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.
Strange Beach, Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Publisher: Soft Skull
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of Strange Beach demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of queer Black masculinity. Oluwaseun’s speakers—usually, but not specified, as two men—move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, sex, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.
In announcing their acquisition of the UK edition, after a three-way auction, Strange Beach was described as “a wrangling of the various selves we hold and perform – across oceans and within relationships – through a highly patterned and textual lyrical play: it is a deeply moving and philosophical tapestry.”
Strange Beach often eschews meaning, preferring, in its deluge of images and emotions, to transmute messages straight to the mind to the reader. Oluwaseun’s poetic influences are clear: Claudia Rankine, Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Carl Phillips, Kevin Young, Hannah Sullivan, John Ashberry, and Ocean Vuong. Strange Beach is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola‘s poems have been published and anthologized in Oxford Poetry, TATE, bath magg, 14poems, Re:creation, Queerlings, and Granta with forthcoming publications in the Poetry Review and PN Review. Most recently, he was placed second in the Ledbury Poetry Competition. His criticism has been published in Telegraph, Magma, Poetry Birmingham, and the Poetry School. His choreographic work has been commissioned by Southwark Council and he is an associate artist at Swindon Dance. Oluwaseun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He lives in London.
Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors. These stunning poems paint a vivid picture of everyday life and Aldana’s experiences as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother.
The Pushcart Prize–winning poem “Black Person Head Bob” addresses how Black people silently yet soulfully acknowledge and see each other. “Why Don’t You Write About Joy?” speaks to the suffering that women of color endure while their cries and spirit remain resolute: because you cannot hear me / doesn’t mean I am not singing. “Small Dark and Moving” skillfully represents the poet’s journey and the souls she carries with her, evoking images of evolving landscapes and beings as they transition through different forms. The poet beautifully interweaves narratives regarding the constant presence and influence of her Caribbean parents and a desire for more connection with her Colombian grandmother and ancestry, capturing the essence of origins, blood ties, and the idea that nothing is ever truly lost. This collection is not only a testament to Aldana’s deep-rooted connection to her heritage, but also a compelling celebration and expression of pride, recognition, and a profound sense of community.
Yael Valencia Aldana, an Afro-Latinx/e poet and writer, is the author of Alien(s). Aldana, her mother, her mother’s mother, and so on are descendants of the Indigenous people of modern-day Colombia. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Torch Literary Arts, Chapter House Journal, and Slag Glass City, among others. She teaches creative writing in South Florida and lives near the ocean with her son and too many pets. Find her online at YaelAldana.com.
Carapace Dancer, Natalia Toledo, Clare Sullivan (Tr.)
Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Toledo returns to the landscape of her childhood where animals predict the future and grandmothers shape masa. Again, she questions Zapotec traditions even as she mourns their disappearance. But in these poems Toledo takes more risks: she exposes her pain and that of her people in images at once elegant and raw. Like the crab, she edges into the past, but the hard shell of experience or cynicism provides only temporary protection to the human vulnerability beneath it.
Natalia Toledo was born in Juchitán, Oaxaca. Her bilingual poetry (Zapotec-Spanish) has been included in numerous journals and anthologies, and translated into languages as varied as Nahuatl, Italian, and Punjabi. She has received support from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) and the Oaxaca State Fund for Culture and the Arts (FOESCA). Since 2019, she has served as Mexico’s Under Secretary of Cultural Diversity and Literacy.
Clare Sullivan, professor of Spanish at the University of Louisville, teaches language, poetry, and translation. She and her students work regularly on translation projects for the Louisville community. Recently she guest edited a special issue of Translation Review: “Translation as Community” Vol 1: Issue 1 (2023). Her collaborative translations of Natalia Toledo and Enriqueta Lunez have appeared in Phoneme Media and Ugly Duckling Presse.
The Choreic Period, Latif Askia Ba
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format:
Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. “This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.” Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.
These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader: “I am not here to accommodate you.”Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.
With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to “relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,” all to see and sing the vital “thing that we be.”
Latif Askia Ba is a poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy from Brooklyn, New York. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and was the Print Poetry Editor for the Columbia Journal’s sixty-first issue. He is the author The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon, and his work appears in Poetry Magazine and many other publications.
Flood Plain, Lisa Sewell
Publisher: Grid Books
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format: Paperback
The poems of Flood Plain might be put forward as a type of evidence, data or samples carefully collected for study. But they are also much more than this— they are the poet’s own testimonies, first-hand records revealing, page after page, her powers of observation and witness. “The flood plain is a field again,” Sewell writes in “Restorative Justice,” a reminder that natural disasters take many forms.“ “The flowers will last until the first snow / of winter as everything conspires / to bury us in what we couldn’ t see or imagine.” Indeed, poetry may be our flood plain: the site on which we absorb these truths, and the means to process the weight of it all.
Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out, Name Withheld, Impossible Object, and Birds of North America, an artist’ s book collaboration with Susan Hagen and Nathalie Anderson. She has edited several essay collections for Wesleyan University Press that focus on twenty-first century North American poetry and poetics, including North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, with Kazim Ali, and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, with Claudia Rankine.
O Lucky Day, Patricia Clark
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Publication Date: January 21, 2025
Format: Paperback / eBook
Patricia Clark’s latest poetry collection O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to include losses in the natural world. These sorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself “to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower.” She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, “something was broken, then healed, then / transformed.” She advises us to “loaf and ponder,” but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.
Patricia Clark is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Sunday Rising, The Canopy, and most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Slate, among others. Awards include a Creative Artist Grant in Michigan, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, and co-winner of the Lucille Medwick Prize from the Poetry Society of America. She also received the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia for The Canopy. Patricia was professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, where she was the university’s poet-in-residence. She was also poet laureate of the city of Grand Rapids from 2005-2007. Her poem “Astronomy ‘In Perfect Silence'” was chosen to go to the moon on the NASA/Space X launch in November 2024 as part of the Lunar Codex.
In the Hushed Thunder, Kenneth Hebson
Publisher: Green Place Books
Publication Date: January 18, 2025
Format: Paperback
In his book of poems, In the Hushed Thunder, Ken Hebson explores the Buddhist thought that “ a move in space would not/affect at all who we are.” In these poems, published by Green Place Books posthumously, Hebson takes us to a generous portion of the world where he captures his sense of place through close attention to detail. In spare and concrete language Hebson helps us feel places we are not likely to know firsthand. But Hebson’ s collection is not a travelogue. Interspersed among the place poems are beautiful pieces speaking to the human condition. Hebson draws poetry from his life on a farm in southern Spain and from moments in his daily life, and at its end.
Kenneth Hebson (1940-2022) graduated from the University of Michigan in 1966. He then traveled all over the world and had many amazing adventures. Spain was the country that captured his heart and remained his passion throughout his life. Ken and his wife Susan bought a farm there and raised pigs for years before returning to the U.S. to work for The Ford Motor Company. Ken worked for Ford in several countries for his 15 years in foreign service. From Spain to Venezuela, to Mexico to Japan, and Detroit in between. Settling in Brattleboro in 1991, he lived out the rest of his years there spending his time writing poetry and working on his memoir. A caring husband and father, a published poet, an avid writer, an engaging storyteller, and a lifelong Buddhist. Ken was a true Renaissance man. He was overjoyed to have this book come out and we honor his memory with it.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/21 and 1/27 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.”