We love poetry here at Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, whether it’s in chapbooks or full-length collections. We have a hunch that our readers do, too. Every Thursday, we’ll be publishing an update about what poetry titles we know are publishing in the following week.

Note: Information, including product descriptions, are provided by the publisher, unedited. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.

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Full-Length

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Light As Light, Simon J. Ortiz

Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: 12/12/23
Format: Hardcover/Paperback

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Poetry that travels far across space and memory from an iconic voice in Indigenous literature.

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

The poems in Light As Light travel far across both space and memory, landing everywhere from the New Mexico of the speaker’s childhood, to California, Tucson, and present-day Beijing, and many airports, highways, and way stations in between. The central concern uniting this collection is language itself: the weight and significance of English and Keres, as well as the nature and power of poetry as a way of life. No collection of Indigenous literature is complete without the work of Simon Ortiz, and this book is a powerful journey through the poet’s life—both a love letter to the future, and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.

Author Bio: Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller, and a retired Regents Professor of English and American Indian Studies at Arizona State University.

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Poems by Presidents: The First-Ever Anthology

Publisher: Dover Publications
Publication date: 12/13/23
Format: Trade Paperback

This first-ever anthology features poems by eleven presidents who, through good times and bad, turned to poetry to express themselves. This compelling collection brings presidents’ literary pursuits to light, unveiling their deepest thoughts and emotions. Highlights include George Washington’s teenage romantic yearnings, Thomas Jefferson’s death-bed adieu, John Quincy Adams’s sonnet memorializing his father, Abraham Lincoln’s mockery of the Confederacy, Woodrow Wilson’s humorous limericks, Warren G. Harding’s steamy love poems to his mistress, and Ronald Wilson Reagan’s existential reflections. Appendixes explore additional presidents who wrote poetry, misattributions, prose formatted as verse, and fondness for poetry. Poems by Presidents is a rewarding resource for poetry lovers and readers interested in presidential biographies and American history.

Author Bio: Anthology edited by Michael Croland

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Best New Poets 2023: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

Publisher: Samovar Press/Meridian
Publication Date: 12/13/23
Format: Trade Paperback

Entering its nineteenth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

Editor Bio: Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, Vulgar Remedies, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series, as well as the essay collection An Arrangement of Skin. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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