guitar. The fisherman obsessed with skipping rocks will pass by you as he ventures out to sea once again. The sound of some sailor begging to a cartoon god to let them become a goldfish will surround you. You’ll feel a million shipwrecks thirst for your buoyancy.
Two Shipwrecks Holding Hands at the Bottom of the Ocean takes you through literal and figurative sinkings. For every plummeting vessel, there’s a child losing innocence and learning nostalgia. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. These 22 nautically preposterous poems only want to wrap you in a wave’s blanket and give you a teddy bear to hold to your heart.
curve: bow: body: break:, Angèle Nyberg
curve: bow: body: break: unfolds as a single longform poem—meandering, obsessing, eroding, breathing. The language becomes waterlike, moving with its force, its resistance and release. This chapbook weaves together an autobiographical reflection that is always nearly arriving. Language fails, again and again, leaving behind a persistent “almostness” that becomes the center of the work.
Large things are very small here. The vastness of colonial violence, land and language loss, and grief, become subatomic, even erotic. Braided throughout are fragments of urban ceremony, queer intimacy, and the matrilineal line that holds together everything.
Ennui Sonnets, Michael Perret
Through an assortment of sonnet forms, these 21 poems give expression to the boredom, frustration, weariness, horniness, love and longing, critique and seeming catastrophe of a bohemian in spirit spending his days lost in a cubicle, disconnected from his city, overly connected to his phone, and dealing with coitus interruptus. It is an art reduced to scribbles on a yellow sticky note, composed to a formal meter of sighs and the taps on a desktop keyboard, an art of ennui, in a word, and the ramifications of whatever comes after late stage capitalism.
Shades of the Soul, Jasmine Dade
Amid the mind’s chaos also exists the inner mechanisms of the heart and because of their inherent duality, they give birth to a million and one emotions.
Shades of the Soul is a collection of poetry meant to highlight the vast spectrum of experiences that people with depression often struggle with. In a society where mental health is often overlooked or thought of as a burden, this chapbook explores highs and lows of struggling with an invisible illness.
Leather-Hard Clay, Klavier Bayon
Leather-Hard Clay is a collection of 14 poems employing varying lengths and styles reflecting the changing nature of interpersonal relationships and identity. For clay to be leather hard means for it to be in a state of enough rigidity to maintain its shape when handled, but malleable enough to be changed. It is a critical state for the clay to exist in, and it allows room for error. This state is reminiscent of young adulthood, in which those overcoming generational trauma are given the room to mold themselves into a new version, one simultaneously free from and endlessly informed by the past.
Domestic, Ashley C. Knowlton
Among other things, Domestic invites readers to envision immense redwoods, the knotted knuckles of coastal trees, and the ancient beards of lichen that sway from their branches. Domestic invites readers to witness the protruding sea stacks that ogle the beach. Domestic invites readers to share the joy in poems motivated by her young children and endure poetry that processes a child that never was.
Decussations, Faris Allahham
Decussations is comprised of poems that originate from random thoughts that cross the mind and also note deeper, broader patterns in humanity and in human mythologies. The title is in reference to the neuroanatomical term, “decussation,” a crossing of the body’s midline. These poems are reflective of different perspectives, containing humor, irony, and some seriousness.
Decussations is a work about interwoven human experience, spirituality, and the fine line between ignorance and understanding.
To Catch Flights, Catch Feelings, Elina Rindle
In To Catch Flights, Catch Feelings, we eat anticipation for breakfast, adventure for lunch, and goodbyes for dinner.
Between the shores once called home and the deserts of the mind, why does it feel so much like living, 40,000 feet in the air, trying to escape gravity? This collection explores the delicate balance between movement and stillness, the impermanence of place, and the fluidity of time.
Taurus Sun/Sag Moon/Leo Rising, Dre Bean
Personal experiences play an important role in shaping who we are. It reflects our core identity and emotional landscape. We are on a journey to discover and fulfill our life’s purpose, and to understand the roles that others contribute along the way.
Expressing ourselves, finding balance while engaging with others can be challenging. Outward expression, regulation, and interaction. The goal is to find catharsis while processing. It’s not always easy.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 12/1 and 12/31 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.”