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

Whether Drupe or Pome, Zachary Rockwell Ludington

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback

A game of duck-duck-goose, a hero’s launch into a blinding, brilliant future, a shift in sound that can’t be pinned as coming or as going. Vacillating between those and these, the poems in Whether Drupe or Pome thrill in indecision. They play with what Kay Ryan calls “recombinant rhyme,” circling back continually but refusing ever finally to land. Still, the poems in this series are not frozen by their semantic tensions: they urge joyful action. 

Whether Drupe or Pome is about taking chances. When the spotlight lands on us, these poems insist that “for the heart-bust hour, the big-boy feats, / you don’t get to set your own alarm.” But they’re also insistent on our inability to read the signs of any critical juncture, to know whether we’re picking the right fruit or whether it’s even the right time. Whether Drupe or Pome is interested in these “critical” moments in the most etymological sense; it remembers —obliquely— the judgement of Paris, the Garden of the Hesperides, ancient ciphers of an even more ancient yearning for the unpredictable opportunity to make a choice that leads to glory. So, it’s crisscrossed by the echoes of competing myths. And the definition and conditions of glory never quite get sorted out. In these poems, even simple things, like child’s play or a waving hand, diverge into multiple and often irreconcilable options, paths that cross and undo one another. Still, in Whether Drupe or Pome, whether or not we ever quite manage to classify what we’re looking for, we somehow end up “getting somewhere.”

Zachary Rockwell Ludington (he/él) is a scholar of Iberian avant-garde poetry, translator, and poet. He is currently working on a book on modernist pastoral in Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century. His creative work has appeared in PEN America, Numéro Cinq, Guesthouse, LEVELER, Ghost City Review, and other journals. His translation of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Pixel Flesh, published by Cardboard House Press, won a grant from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. Zach teaches Spanish at the University of Maine and lives with his wife and two little boys.

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Snowfire and Home, Alexander Etheridge

Publisher: Belle Point Press
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback

These poems share a surprising beauty akin to rust: fading yet persistent, with lingering flecks of color. In Snowfire and Home, Alexander Etheridge calls readers’ attention to what remains amidst a landscape fated for desolation even as it moves toward seasons of renewal. With a voice equal parts surreal and reflective, this chapbook is a fitting companion for “the morning hours of winter, before we’re called into dirt.”

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Scissors and Spackle, Ink Sac, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of God Said Fire.

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Full-length

The Unaccounted for Circles of Hell by Lynne Schmidt

Publisher: Stanchion Books
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback

In Dante’s Inferno, he easily descends into Hell and explores circles reserved for traitors & betrayers, liars & thieves.

Lynne Schmidt’s blistering new poetry chapbook wrestles with the terrifying notion that we are currently in Hell, that the things we suffer on a daily basis — Violence Against Women, Body Image, Death and Dying and Grief — are a part of some larger punishment.

Lynne Schmidt is the queer, neurodivergent grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. Their latest chapbook, The Unaccounted for Circles of Hell, will be published with Stanchion in January 2024, while their chapbook SexyTime was a winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Contest, and Dead Dog Poems was the 2020 New Women’s Voices Contest. In 2012 they started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers her pack of dogs and one cat to humans.

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Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems, A Graywolf Anthology, Graywolf Press

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Raised by Wolves is a unique and vibrant gathering of poems from Graywolf Press’s fifty years. The anthology is conceived as a community document: fifty Graywolf poets have selected fifty poems by Graywolf poets, offering insightful prose reflections on their selections. What arises is a choral arrangement of voices and lineages across decades, languages, styles, and divergences, inspiring a shared vision for the future.

Included here are established and emerging poets, international poets and poets in translation, and many of the most significant poets of our time. There are extraordinary pairings: Tracy K. Smith on Linda Gregg; Vijay Seshadri on Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly; Natalie Diaz on Mary Szybist; Diane Seuss on D. A. Powell; Elizabeth Alexander on Christopher Gilbert; Ilya Kaminsky on Vénus Khoury-Ghata, translated by Marilyn Hacker; Mai Der Vang on Larry Levis; Layli Long Soldier on Solmaz Sharif; Solmaz Sharif on Claudia Rankine. In these poets’ championing of others, fascinating threads emerge: Stephanie Burt writes on Monica Youn, who selects Harryette Mullen, who writes on Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang, who chooses Fanny Howe, who writes on Carl Phillips, who selects Danez Smith, who chooses Donika Kelly, who writes on Natasha Trethewey.

Graywolf Press is a leading independent and nonprofit publisher of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation, and genre-defying literature whose aim is to foster new thinking about what it means to live in the world today.

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Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes, Imane Boukaila

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback

This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.

Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds, Boukaila offers us a chance to make mistakes, to be messy, to learn and unlearn the languages we use to survive. 

Readers seeking “treasures yet to be uncovered” will find this and more in this expansive collection.

Imane Boukaila is the author of Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes and a moving nomad thinker, daring to tress hope in tormented voids. She is a nonspeaking autistic poet and the co-founder of Hear Our Minds, an art movement motioning autistic revolution. She lives in Toronto.

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Before You Met Me, Agatha Sicil

Publisher: RIZE
Pub Date: 1/29/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Before You Met Me is a confessional poetry and prose book that was created in tandem with Agatha’s therapist who helped guide her through the healing process. Agatha uses the art of writing as a way to unspool the murky web of memories inside our unconscious minds in an effort to bring them to conscious awareness. Before You Met Me provides insight into the underlying mental health issues that readers encounter but never reveal. The book includes snapshots of decades-old diary entries and authentic written correspondence between the protagonist and her loved ones. These stories were crafted around her own memories and explore her deepest thoughts and feelings, attempting to express the unexpressed.

Agatha Sicil is a full-time special education teacher and a part-time writer. She is a BIPOC and was born in New York City, but has lived all over the state. She is the author of many works including “ Burn,” the prologue to her creative nonfiction piece, “Before You Met Me.” She lives in the New England region with her husband and children.

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Selected and New Poems, John F. Deane

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Pub Date: 1/25/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

John F. Deane opted for a Selected and New rather than the tombstone of a Collected to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems (Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill, 2012) already exists. With substantial new work to share, it seemed timely to produce an essential volume, with compelling new work added to underline his witness. Deane’s poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems’ lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen. The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A ‘rewilding’ of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirit and Spirit occur. A new sequence, ‘For the Times and Seasons’, completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island, Co Mayo, Ireland. He is the founder of Poetry Ireland, the National Poetry Society, and The Poetry Ireland Review. He is founder of the Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2006 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College, and in 2016 was Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies, Loyola University, Chicago and taught a course in poetry. In 2019 he was visiting poet in Notre Dame University, Indiana.

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Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West, Russell Brakefield

Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

With musical language and vivid imagery, Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West attunes us to the sheer wonder of being alive. Intimate reflections on family histories, hardship, and everyday life reveal the ways art and nature can lift us from grief and serve as lodestars in an increasingly uncertain world. Russell Brakefield’s poems span American landscapes and personal experience, dropping down in music venues and dark barrooms, back alleys and suburbs, brightly lit galleries and lonely graveyards. How do we manage the weight, one poem asks, of carrying all our histories inside us? The poet hunts for answers everywhere, seeking insights into the particulars of the natural world and the minutiae of everyday life. Inspired by an assemblage of Americana and a litany of literary landmarks—from spiritual epiphanies at the Hemingway house to a reckoning with privilege in Lucille Clifton’s Baltimore—Brakefield explores how poetry can be influenced, propped up, and contorted by the American canon. Drawing on a depth of emotion, wit, and reverence for nature, this striking new collection captures the beautiful and often poignant complexities of the human experience.

Russell Brakefield is an assistant professor in the University Writing Program at the University of Denver. He is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press) and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His poems have been published in over thirty literary magazines, and he has been awarded fellowships from the University Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Park Service.

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Stray Latitudes, Dan Leach

Publisher: Texas Review Press
Pub Date: 1/24/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The poems in Dan Leach’s debut collection present lyrical portraits of dying (if not already dead) suburban neighborhoods in South Carolina. Stalled-out construction sites, abandoned shopping malls, and builder grade houses that seem haunted before they’re even sold—these are the doomed spaces that populate Leach’s work. Stray Latitudes investigates the spiritual and geographical crises of the New South, pitting the individual need for identity against the recent swell of nationalism and the ongoing creep of capitalism. Like the vagrant creature for which the book is named, these are poems that scratch and claw in their search for a place to call home. 

Dan Leach has published work in Copper Nickel, The Southwest Review, and The Sun. He has two collections of short fiction: Floods and Fires (University of North Georgia, 2017) and Dead Mediums (Trident Press, 2022). He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and currently teaches writing at Charleston Southern University. Stray Latitudes is his first collection of poetry. 

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The Safety of Small Things, Jane Hicks

Publisher: Fireside Industries
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

The Safety of Small Things meditates on mortality from a revealing perspective. Images of stark examination rooms, the ravages of chemotherapy, biopsies, and gel-soaked towels entwine with remembrance to reveal grace and even beauty where they are least expected. Jane Hicks captures contemporary Appalachia in all of its complexities: the world she presents constantly demonstrates how the past and the present (and even the future) mingle unexpectedly. The poems in this powerful collection juxtapose the splendor and revelation of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memory give honor to those we’ve lost, and how they can all fit together. This lyrical and contemplative yet provocative collection sings a song of lucidity, redemption, and celebration.

Jane Hicks is a teacher, poet, and fiber artist. Winner of the Appalachian Writers Association 2006 Book of the Year Award in Poetry, she is the author of Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia and Driving with the Dead: Poems.

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Cottonmouth, Miya Coleman

Publisher: Button Poetry
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Miya Coleman’s premier collection, Cottonmouth paints the picture of what makes up a home, and also, more importantly, what doesn’t.

Readers join Coleman as she journeys through her own conceptions of race, religion, beauty, and addiction to uncover what it means to be one person with many different identities.

At the center of the book lies love and grace, as Miya examines cycles of grief and familial trauma, and confronts the aftermath. All the while a quiet, insistent voice asks, is love enough?

Miya Coleman is a spoken word artist by way of Chicago, IL. Discovering her passion for poetry in 2012. She has performed for Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and the Congressional Black Caucus, Harvard University, as well as been crowned champion of the 2021 Roxbury Poetry Festival. Coleman is eager to focus on the uniquely human experiences that connect us all despite harrowing realities. Recently completing her Masters in Applied Development and Educational Psychology as a Double Eagle at Boston College, Miya hopes to use her talents to educate and inspire the next generation of creators.

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Is It Poetry?, Toshiko Hirata, Eric E. Hyett, Spencer Thurlow

Publisher: Phoneme Media
Pub Date: 1/23/2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

American readers’ awareness of contemporary Japan, through literature and poetry, has increased in recent decades, but many are still left with little means of understanding the everyday cultural phenomena that makes Japanese culture what it is. Hirata uses her poems to genuinely investigate aspects of Japanese culture in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand, and she has an extraordinary way of breaking down a normal event, like seeing an old man riding a bicycle in a park, into a journey that elucidates something profound. Her poems gain prosody while keeping a core narrative aspect which is colored with her own dark and warm artistic lens. Every poem in Is It Poetry? helps the reader understand and think about what is to be cherished, feared, loved, and what is not.

Hirata Toshiko is one of Japan’s best-known contemporary poets, as well as a renowned playwright and author of seventeen novels. She is associated with the ‘women’s boom’ in contemporary Japanese literature. Her collection, Shinanoka (Tokyo, Shichōsha, 2004), or, Is It Poetry? earned Hirata the Hagiwara Sakutarō Prize for poetry.

Eric E. Hyett and Spencer Thurlow are a poetry translation team from Massachusetts. Their first translated book, Sonic Peace by contemporary female Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita (Phoneme Media, 2018), was shortlisted for the 2018 National Translation Award and the 2018 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Their translations and essays have appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, World Literature Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, Pendemics, Transference, The Cincinnati Review.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/23 and 1/29 here? Contact us to let us know!