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 poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.

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

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Chapbooks

Māori Maid Difficult, Nicola Andrews

Chapbook Poem: Whenua by Nicola Andrews

Publisher: Tram Editions
Publication date: 1/15/2024
Format: Paperback

This collection twines together themes of takatāpui (queer) urban Pasifika identity, Indigenous sovereignty and language, familial obligations, and jester-like wit for the chronically online.

This poetic work will appeal to those with interests in Indigenous rights and languages, migration, and the ways we can push against expectations of gender and family roles.

Nicola Andrews (Māori, Pākehā) is a member of the Ngāti Paoa iwi currently living on Ramaytush Ohlone territory. Their writing practice has been supported by communities including the Kearny Street Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Rooted & Written, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation. In 2023, they were awarded the University of Washington Information School Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Alumni Impact Award, and won the AAALS Indigenous Writers Prize for Poetry. Their micro-chap Sentimental Value was published in the 2023 Ghost City Press Summer Series, and their work is forthcoming in several anthologies. In their spare time, they watch dinosaur documentaries with their cat.

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Full-length

Theophanies, Sarah Ghazal Ali

Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, these poems explore the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Navigating both scripture and culture, the poems in Theophanies work to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence. Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems struggle to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history Stitched through these poems is longing—for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine. Theophanies asks: is seeing really believing, and is believing belonging? The speaker seeks to understand her own, bewildering “I,” to use it with reverence, and to mythologize herself and all mothers to ensure their survival in a male-dominated world hard at work erasing them In the absence of matrilineal elders in her family, the speaker turns to the archetypal “mother of nations” for whom she is named, Sarah, and her sent-away “sister,” Hajar. What does it mean to have a woman’s body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Theophanies arises from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as Editors’ Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Djanikian Scholar, her poems and essays appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, the Rumpus, Haydens Ferry Review, Best New Poets 2022, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Palette Poetry, poetry editor for West Branch, and a ’22-23 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. Learn more at sarahgali.com.

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Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser

Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.

The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.

Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets, a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is an Anishinaabe writer, photographer, and scholar. Her poetry collections include Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance.

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The Pendulum Moves Off, Theodore Haddin

Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

From a boy’s first acquaintance with nature and the meaning of time to witnessing climate change and desolating wars, Theodore Haddin’s poems in The Pendulum Moves Off celebrate the lives of humans and Earth’s other animal inhabitants with longing, exuberance, and awakening. Time is in the clock as well as in nature, and our extraction of the natural world diminishes us as well. In truth, “tock and tick” are not forever, but the call of art and music and Haddin’s love of rivers in this beautiful and thought-provoking collection remind us of a better way of life we have yet to discover.

Theodore Haddin is a poet, editor, and emeritus professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Previous collections are By a Doorway, in the Garden and the chapbook The River and the Road. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Birmingham Poetry Review, Chariton Review, Valley Voices, POMPA, and Poetry South and in three anthologies. Reviews on American literature and poetry have been published in Valley Voices, The Anniston Star, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. A professionally trained violinist, Haddin has performed locally and supported music organizations including the Arianna String Quartet and individuals in Berlin and St. Louis. At UAB, he founded and directed The Humanities Forum, now named in his honor as The Theodore Haddin Forum for the Arts and Sciences.

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The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard

Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos-our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries.

Neil Shepard‘s eighth book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland); he edited the anthology Vermont Poets and Their Craft in 2019 (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day, as well as in many literary magazines, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. He edited the Green Mountains Review for many years and currently edits the online journal Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits time between Vermont and NYC where, until the pandemic, he taught poetry workshops at Poets House.

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I Say the Sky, Nadia Colburn

Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback

In poems at once profound and accessible, Nadia Colburn finds splendor and astonishment in a natural world—and a human world—that is deeply troubled yet still majestically beautiful. Both elegy and celebration, I Say the Sky addresses some of the most challenging aspects of human existence, from childhood trauma to environmental devastation, and discovers, in unexpected and clear-sighted ways, wisdom, wonder, and peace.

Colburn’s brilliant second book charts a journey to meet the self. From girlhood to parenthood, loss to discovery, in poems that sing, the book explores how meaning is made. Claiming the female voice from silence, the poems find their grounding in the body and achieve rootedness and hope.

I Say the Sky is a meditative and ultimately inspiring book that will be savored by seasoned readers as well as those new to poetry.

Nadia Colburn is the author of The High Shelf, and her poetry and prose have appeared in more than eighty publications, including the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Spirituality & Health, Lion’s Roar, and the Yale Review. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is the founder of Align Your Story Writing School, which brings traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children. Find her at nadiacolburn.com, where she offers meditations and free resources for writers.

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Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, Katerina Stiykova

Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in a new tide of European immigrants to the United States. These populations, which hailed primarily from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, were largely adrift in America’s cultural melting pot. Laden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home.

In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which “calls / the roaming mind / looking for land” with the shell of her homeland at her back. Through themes of domestic abuse, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, and the search for cultural identity, the poems in this collection transcend the borders of language and nation-states. As a Bulgarian immigrant, Stoykova weighs the differences between safety and captivity, exploring how one can feel sheltered yet still not feel at home.

Through a series of addresses to her new domestic partner, America, the speaker in this collection expresses gratitude while simultaneously interrogating the landscape that has come to “home” her. With every line of verse, Stoykova’s unique grasp on the turns of the English language brings a fresh perspective to immigrant identity and lays bare the terrifying and thrilling duality of living between two cultures.

Katerina Stoykova is an author, editor, teacher, and translator from Bulgaria. She immigrated to the United States in 1995, publishing several poetry books in English and Bulgarian since her arrival. Her book Second Skin was awarded a grant from the European Commission to be translated and published in English. In 2010 she launched an independent literary press, Accents Publishing.

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Love is Colder Than the Lake, Liliane Giraudon, Sarah Riggs, Lindsay Turner

Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Love is Colder than the Lake weaves together stories dreamed and experienced, fragments of autobiographical trauma, and scraps of political and sexual violence to create an alchemical and incantatory texture that is all Giraudon’s own. In its feminist attention and allusive stylistic registers, Love is Colder than The Lake claims a unique position among contemporary French literature. The heroes (or anti-heroes) in this collection include Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lorine Niedecker, Emma Goldman, Chantal Akerman, the Marquis de Sade, and the unnamed lake itself. Giraudon’s writing, editing, and visual work have been influential in France for decades, and English-speaking readers will thrill to this challenging, important voice.

Liliane Giraudon was born in Marseille in 1946. She continues to live and work in Marseille, and her writing is inseparable from the place, shaped by the vibrant community of poets and writers and artists Giraudon has herself shaped, as well as by the city’s gritty and diverse cosmopolitanism. Giraudon’s many books have, since 1982, been primarily published by France’s P.O.L. editions. Giraudon has also been instrumental as an editor for influential reviews such as Banana Split, Action Poétique, and If. She performs and collaborates widely, including with Nanni Balastrini, Henri Delui, Jean-Jacques Viton, and many others. Two of her books (Fur and Pallaksh, Pallaksh) were published in English by Sun & Moon Press in 1992 and 1994, respectively. She lives in Marseille, France. 

Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). She has twice received French Voices awards for her translations from the French, which include books of poetry and philosophy by Stéphane Bouquet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Duforumantelle, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Sarah Riggs is a poet and multivalent artist. Her most recent book The Nerve Epistle appeared in 2021. Translation is one of her arts, for which she received a Griffin prize with Etel Adnan, and Best Translated Book Award, also for Adnan’s Time (Nightboat, 2019). Riggs lives in Brooklyn, after many years in Paris. Author residence: Marseille, France

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Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like River Water, Irma Pineda, Wendy Call

Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater / Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La Nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos is a trilingual collection by one of the most prominent Indigenous poets in Latin America: Irma Pineda. The book consists of 36 persona poems that tell a story of separation and displacement in two fictionalized voices: a person who has migrated, without papers, to the United States for work, and that person’s partner who waits at home, in the poet’s hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca.

According to Periódico de Poesía, a journal based at UNAM (Mexico’s national university), when it was published in 2007, this book established Pineda “one of the strongest poets working in Zapotec, the [Mexican] Native language with the largest literary production.”

Irma Pineda is a Binnizá poet, translator, educator, and Indigenous rights activist. She is the award-winning author of twelve books of bilingual (Spanish-Isthmus Zapotec) poetry. A faculty member at Mexico’s National Teachers’ University, she served as Vice-President of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues from 2020 through 2022. Her first English-language collection, In the Belly of Night and Other Poems, appeared in 2022. More than one hundred of her poems have appeared in U.S. literary journals—including Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, and Two Lines—in Wendy Call’s English translations. Together, Pineda and Call won the 2022 John Frederick Nims Prize for Translation, for trilingual poems published in Poetry. She lives in her hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico. 

 Wendy Call (she/ella) translated Irma Pineda’s In the Belly of Night and Other Poems (2022) and co-translated Mikeas Sánchez’s How to be Good Savage and Other Poems (2023). She is author of the award-winning book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (2011) and co-editor of two anthologies: Telling True Stories (2007) and Best Literary Translations (forthcoming from Deep Vellum, 2024). A 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and 2018-2019 Fulbright scholar in Colombia, she lives in Seattle and Oaxaca.

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A History of Half-Birds, Caroline Harper New

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Paperback

Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”

In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone “sucks the sea / into little demitasse” and hyacinths “sip the sun / black.” A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about New’s work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the ancient fish who “carved their shape” in a mountain’s peak, or a mother who wears a lifejacket in the bathtub.

Crafted by New’s voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love’s beastly impulses—all it protects, and all it destroys.

Caroline Harper New is the author of A History of Half-Birds, winner of the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. She is a poet and visual artist from the Gulf Coast with a background in anthropology, and she holds an MFA in Writing from the University of Michigan. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Palette Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, and Driftwood Press. She is winner of Palette Poetry’s 2023 Love & Eros Prize, the Malahat Review‘s 2023 Open Season Award, the Cincinnati Review‘s 2022 Robert and Adele Schiff Award, and Bellevue Literary Review‘s 2022 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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A Dream in Which I Am Playing With Bees, RK Fauth

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Publication date: 1/16/2024
Format: Hardcover

A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees is a collection of poems made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the aftermath of a fictional bee extinction, these poems are presented to the post-bee reader as “artifacts.” These are poems in hindsight.

Playing with Bees positions poetry in hindsight to contemplate poetry’s “natural” inclinations towards building alternative worlds through earthbound metaphors. Whether in a line or an entire premise, none of the poems could think, speak, or see in the same way if bees—and the relations they make possible—suddenly disappeared. Like any natural resource, the bee is a wellspring of possibility. Essential. Fragile. Causal. And like any animal, the pollinating bee has enabled a diverse phylum of phrases and myths that humans trade to express our most hard-to-name feelings.

What changes about our imaginations after a peg in the environment is removed? What could disappear from our minds, our fantasies, and our self-descriptors, if nature is no longer a mirror? Consider a museum of language. As artifacts, these poems are the residue of a dead species—but they are also the offshoots of a playful, abundant, delicate ecosystem. Playing with Bees covets what’s left. At the bottom of everything, we find the fragments an ecologically intact dream; an apocalypse in reverse.

RK Fauth earned a master’s degree in English from Georgetown University, where she also served as a LannanPoetry Fellow. Her writing has appeared in POETRY magazine, Poem-a-Day, West Trade Review, The Decadent Review, AGNI literary magazine, and elsewhere. Fauth has held fellowships and distinctions from the Fulbright Program, the Alpine Fellowship Foundation, the Lannan Foundation for Poetics and Social Practice, and the Academy of American Poets. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

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Bear Lexicon, Eric Fisher Stone

Publisher: Clare Songbirds Publishing House
Publication date: 1/19/2024
Format: Paperback

Eric Fisher Stone’s premier collection with Clare Songbirds.

Eric Fisher Stone is a poet and writing tutor from Fort Worth, Texas. He received his MFA in writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals. His other publications include two full length collections of poetry: The Providence of Grass from Chatter House Press, and Animal Joy, from WordTech Editions.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/16 and 1/22 here? Contact us to let us know!