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.
Consider the Rooster, Oliver Baez Bendorf
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations.
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2019) and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.P., 2015). He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Publishing Triangle, CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Born and raised in Iowa, he now lives in Colorado.
Mojave Ghost, Forrest Gander
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander’s new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas fault toward the desolate town of his birth, and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confidential tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander’s most inviting and poignant book yet.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. He taught at Harvard University and Brown University. Gander is a translator and the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received a Pulitzer Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations.
Load in Nine Times, Frank X. Walker
Publisher: Liverlight
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.
Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more “[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor” (Khadijah Queen). “How do you un-orphan a people?” Walker asks. “How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?”
While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker’s poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.” Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry.
Frank X Walker is the author of twelve poetry collections. He was named the 2013 Kentucky poet laureate and is cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ominous Music Intensifying, Alexandra Teague
Publisher: Persea
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors—and in which Yeats’ famous apocalyptic figure of the Rough Beast takes a painting class, wears a spacesuit, and listens to public service announcements—[ominous music intensifying] takes on the too-muchness of contemporary, apocalypse-prone America with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. In this fourth book of poetry, Alexandra Teague expands her subject matter to include chronic pain, generational poverty, and what it means to stay safe—physically and psychologically. Her new poems are reckonings with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, torture devices and sad clown paintings—and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.
Alexandra Teague is the author of two previous books of poetry—Mortal Geography, winner of Persea’s 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders—and the novel The Principles Behind Flotation. She is also co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Alexandra is a professor at University of Idaho.
Between the Night and Its Music, A. B. Spellman, Lauri Scheyer
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman’s early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman’s literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years with lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman’s continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer’s introduction situates Spellman’s work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly.
Alfred Bennett (A. B.) Spellman is a poet and jazz critic whose books include The Beautiful Days (1964), Four Jazz Lives (1966), and Things I Must Have Known (2008). His work at the NEA was honored with the establishment of the A. B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. He has served on panels such as the Rockefeller Panel and as a member of the Advisory Group for the African-American Museum of the Smithsonian Institute. LAURI SCHEYER is Xiaoxiang Scholars Program Distinguished Professor and founding Director of the British and American Poetry Research Center at Hunan Normal University (China). Her many prior books include A History of African American Poetry and Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry.
Wolf Tours, Alyse Knorr
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
With Wolf Tours, Alyse Knorr creates a captivating world in which readers will encounter themes like climate change and grief, queer love, linguistics, and intercultural connection alongside a sentient pack of wolves in Colorado’s southwest. This novel-in-verse is steeped in wildness and a true reverence for the natural world and those that inhabit it, including Rodney, our narrator and tour guide.
Readers join this unique eco-tourism company run by a pack of sentient wolves, offering life-changing adventures for humans seeking a deeper connection with nature. Rodney, on a journey of self-discovery herself, and grappling with a recent heartbreak struggles to connect with tour participants despite desperately wanting to. Knorr writes with sensitivity and creativity, weaving a tapestry of lyrical and inventive verse, while Rodney and the tour group navigate the wilderness and a changing landscape together.
Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University, co-editor of Switchback Books, and co-producer of the Sweetbitter podcast. She is the author of the poetry collections Ardor (2023), Mega-City Redux (2017), Copper Mother (2016) and Annotated Glass (2013). She also authored the video game history books GoldenEye (2022) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (2016); and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.
Dear Wallace, Julie Choffel
Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Julie Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations, the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens, a proxy for beauty, inventiveness, and legitimacy, becomes an audience for the ennui, anxiety, and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer’s life today.
Julie Choffel is an assistant professor in English at the University of Connecticut, Hartford. She is the author of The Hello Delay.
The Right Hand, Christina Pugh
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Pain, piercing, and language: with urgent lyricism and lacunae on the page, The Right Hand explores the physical, emotional, and philosophical experiences of chronic pain, bodywork (especially acupuncture), and healing. In the second half of the collection, the poet spends extended time with Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome, finding this famous scene of wounding to be in dialogue with her own experience of pain, as well as her suspension between languages and spiritual isolation. In The Right Hand, the hidden sites of the body speak, and Bernini’s centuries-old arrow pierces us with hurting eloquence.
Christina Pugh is the author of five previous books of poems including Stardust Media, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and Perception, named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books; as well as a book of essays titled Ghosts and the Overplus: Reading Poetry in the Twenty-First Century. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and many other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry, she has received fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. A recent visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
All at Once, Jack Ridl
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Jack Ridl’s latest collection, All at Once, is structured as a lyrical collage that looks back at his eighty years of life in a rearview mirror. Nothing eludes this poet’s attention, reflection, or unbridled joy. Ridl’s poems, written in a direct style and tender voice, bring together mismatched meditations, leading us to experience the reality that neither ourselves nor wherever we are is one-sided. These poems are musings on loss and grief, softly interwoven with devotion, human connection, and love. In the words of his daughter when she was seven years old, “Daddy, ‘with’ is the most important word in the world because we are always ‘with.’” Each person reveals infinite realities of “with.” All at Once is for anyone in need of companionship or a gentle smile.
Jack Ridl, poet laureate of Douglas, Michigan, is the author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch.
Death Benefits: A Century of Sonnets, David R. Slavitt
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Death Benefits deepens and extends David R. Slavitt’s sublime, lyric confrontation with mortality—and does so in a plainspoken and marvelously entertaining, conversational way. His poetry encourages us to recognize our own predicaments, as we see ourselves reflected as fellow sufferers entrapped by daily circumstance. In his new collection, Slavitt presents a sequence of one hundred sonnets, each one loaded with life, observation, and quicksilver wit. Readers will delight in looking on with wonder, at every turn of the page, to see how the poet will pull it off this time and what kind of linguistic magic he will use to fend off the mortal pain of getting through each day. His voice plays over the grid of the meter in utterly natural intonations. His music squarely faces the dark, but its enduring note is faith in common sense and the pleasure that poetry provides, rather than cynicism or despair.
David R. Slavitt has published 130 books of poetry, fiction, and translation. Born in White Plains, New York, and educated at Andover, Yale, and Columbia, Slavitt has worked at Newsweek and taught at Temple University, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Bennington College.
The Rent Eats First, Eric Sirota
Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
With a captivating blend of serious urgency and sarcastic wit, The Rent Eats First moves through personal stories and cultural moments to develop a broad picture of systemic inequality. Sirota interweaves his personal experiences as a public interest lawyer, representing low income tenants, with biting critique on the broader social and governmental systems that breed disparities. This collection reminds us that the political is emotional as Sirota shares personal struggles with mental health, self-image, and relationships in the face of social crisis.
Through dynamic and poignant form, Sirota conveys the chaos of an ineffectual, discriminatory system. An earnest look at the difficulties of fighting a system from within, The Rent Eats First is a collection that needs to be read.
Eric Sirota is a poet and public interest lawyer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has been featured by Button Poetry, Entropy!, FreezeRay Poetry, Alternating Current (February 2020), Jet Fuel Review, and elsewhere. He is a proud member of the MMPR collective and the Assistant Executive Editor of Knights’ Library Magazine. By day, he supervises law students who provide free legal services to veterans. You can’t miss him. He’s the tallest Jew for miles. Twitter handle: @TheMCRota
She Falls Again, Rosanna Deerchild
Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
This book is about a poet who may or may not be going crazy, who is just trying to survive in Winnipeg, where Indigenous people, especially women, are being disappeared. She is talking to a crow who may or may not be a trickster, and who brings a very important message: Sky Woman has returned, and she is ready to take down the patriarchy.
This is poetry, prose and dialogue about the rise and return of the matriarch. It’s a call to resistance, a manifesto to the female self.
Cree poet and broadcaster Rosanna Deerchild is an important voice for our time. Her poems – angry, funny, sad – demand a new world for Indigenous women.
Rosanna Deerchild has been storytelling for more than twenty years, currently as host of CBC Radio One’s Unreserved, a show that shares Indigenous community, culture, and conversation. Rosanna has also developed and hosted This Place, a podcast series for CBC Books around the Indigenous anthology This Place: 150 Years Retold. Her debut poetry collection, this is a small northern town, won the 2009 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Her second book, calling down the sky, is her mother’s Residential School survivor story. A Cree from O-Pipon-Na-Piwan Cree Nation at South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba, Rosanna now lives and works in her found home of Winnipeg.
Army of Giants, Matthew Rohrer
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Formally audacious, these are poems that playfully engage with word constraint, iambic pentameter, and long-sentence forms, keeping us in a constant state of surprise and curiosity. By sanctifying everything from lava lamps, cemeteries, and clouds to literary heroes such as Anna Akhmatova, Chika Sagawa, and Lewis Warsh, Matthew Rohrer continues his project of uncovering wonder wherever it can found. In poems that rise and build toward a gigantic peak at the center, Army of Giants provides new poetic vistas from which we can contemplate the worlds we inhabit.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books, 2020), The Others (Wave Books, 2017), which was the winner of the 2017 Believer Book Award, Surrounded by Friends (Wave Books, 2015), Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Satellite (Verse Press, 2001), and co-author, with Joshua Beckman, of Nice Hat. Thanks. (Verse Press, 2002), and the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing. His first book, A Hummock in the Malookas was selected for the National Poetry Series by Mary Oliver in 1994. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at NYU.
Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible, Rebecca Lindenberg
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Living in landscapes of ruin and ruination, memory and problematic nostalgia, Rebecca Lindenberg’s Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible plumbs the depths of disruption, decay, and how we go on when the world stops cold. Inspired by the speaker’s experiences of living with type 1 diabetes, the collection chronicles humanity’s daily fight for survival in a world that’s bent on destroying itself.
Lindenberg centers love, self-acceptance, and intimacy as incomparable balms across great geographical and psychological distances, and asks the reader to do the impossible: hope.
Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of three poetry collections, Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, 2024), The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2014), winner of the Utah Book Award, and Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012). She’s the recipient of an Amy Lowell Scholarship for Traveling Poets, a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. She has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the MacDowell Arts Colony. Poems from the most recent collection appear or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets (ed. Ada Limón), Missouri Review, American Poetry Review, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for the Cincinnati Review.
The Great Zoo: A Bilingual Edition, Nicolás Guillén, Aaron Coleman (tr.)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: October 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Born in Cuba to parents of African and European ancestry, Nicolás Guillén worked in printing presses and studied law before moving into Havana’s literary scene. A virtuosic maker and breaker of forms, Guillén rose to fame by transforming a popular form of Cuban music into poetry that called attention to the experience of Afro-Cuban people, and he continued to interweave his artistic and political commitments as he traveled the world.
Originally published in Spanish in 1967, The Great Zoo is a humorous and biting collection of poems that presents a fantastical bestiary of ideas, social concerns, landscapes, phenomena, and more. The “animals” on view in this menagerie include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, clouds from different countries, a singing guitar, a temperamental atomic bomb, blue-pelted police, a hurricane, the KKK, and the North Star, among many others. Translated by Aaron Coleman with a keen understanding of the contexts of colonial racialization, oppression, and exoticism, this bilingual edition stands as a testament to Guillén’s carnivalesque vision.
Nicolás Guillén (b. 1902, Camagüey, Cuba; d. 1989, Havana) was a prolific poet, writer, and activist. He is the author of more than ten collections of poetry, including Motivos de son, and the first English-language anthology of his early work, Cuba Libre, was translated by Langston Hughes.
Aaron Coleman is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature in the Helen Zell Writers’s Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the poetry collection Threat Come Close, winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the chapbook St. Trigger, selected for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Coleman has received fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Program, Cave Canem Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including the New York Times, Boston Review, and Callaloo.
Unwritten Woman, Hannah Lavery
Publisher: Polygon
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback/ eBook
Hannah Lavery’s Unwritten Woman is a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves. It is a celebration of Lavery’s home city, but also an exploration of gender, race and belonging.
Hannah Lavery’s Unwritten Woman is a bold and lavish call for us to see the woman in the stories we read and tell ourselves.
From her search for the story, in her home city, Edinburgh, through her chilling re-telling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde, elevating the women in that classic tale from being written between the lines, to the woman of color, shouting from the sidelines of our cultural landscape.
Hannah Lavery is an award-winning poet and playwright. Her pamphlet, Finding Seaglass was published by Stewed Rhubarb and her poem, “Scotland You’re No Mine” was selected as one Scotland’s Best Poems for 2019. The Drift, her highly acclaimed autobiographical lyric play toured Scotland as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Season 2019 and in 2020, she was selected by Owen Sheers’ as one of his Ten Writers Asking Questions That Will Shape Our Future for the International Literature Showcase, a project from the National Writing Centre and the British Council. Her second lyric play Lament for Sheku Bayoh premiered at Edinburgh International Festival in 2021.
Through a Window, Norman Fischer
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Through a Window is not a spiritual quest as much as reading the thrust of short, poetic lines into a “ factual factual / world” . Leaning forward into the language of landscape and drawing back into thought, Fischer’ s poetry finds itself more realized through connecting inside and outside than either singularity can opine.
Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. His recent poetry titles include Selected Poems 1980-2013, There Was a Clattering as… , Nature, and Men in Suits. His translation of the Hebrew psalms, Opening to You, is widely read in both Jewish and Christian circles. University of Alabama published Experience: Essays on Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion. He lives in Muir Beach with his wife Kathie, also a Zen priest.
Bumblebees, Deborah Meadows
Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Deborah Meadows’ latest book of poetry, Bumblebees, is an expansive and radical text written in the language of climate, war, interrogation, and existence. Meadows’ poetics live on the earth of all disciplines, infusing her language with vital contemporary concerns. Bumblebees will leave the language of global catastrophe stuck in your teeth.
Deborah Meadows grew up in Buffalo. After graduating from SUNY, Buffalo in Philosophy and English, she moved to California where she taught for many years. She is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo, and has published over a dozen books of poetry, most recently Neo-bedrooms, Lecture Notes, a duration poem in twelve parts, and The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays. More at DeborahMeadows.com.
Hungry Ghosts, Gabriele Tinti, Roger Ballen, David Graham (tr.)
Publisher: Eris
Publication Date: October 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.
Taking as their starting points the simplest of media—respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative—Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti’s verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti’s response to Ballen’s brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death.
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Willem Dafoe, and Kevin Spacey. His work is focused on the theme of death and suffering and is mostly composed in the form of ekphrastic and epigrammatic poetry. In 2018 his ekphrastic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Montale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.
Roger Ballen is an award-winning photographer based in South Africa. He is renowned both for the documentary-style works featured in series such as Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa and for his more recent, experimental images incorporating artistic forms such as painting and sculpture. His photographs have been exhibited in museums all over the world and feature in numerous permanent collections.
David Graham lives in Venice and has been translating from Italian to English for almost thirty years. He specialises in art, including art criticism, mainly for exhibition catalogues. He has translated guide books for almost all of Venice’s museums and art galleries, and for some years also the catalogues for the Venice Art/Architecture Biennale. His more recent work has included several major publications for the Vatican Museums. He also likes to dabble in poetry from time to time.
Umbilical Discord, Rawand Mustafa
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
At its core, Rawand Mustafa’s Umbilical Discord is an impossible attempt. Ambitious in scope, it strives to trace the billion-branched reach of the Palestinian context within a fixed yet flowing form-columnar, helical, intertwining, tense, intense. Incorporating testimonies by elder Palestinian women who survived the Nakba, or Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948, Mustafa re-presents the ongoing shockwaves from this historical upheaval by interlacing witnesses’ stories with related recollections from her own family history. The overlapping accounts from Palestinian women that Mustafa has painstakingly translated or gathered from family members recall moments of supreme perseverance in the face of unimaginable violence, separation, and loss, while weaving together past and present, collective and individual, Arabic and English, memory and imagination, homeland and host country. As Trish Salah observes in the foreword for Umbilical Discord, “these are poems of yearning and of being, both in spite of and fractured by an impossible history. [. . .] Mustafa offers resistant traces of the geographies and names dis/re-membered in [. . .] efforts to erase the material architecture and cultural memory of Arab life in Palestine. What must be traversed in order to come to tell a history? As Mustafa writes in ‘dis cord,’ her opening poem, [. . .] ‘I attempt / my story / on a lost / foundation.’?”
Rawand Mustafa is a Palestinian Syrian writer who grew up in Canada and now lives in the United States. She received her MA in English and creative writing from the University of Windsor. Mustafa draws inspiration from social justice causes and is particularly impassioned by the struggles and resilience of Palestinians living under occupation or in exile.
Twirling in a Beam of Light: a woman’s life in poetry, Judy Kirkwood
Publisher: Lucid House Publishing
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
This book started in the 1970s when I was a writer of poems, having graduated with a Master’s Degree from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I don’t believe any of the poems in my original Masters manuscript survived, but some of the people depicted in it did, mainly me and my then boyfriend, then husband, then ex, and our friend Paul, who remains a Chicago character even if he lives in Indiana.
Marriage is a fragile enterprise. A long one, like mine (35 years) is a history of more than two people. It is places and times, ideas and dreams, families of parents, children, and grandchildren, friends, houses and seasons. Yes, there was an actual balcony, and a pink room, and of course we are all small planets orbiting around each other and the sun, shooting stars and eclipsing our own radiance. Our stories continue with or without us. It wasn’t until the poems for “Twirling in a Beam of Light” were in order that I realized the whole was really a memoir of growing from a girl, safe with her parents’ voices in the background, to a girlfriend, wife, mom, work career and the transformation that aging offers. These poems are about joy and loss, grief and celebration, seeing oneself in context as the world changes. The message is you can start over and make a home among strangers, you can open the door to a new beginning, and no matter how many dark nights pass, you can fly through the day on a dust mote twirling in a beam of light.
After receiving a Master’s degree with a specialization in poetry from the Creative Writing program University of Illinois, Chicago, fifty years ago, Judy Kirkwood was mystified as to how to put that expertise into practice-so she became an editor. Eventually, her passion for poetry and art led to co-founding a papermaking studio in Madison, Wisconsin, and producing limited edition books, broadsides, and paper art
exhibited and sold all over the country at galleries rare book rooms of libraries, and gift shops, including at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.
Toxemia, Christine McNair
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body— from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations. With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts. Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing— and holding— some of our greatest fears.
Christine McNair is the author of Charm (winner of the 2018 Archibald Lampman Award), Conflict (finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award for Poetry), and Toxemia. She was also nominated for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her chapbook pleasantries and other misdemeanours was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her work has appeared in sundry literary journals and anthologies. McNair lives in Ottawa where she works as a book doctor.
Faraway Tables (Unabridged), Eric D. Goodman
Publisher: Yorkshire Publishing
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Faraway Tables is a mesmerizing collection of poetry that captures the monumental and the mundane with eloquent precision. Written largely during the Covid pandemic, these poems are imbued with a reflective depth that explores the essence of human experience—ranging from the personal to the geopolitical.
Goodman’s insightful observations of life’s transitions, especially in a world reshaped by pandemic isolation and technological shifts, reveal the courage it takes to love a life that’s continuously evolving.
Faraway Tables invites readers to savor the delicate flavors of experience, the tender beauty of other places and other times, and the enduring connections that define our shared humanity.
Eric D. Goodman lives and writes in Maryland. He’s the author of six previously published books of fiction. More than a hundred of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in literary journals, magazines, and periodicals. Eric’s recent poetry has been featured in more than twenty publications, including Gargoyle Magazine and The Main Street Rag. Learn more about Eric and his writing at www.EricGoodman.com
Paper Sky: Prose Poems, Kathleen McGookey
Publisher: Press 53
Publication Date: October 5, 2024
Format: Paperback
Kathleen McGookey’s prose poems and translations have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best Microfiction 2019, Best Small Fictions 2019, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field,, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Quiddity, and The Southern Review. The author of four books of poetry and three chapbooks, she has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. She has received grants from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, the Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her poems have appeared on both Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has taught creative writing at Hope College, Interlochen Arts Academy, and Western Michigan University, and lives in Middleville, Michigan, with her family.
The Chances of Harm, Adrian Rice
Publisher: Press 53
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
“The most generous and un-self-centred of poets, Rice seems to share his new home with his readers, his voice instinctively kindly, “the embersmoke of wonder” always in his eyes. If the collection radiates a special glow, it’s not only the hearthside glow of language well-crafted but, it seems, the wider light of a life well-lived.” —Carol Rumens, author of The Mixed Urn
Adrian Rice is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He graduated from the University of Ulster with a BA in English & Politics, and an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature, and holds an EdD from Appalachian State University. He has delivered writing workshops, readings, and lectures throughout Europe and the United States. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Mason’s Tongue, which was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, and nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry. Adrian now lives with his wife and youngest son in Hickory, North Carolina. He is a Senior Lecturer in University College at App State, Boone.
Writing the Stars, Lou Ella Hickman
Publisher: Press 53
Publication Date: October 4, 2024
Format: Paperback
Here in these poems, Sister Lou explores the vicissitudes of life with palpable grace. She brings light to the dark places and serves each reader a road, a map, a compass toward sweet peace. —Alice Faye Duncan, author of Coretta’s Journey and This Train Is Bound for Glory
Sister Lou Ella Hickman has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and new verse news as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker; Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin; Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker; and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and 2020.
ana c. buena, Valeria Román Marroquín, Noah Mazer (tr.)
Publisher: Cardboard House Press
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In a searing manifesto-poem of late capitalist debt, hunger, and women’s labor, Valeria Román reconstructs the survival of young migrant and worker ana c. buena amid the so-called Peruvian “economic miracle” and its turbulent political space. Grappling with the meaning of care and exhaustion in an extractive economy, this collection reveals the scale of domestic routine, so easily rendered invisible by historical records, knotted into the macroeconomic scale of geopolitical forces. Hungry, ana inhabits a world that inscribes her as expendable, as experts announce “miracle bonanza times.” With a subsuming rhythm, sensory evocation, and dark humor, Román destabilizes writing itself in the face of a precarious “social totality.”
Valeria Román Marroquín (Arequipa, 1999) has published the books feelback (2016), matrioska(2018), triza la luz (in collaboration with photographer Herbert Mulanovich, 2020), ana c. buena(2021), and MULTITUDES (2023). In 2017, she was awarded the José Watanabe Varas National Poetry Prize. She studied Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and currently works as a translator and interpreter.
Noah Mazer (New York, 1997) is a poet and translator based in Mexico City. His translations have appeared in Tripwire, Protean, and Paintbucket.page. He published his first full-length translation, Belén Roca’s Infrarealist Magic, with woe eroa in 2022.
Countdown to Democracy, Deborah French Frisher
Publisher: Galileo Press
Publication Date: September 2024
Format: Paperback
“Deborah French Frisher’s poetic countdown as an American witness is at once spellbinding, poignant and an outward projection of needed inspiration melded by the counter action of her country. Meeting our moment when history needs a strong woman to get the job done by preserving democracy’s destiny, just as women and men feed the country and each other’s souls of freedom.” (Richard Yabarra, CEO, MNC Inspiring Success, San Francisco, and son in law of Helen and Cesar Chavez)
Don’t see a poetry title published between 10/1 and 10/6 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/3 from Press 53, Variant Lit, Orison Books, Red Hen Press, Signal Editions, Knopf, New Directions, Wesleyan University Press, Bloodaxe Books, Blair, Third Man Books, BOA Editions Ltd., Copper Canyon Press and University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chapbook Poem: Frank’s Shoebox by Daniel Damiano
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2024, “Frank’s Shoebox” from The Concrete Jungle and the Surrounding Areas by Daniel Damiano, along with a few words from the poet.
Poetry Chapbooks (August 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in August 2024 by Small Harbor Publishing, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/10 from Lost Horse Press, Curbstone Books 2, Finishing Line Press, Brick Books, Alice James Books, University of Georgia Press, Four Way Books, University of Pittsburgh Press, Hub City Press, Autumn House Press, New Directions, Grayson Books and Wave Books.
Check out new poetry books being published the week of 9/17 from Red Hen Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, The Kent State University Press, Tin House Books, Wesleyan University Press, W. W. Norton & Company, Ecco, ECW Press, American Poetry Review, Querencia Press, White Pine Press, City Lights Publishers, BOA Editions, Holy Cow! Press, 42 Miles Press, Driftwood Press, Finishing Line Press, Button Poetry, Birds LLC and Metatron Press.
Sept/Oct ‘24: ModPo, Renewal, and Expansion
Read a message from Aiden Hunt about Issue 5 content, the future of Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and the open online poetry course that inspired the creation of this journal.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/24 from Finishing Line Press, Papillote Press, At Bay Press, University of Iowa Press, Nightwood Editions, Andrews McMeel Publishing, House of Anansi Press, Carcanet Press Ltd., Red Hen Press, Perugia Press, Caitlin Press, NYRB Poets, University of Chicago Press and Scribner.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/1 from Galileo Press, Cardboard House Press, Press 53, Yorkshire Publishing, Book*hug Press, Lucid House Publishing, University of Arkansas Press, Eris, Roof Books, Polygon, University of Chicago Press, BOA Editions, Wave Books, Coach House Books, Button Poetry, LSU Press, CavanKerry Press, Tupelo Press, The Backwaters Press, Fulcrum Publishing, Wesleyan University Press, Persea, Liverlight, New Directions and Nightboat Books.
Poetry Chapbooks (September 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in September 2024 by Small Harbor Publishing, Factory Hollow Press, Wesleyan University Press, GASHER Press, Querencia Press, Black Ocean, Flume Press, RADIX, Red Ogre Press, Bloodaxe Books, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/8 from Green Writers Press, Unbound Edition Press, Finishing Line Press, Etruscan Press, Talonbooks, University of Arizona Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Knopf, LSU Press, Princeton University Press, Alice James Books, Wave Books and Copper Canyon Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/15 from Finishing Line Press, Saturnalia Books, Curbstone Books 2, Roof Books, University of Iowa Press, Milkweed Editions, University of Chicago Press, Graywolf Press, BOA Editions Ltd., Copper Canyon Press, Haymarket Books, Granta Books, W.W. Norton, Nightboat Books, Knopf & Tin House Books.