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

Dumb Luck & other poems, Christine Kitano

Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Christine Kitano’s Dumb Luck & other poems offers a portrait of a thirty-something Asian American woman who finds herself living in the relative safety of upstate New York before and during the pandemic. In one poem the speaker reflects on current events (the ongoing pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S.) and contrasts these with the peace of rural New York, wondering, “Is this / the reward for good luck, just a more / comfortable survival?” The poems in this collection orbit around this question, providing both lyric and narrative explorations on luck, guilt, and survival. Ultimately, these poems delve into how the otherwise mundane questions of selfhood and identity for a gendered and racialized body take on greater urgency during times of increased social unrest, panic, and violence.

Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is coeditor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University and also serves on the poetry faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Only a Season, Svetlana Litvinchuk

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

Only a Season is a debut chapbook depicting one immigrant farmer’s journey through motherhood artfully strung together in poetic form. As she welcomes her first child and takes on the task of reassessing generational patterns, she explores themes of aging, feminism, and rural living, all while engaging with postpartum grief and joy.

It is one part admiration of nature, one part affirmation of motherhood, and one part a survey of the ancestral roots that make us who we are as seen through a shifting identity. Only a Season is deeply sweet yet sorrowful, aching for answers to universal questions, and is filled with acceptance for change as seen through the lens and language of the natural world. With a glance back down a long line of Slavic farmer ancestors to seek guidance, it becomes a story of breaking through centuries of trauma to finding oneself finally born, in the realization that the next phase of identity demands that she first watches it completely dissolve in the early stages of motherhood.

Filled with vivid imagery, rare vulnerability, and a growing awareness of conflicting cultural values and expectations, one woman evaluates what to pass on and what to bury for good, transforming it all into seeds for the next generation. This collection is an attempt to slow time, pause it, savor it, lament the losses of Self and to softly settle into the gifts that unfold with new life. At once moving and accessible, the poems explore subjects one might explore while repeatedly rocking their baby to sleep.

Svetlana Litvinchuk is a Ukrainian immigrant who spent her early childhood camping on the banks of rivers and communing with rural farmers in Kiev, Ukraine. After the collapse of the Soviet Union she emigrated with a four-generation family unit to Chicago, IL where she adapted to western life until graduating high school. She has since lived in San Francisco, CA; Albuquerque, NM; and now resides with her husband and daughter on their permaculture farm in the Arkansas Ozarks. She holds bachelor’s degrees in international studies and foreign languages and literature from the University of New Mexico. She is passionate about human rights, food sovereignty, and the environment. Her love of the Earth comes from being part of a long line of farmers and hunters, from a childhood spent mostly outdoors, and from Chernobyl turning this world on its axis. She finds inspiration in beating the drum of feminism and the archetypal mother, swimming immersed in the deep waters of ancestral grief, and blinking rapidly in awe at the everyday wonders of our natural world.

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Seasick Serenade, Sung Partial, Dan Murphy

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

Seasick Serenade, Sung Partial takes the ancient epic of The Odyssey and reconsiders the characters in harsh, compelling light, forced to live with the aggravated concerns of contemporary society.

The figures of Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, and the suitors, come alive in a marginal space between the ancient world and the 20th and 21st centuries, rendered often with the heightened language used to depict the primal world, but with panic, mania, and arresting insight: “For your hoarse voice/Son of God /Son of Man/have you tried gargling/with salt water/Brave King/ have you tried drowning”

The poems in Seasick Serenade consider the self and language, to convey the idea—in personal, as well as political, aesthetic, and spiritual terms—that poetry being part of the world, makes the world part of poetry.

Dan Murphy, a sub-urban Los Angeles writer, musician, former public school teacher, union member, and caffeinated family man, received his Master’s degree in English at California State University at Northridge where he studied poetry with Dorothy Barresi. His writing aims to depict the personal in the political, the larger narrative in the autobiographical, desperation alongside spiritual consolation, and the meaning behind that postmodern moaning.

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Why I’m Watching: on Horror and its heroines, K. DeCristofaro

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

Why I’m Watching is a collection of reflections on the cinematic genre of Horror, and the women it’s filled with. Whether they are brewing potions, going down to the basement, or brandishing a shining weapon, the women in this chapbook are ones every Horror fan will recognize. K. DeCristofaro is fascinated and enamored by Horror movies and their vast and varied depictions of femininity, and this project began with a single question: why she’s watching.

When K. DeCristofaro looked around her Horror movie club one day, and saw a room full of women and members of the LGBTQ+ community, it inspired a curiosity in her about what draws us to this genre. In a world that sometimes seems so full of fear and darkness, why do we gather to enjoy more of it? This chapbook answers that question with resounding admiration for the craft and its characters, exploring the many lessons, journeys, and moments of beauty found within. In discussion with the films she so admires, through her poetry K. DeCristofaro also explores critiques and drawbacks of their stories, and the ways the world of Horror, and the world in general, has failed its heroines and the real women they represent.

Filled with references and homages to slashers, the paranormal, and creature features alike, each poem also explores themes of self-discovery, queerness, grief, hope, and the constant joys and battles of womanhood that come through loud and clear – no Horror experience required. K. DeCristofaro’s writing is expressive, heartfelt, and accessible, and she paints pictures as vivid and romantic as the blood effects of the 1980’s.

K. DeCristofaro is a poet and multidisciplinary artist living in Boston, Massachusetts with her cat, dog, and partner. She is a hobbyist green witch, an herbal tea devotee, a horror film enthusiast, and a joyfully bisexual force of nature. Her work can be found in publication by Beyond Queer Words, Nightshade Publishing, Messy Misfits Club magazine, and on Instagram at @herbalteapoetry.

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WORLD’S END FEAST, Auzin

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

Love and plastic. Cables and gore. Job-hunting at the end of it all; hungry for nothing. What are you becoming, and can you control your newfound impulses? Pull up a chair and try not to look over the horizon. There’s a place waiting for you at the WORLD’S END FEAST.

Anxious, dark, and tender, this chapbook traverses the mire of the late Anthropocene to spy on the harms we inflict on each other, and ourselves. The scenery is in a state of entropic growth. Body horror is the road we travel. And at the end of the journey? Not death, but transformation.

Auzin is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. With over two dozen publications since 2020, she has also published two chapbooks, and was nominated for a Pushcart Best of the Net Prize in 2022. She worked previously as an editor at Hecate Magazine, Wrong Publishing, the Jupiter Review, and Longleaf Review. Auzin was awarded an Outpost residency in 2023. More of her work can be viewed at byauzin.com.

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Echo Decay, Davi Schweizer

Publisher: Kith Books
Publication Date: February 5, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

please don’t – point to this – as proof
as if it were a clue – some sort of map

i’m not afraid of heights

And yet, Davi Schweizer can’t help but leave breadcrumbs. Names dropped and blood let on subways and phone lines across Japan and the US. Shot through with geography, Echo Decay, charts a stuttering path through instability and anguish and out into love. Schweizer’s willingness to relay the darkness and their deft use of form and space both serve to heighten the vulnerability of each and every page. Echo Decay is an unflinching collection about mental illness and the hard work of existence; a must read for those who face the same task.

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Full-length

Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen

Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen excavates the moments of rupture in a family: a mother who was forced underground after the Fall of Saigon, a father who engineered a new life in California as an immigrant, a brother who cut himself out of every family picture before cutting himself out of their lives entirely. And as new generations of the family come of age, opportunities to begin anew blend with visitations from the past. Through poems of disarming honesty and personal risk, Nguyen examines what takes root after a disaster and how we can make a story out of the broken pieces of our lives.

As Terrance Hayes writes, “‘There is nothing that is not music’ for this poet. Poetry is found in the gaps, silences, and ruptures of history.” This astonishing second collection renders poetry into an act of kintsugi, embellishing what is broken in a family’s legacy so that it can be seen in a new light.

Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. Her debut poetry collection Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Colorado Book Award. A Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s), Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Editor’s Pick

Aiden Hunt says, “While not the only impressive collection released this week, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection, Root Fractures, especially moved me. The combination of retrospective dysfunctional family analysis, grounded in painful history, and creativity of form is perfect. This book has layers that make it worth reading and re-reading.”

Read Aiden’s review-essay for Tupelo Quarterly Reviews: On Photos That Lie & Poems of Hard Truths: Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Root Fractures: A Review by Aiden Hunt

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Moon Grammar, Matthew Porto

Publisher: Slant Books
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

In the opening poem of Matthew Porto’s dazzling debut collection, we hear the voice of the recurring angel figure for the first time, commanding us to “Get used to the light.” That light—blinding, mysterious, unsettling, but occasionally illuminating—shows up again and again in Porto’s taut, elegant poems. As he writes in another poem: “Some light, it’s true, makes it to us, but always / refractory, errant, struggling to deign downward.”

The occasions for these poems range from encounters with ancient biblical and mythological tropes to fresh translations of elegiac Anglo-Saxon verse to sojourns from Texas to Taiwan and Vermont to Venice.

Holding everything together—the themes of love and responsibility, memory and forgetfulness, loss and hope—is the grammar of the moon, ever-changing, yet ever-present. Here is a fully mature poetic voice, one which former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky rightly hails as “ingeniously alert, compelling, and unpredictable.”

Matthew Porto is an Italian-American poet from Long Island, NY. He holds a PhD in English from Texas Tech University and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. His first collection, Moon Grammar, appeared with Slant Books in 2024. He lives in Boston, MA, where he a professor of English at Berklee College of Music.

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Santa Tarantula, Jordan Pérez

Publisher: University of Norte Dame Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

Jordan Pérez explores the tension between fear and reprieve, between hopelessness and light, in her debut collection, Santa Tarantula, the tenth winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Pérez lends voices to the forgotten: to the political dissidents, gay men, and religious minorities imprisoned in the forced-labor camps of 1960s Cuba; to biblical women who were deemed unworthy to name; to survivors of sexual violence who grapple with paralyzing fear and isolation.

With rich detail, these poems weave together the stories of those who go unheard with family memories, explore moments of unspeakable tragedy with glimpses of a life beyond the trauma, and draw out what it means to be vulnerable and the strength it takes to endure. Santa Tarantula pushes through the darkness, cataloging unspoken pain and multigenerational damage, and revealing that, sometimes, survival is in the telling.

Jordan Pérez works professionally in online safety and childhood sexual abuse prevention. She has an MFA in creative writing from American University and has published poetry in Poetry Magazine, Cutthroat, Poetry International, Mississippi Review, and more.

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Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo

Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons”); and more.

At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice—and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: “If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician’s / paints.”

Gregory Pardlo‘s collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Pardlo is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, and Totem. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pardlo is poetry editor at Virginia Quarterly Review, codirector for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University, and a visiting associate professor of practice in Literature & Creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.

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This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, Kwame Alexander

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, “each incantation,” as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly.”
 
This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a “jewel in the hand” (Patricia Spears Jones) to “butter melting in small pools” (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists.

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, publisher, two-time Emmy-nominated writer/producer, and #1 New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books, including Why Fathers Cry at Night: A Memoir in Love Poems, Recipes, Letters, and Remembrances, The Door of No Return, and Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope. A regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, Alexander is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2016 and 2020 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award and the 2017 inaugural Conroy Legacy Award. In 2018, he founded the publishing imprint Versify and opened the Barbara E. Alexander Memorial Library and Health Clinic in Ghana, as a part of the Literacy Empowerment Action Project (LEAP), an international literacy program he co-founded. You can listen to his podcast Why Fathers Cry and find him online at KwameAlexander.com.

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Asterism, Ae Hee Lee

Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

At times personal, at others political, slipping back and forth between lyric and narrative and drawing on various languages and geographies, Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work—in, and on, a world that is simultaneously expanding and contracting. Both accessible and legitimately experimental, these poems invite and challenge the reader, moving between registers and modes with ease.

Ae Hee Lee holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks: Bedtime || Riverbed, Dear bear, and Connotary, the last of which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

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Newly Not Eternal, George David Clark

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Equal parts elegy and ode, Newly Not Eternal explores the startling suffering and sentiment implicit in human mortality. At the heart of this collection, a son has died on the cusp of his first breath, but the book’s stakes are larger and more universal than a single, silent, foreshortened life. Ranging from personal lyrics to monologues in persona, from triolets to a modified crown of sonnets, from surreal fantasy to natural landscape, George David Clark’s poems sing of the brutality of time and the beauty that transcends it.

George David Clark was born in Savannah, Georgia, and now lives in McMurray, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their four children. The editor of 32 Poems,he is associate professor of English at Washington & Jefferson College. His previous collection, Reveille, won the Miller Williams Poetry Prize.

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How to Drown a Boy, J. Bruce Fuller

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

How to Drown a Boy, a debut collection of poems by J. Bruce Fuller, investigates how boyhood and fatherhood entwine to create cycles that mimic decaying and dangerous natural surroundings. The woods, the water, the oil rigs, and the men who work them all have a powerful effect on the speaker from childhood through adulthood. These poems examine the weight of family and culture against a backdrop of climate change and environmental disaster.

J. Bruce Fuller‘s poems have appeared in the Southern Review and Best New Poets 2022, among other publications. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Stanford University, where he served as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University and is the director of Texas Review Press.

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A Library of Light, Danielle Vogel

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: February 4, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

When poet Danielle Vogel began writing meditations on the syntax of earthen and astral light, she had no idea that her mother’s tragic death would eclipse the writing of that book, turning her attention to grief’s syntax and quiet fields of cellular light in the form of memory. Written in elegant, crystalline prose poems, A Library of Light is a memoir that begins and ends in an incantatory space, one in which light speaks. At the book’s center glows a more localized light: the voice of the poet as she reflects, with ceremonial patience, on the bioluminescence of the human body, language’s relationship to lineage, her mother’s journals written during years of estrangement from her daughter, and the healing potential of poetry. A mesmerizing elegy infused with studies of epigenetic theory and biophotonics, A Library of Light shows that to language is to take part in transmission, transmutation of energy, and sonic (re)patterning of biological light.

Danielle Vogel is a cross-genre writer and interdisciplinary artist. Her books include A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and Between Grammars. She is associate professor of English at Wesleyan University.

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The Familiar, Sarah Kain Gutowski

Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

A book-length narrative in poems, The Familiar explores female mid-life existential crisis through two characters, the Ordinary Self and the Extraordinary Self, who send a single household into chaos as they vacillate between the siren call of ambition, the necessity of the workplace, and responsibility to love and family. Engaging with philosophy and pop culture, bouncing between high and low diction, The Familiar considers the effects of second and third-wave feminism through an absurdist and fabulist lens, wrestling with the notion women can truly “have it all.”

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of two books, The Familiar and Fabulous Beast: Poems, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of the project Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry. Her poems have appeared in various print and online journals, including The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review. Her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books. 

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Belmont Portfolio, John Robert Lee

Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd.
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

This is a magnificent and varied collection in which the observational, the sacramental, the elegiac, the prophetic and the personal mesh together. The suite of title poems records a time spent on his own in the unfamiliar streets of Belmont in Trinidad that catch the sense of being on the edge of adventure and moments of epiphany in seeing the numinous behind the ordinary. The ‘ Office Hours’ suite, with gracious nods to W.H. Auden, is both an engagement with the hours of divine office and the Bible readings that go with it, and a very human series of reflections on that most universal of experiences – how we live through the cycles of our days. The rousing, Old Testament prophetic, righteous anger of the ‘ Watchman’ sequence reflects on the hell of living in Babylon and the gap between the deceits of ‘ liberal democracies’ and the ghastly realities of their global crimes. In the last sequence, ‘ What Remains to be Said’ , the poet emerges to the front of the stage and speaks confidentially to the reader, reflecting on what must be treasured as sustenance through ‘ this Purgatorio’ of our times, and wondering how one can speak in an era where you are ‘ collared in faith in agnostic seasons’ , where the too frequent news of the deaths of those with whom you have shared the struggle is a ‘ haunting against my faith in the Tree of Life’ – and questioning, slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘ approaching mid-seventies, what do I know?’

John Robert Lee is one of the group of significant Saint Lucian writers who are the younger contemporaries of the late Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott. He is the author of Belmont Portfolio, elemental, (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015, (2017), and Pierrot, (2020). His poetry appears in numerous magazines and anthologies, including the Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse. His reviews and columns appear widely, and he produced and presented radio and television programmes in Saint Lucia for over thirty years.

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Eschatology in Crayon Wax, Joshua Robbins

Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: February 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The poems in Eschatology in Crayon Wax evoke a feeling of being caught between a fragile yearning to be transformed and a whirlwind of botched divinity. Rooted in the antiphonal tradition of early Christian liturgies, Robbins shows compassionate care for this our world of things, caught as we are between what is and what should be.

Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), part of the Miller Williams Series in Poetry. His recognitions include, among others, the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at the University of the Incarnate Word and lives in San Antonio. 

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X in the Tickseed, Ed Falco

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

From discursive essay-poems to tightly constructed lyrics, Ed Falco’s X in the Tickseed examines a world that reveals itself through its mysteries, reflecting upon the ephemeral nature of all things. In the series of poems that bookend the collection, a speaker identified only as X reviews personal history and relationships, speculating, pondering, and questioning in the face of a baffling universe. Peppered between the X poems, artists as varied as Artemisia Gentileschi, Frank O’Connor, and Nick Cave surface, usually in poems posing as essays about their art. Other poems range from explorations of cultural perspective, as in “A Few Words to a Young American Killed in the Tet Offensive,” where a war resister addresses a young man of his generation who died in Vietnam, to the often playful “An Alphabet of Things.” Throughout, Falco’s poems speculate on matters of life and faith, intensified by an awareness of death.

Ed Falco is the author of a dozen books, including novels, short story collections, and poetry. A recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Prize in Poetry from the Southern Review and the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction from the Virginia Quarterly Review, he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Tech.

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Mom in Space, Lisa Ampleman

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Mom in Space is a complicated love letter to both the intergalactic and the terrestrial. Using the lens of spaceflight, Lisa Ampleman explores subjects ranging from the personal to the political, from fertility tests and parenting to climate change and civil rights.

As NASA and commercial space companies gear up for Artemis missions to the moon, Mom in Space offers new conceptions of women in space, incorporating both fictional and real female astronauts, among them the first mom in space (Anna Fisher) and the first Black woman in space (Mae Jemison). With a sense of both awe and informed inquiry, Mom in Space considers what spaceflight means not just for those who get rocketed into space but for those who stay home.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of the poetry collections Full Cry and Romances. She is the managing editor of the Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.

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In Ghostlight, Ryan Wilson, Dave Smith

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions.

Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Ryan Wilson is editor-in-chief of Literary Matters and author of The Stranger World; How to Think Like a Poet; and Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020. Raised in Georgia, he now lives in Carroll County, Maryland, and teaches at the Catholic University of America and in the University of St. Thomas-Houston’s MFA program.

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For Today, Carolyn Hembree, Ava Leavell Haymon

Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: January 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree’s For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father’s death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.

Carolyn Hembree is the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.

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A Sweeter Song: Catharsis, Martina McGowan

Publisher: Sourcebooks
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

A Sweeter Song moves beyond the rage of McGowan’s first poetry collection by showing that there is more than one dimension to the lives of people of color, women, and other marginalized and oppressed peoples, focusing on universal issues we all face as human beings. The issues covered in this collection include, but are not limited to: Personal history/ Parents/Ancestors, Love/Lust/Loss, Biblical Religion, Death/Dying/ Aging, War/Politics.

Martina McGowan, MD is a gynecological physician who has spent a lifetime engaging formidable opponents. She has been a survivor and activist fighting against social, racial, and sexual injustices, and a physician serving under served women who have been survivors, as well as heroines in the war on women.

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Slow Wreckage, Barbara Crooker

Publisher: Grayson Books
Publication Date: January 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

The poems in this collection consider the “slow wreckage” that comes with advancing years. As well as considering the travails of an aging individual, Barbara Crooker uses a wider lens to examine the damages inflicted by society and its failings. The poet writes with candor, irony, and ultimately, love.

Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 1/30 and 2/5 here? Contact us to let us know!