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.
Saturday, Margaret Ross
Publisher: The Song Cave
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Margaret Ross’ highly anticipated second collection of poems, Saturday, chronicles a brute education in love and decorum through ceremony starter kits, basement classrooms and a mission school turned art camp, seeking to “touch the myth beneath the fiction.” Dexterous and musical, Ross writes stunning lines with unmistakable precision. These poems accrue from fleeting details, think in images and resist simplifying the nature of feeling. In emotionally raw scenes, Saturday explores various forms of intimacy and estrangement in unforgettable ways.
Margaret Ross is the author of one previous collection, A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015). Her poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in Granta, the Paris Review, Poetry, the Yale Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading. The recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright grant and a Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, she was most recently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and will teach poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall.
No Credit River, Zoe Whittall
Publisher: Book*hug Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
From acclaimed novelist and television writer Zoe Whittall comes a memoir in prose poetry that reconfirms her celebrated honesty, emotional acuity, and wit. Riving and probing a period of six years marked by abandoned love, the pain of a lost pregnancy, and pandemic isolation, No Credit River is a reckoning with the creative instinct itself.
Open and exacting, this is a unique examination of anxiety in complex times, and a contribution to contemporary autofiction as formally inventive as it is full of heart.
Zoe Whittall is the author of the short story collection Wild Failure, and five bestselling novels including The Fake, The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People, Holding Still for as Long as Possible, and Bottle Rocket Hearts. Her previous poetry collections include Pre-cordial Thump, The Emily Valentine Poems, and The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life. Her work has won a Lambda Literary Award, the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Award, and been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She has worked as a TV writer on the Emmy-Award winning comedy show Schitt’s Creek and The Baroness Von Sketch Show for which she won a 2018 Canadian Screen Award. She was born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and now lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Leaked Footages, Abu Bakr Sadiq
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems in Leaked Footages carry urgent subjects, ranging from death to disappearance to grief to memory. Not only do the poems fulfill the tradition of witnessing often manifested in contemporary poets such as Garous Abdolmalekian and Ilya Kaminsky, but they extend that tradition by the medium through which they witness: the technical and the technological. Here, the camera, the closed-circuit TV, cinematographic techniques, and the cyborg are trusted for truth telling. Reality is represented in footage seen through the eyes of multifaceted speakers.
In Abu Bakr Sadiq’s exploration of northern Nigeria in speculative poetry, the lyrical meets the chronicle. In this fusion of Afrofuturism with experimental poetic techniques, the reader witnesses a country ravaged by terrorism and the consequences of war, as well as the effects of these on those who survive. While the tone is grave with concern and conscience, the poems do not take the easy route of sentiment. Instead, attention is paid to structure—from the erasure poems that are informed by the theme of disappearance to the contrapuntal poems that are influenced by the testaments of leaving.
Abu Bakr Sadiq is a Nigerian poet born and raised in Minna. He is an undergraduate student at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Sadiq is the winner of the 2022 IGNYTE award for Best Speculative Poetry and a finalist for the 2023 Evaristo Prize for African Poetry. His work has been published in Boston Review, The Fiddlehead, Mizna, Fiyah, Palette Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, Augur Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere.
Whitewash, Frances Victory Schenkkan
Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Whitewash explores the civil rights era and its lingering tensions in Shreveport, Louisiana. Narrative and lyrical poetry weave an intricate collection of voices struggling to come to terms with racism, complicity, and hypocrisy. Deeply researched, Frances Victory Schenkkan’ s poems also confront her own religious and family histories alongside these portraits of a fractured city— layering them into a broader examination of the ways that American culture, like The Great Raft that once stymied Shreveport growth, still bears many griefs in need of healing.
Frances Victory Schenkkan is the author of Mr. Stevens’ Secretary (University of Arkansas Press). A National Poetry Series finalist, her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, POOL, and Third Coast, among others. She lives in Austin.
Shine, Joseph Millar
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Joseph Millar’s lyrical poems explore work, love, filial connection, life, and death. This is Millar’s sixth collection, and it reaches a deeper, more sonic level than his usual narrative voice. A collection of half songs rendered in a hardscrabble lyricism, they are propelled by their shifting, irregular rhymes, half rhymes, and off rhymes. The poems’ subjects grow from moments of daily life and their deeper obsessions—love, work, death, desire—and the making of art itself. Touched with more humor than earlier work, and with an unpredictable timing that seems to listen to itself as it travels down the page, the poems are part wonder and part reflection, carried along by their music.
Joseph Millar is the author of Overtime, Fortune, Blue Rust, Kingdom, and Dark Harvest. His work has won a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University in Oregon and lives in Richmond, California.
Museum of the Soon to Depart, Andy Young
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Museum of the Soon to Depart, poet Andy Young searches for her place in history as it unfolds around her through revolution, plague, and natural disaster. As curator of her museum, she navigates her own and others’ suffering through intense observation, from the inner mechanisms of grief and illness to the solace of distance provided by photography. The material of the poet’s own life and events on the world stage intertwine, resulting in poems with a staggering range, inhabiting language in ways that ultimately point to its limits.
Andy Young teaches creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been translated into several languages, featured in classical and electronic music, in flamenco and modern dance performances, and jewelry, tattoos, and public buses.
Blue Yodel, Eleanor Stanford
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.
Eleanor Stanford is the author of three previous books of poetry from Carnegie Mellon University Press, most recently The Imaginal Marriage. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Iowa Review, and Poetry, among many others. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Those Absences Now Closest, Dzvinia Orlowsky
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
In her newest collection, Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She is the author of six poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest.
Journal of the Cultural Revolution, Luo Ying, Denis Mair (Tr.)
Publisher: White Pine Press
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Journal of the Cultural Revolution is a collection of poems depicting the lives of educated youth during the cultural revolution. The author uses poetry to reminisce about many friends and memorable experiences during their time as educated youth, reflecting how the era influenced individual destinies. The language is poetic and with bursts of unexpected insights with strong emotions and rhythms. At once a work of narrative lyricism and an act of personal courage, this memoir in verse documents the human cost of a period of political turmoil in China’s recent past.
Giving voice to the inner life of a man haunted by his experiences, Journal of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to a traumatic time when ideology threatened to crush individuality. Luo Ying’s poetry stands as eloquent testimony to the power of the individual voice to endure in the face of dire social and historical circumstances.
Luo Ying is the pen name of Huang Nubo. Born in 1956 in Ningxia Province, China, he has published eleven collections of poetry and fiction. His work has been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Mongolian, Spanish and Icelandic. He is also an intrepid mountaineer and a key member of the Explorers Club in New York City. A successful Chinese real estate developer and entrepreneur, he is also founder of the Zhongkun Poetry Development Fund, the Sino-Japanese Poetry Fund, and the Sino-Icelandic Poetry Fund.
Denis Mair has translated the work of numerous Chinese poets into English, including the volumes Reading the Times: Poems of Yan Zhi and Selected Poems by Mai Cheng.
The Opening Ritual, G.C. Waldrep
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In The Opening Ritual, G. C. Waldrep contends with the failure of the body, the irreducible body, in the light of faith. What can or should “healing” mean when it can’t ever mean “wholeness” again? And what kind of architecture is “mercy” when we live inside damage? These are poems that take both the material and the spiritual seriously, that cast their unsparing glances toward “All that is not / & could never be a parable.”
The collection concludes with a sequence of truly grand meditations on spiritual consciousness—in one the poet notes how, in the stillness of contemplation, the world begins to hum and resound with music. The Opening Ritual attends to and fashions its song from that music.
G. C. Waldrep is the author of several collections of poetry, including feast gently, also published by Tupelo, which won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament. Waldrep’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, APR, New England Review, New American Writing, Harper’s, Tin House, Verse, and many other journals, as well as twice in The Best American Poetry and in the second edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry. He has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
Unmoored, Elizabeth Burk
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Unmoored is a collection of poems about a life well-lived and well-examined for all of its eccentricities and triumphs. Arranged loosely in the form of a memoir, this new collection includes work from two previously published chapbooks which focus on her experience as a New Yorker who lives part-time in southwest Louisiana, as well as new poems that go from a childhood with a political bent, through aging—getting through the last stretch of life with grace and humor.
Poet Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel, says this about Elizabeth Burk’s new poetry collection, “Unmoored is both existentially serious and massively entertaining.” It is arranged loosely in the form of a memoir—as a New Yorker who married a Cajun, Burk lives part-time in southwest Louisiana and has published two chapbooks describing this experience, Learning to Love Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase. This new collection includes many poems from these chapbooks as well as new poems that focus on aging—on getting through the last stretch of life with grace and humor. Burk has compiled her work into a poetic memoir of a life well-lived and well-examined for all of its eccentricities and triumphs. Undoubtedly, Unmoored can be counted among the latter.
Elizabeth Burk is a psychologist and a native New Yorker who divides her time between her family in New York and a home and husband in southwest Louisiana. She is the author of three previous collections: Learning to Love Louisiana, Louisiana Purchase, and Duet: Poet & Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband, Leo Touchet. Her poems, prose pieces, and reviews have been published in various journals and anthologies including Atlanta Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Anthology, Louisiana Literature, Passager, Pithead Chapel, ONE ART, PANK, and elsewhere.
The Glass Clouding, Masaoka Shiki, (Tr.) Abby Ryder-Huth
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
The Glass Clouding blends translation and poetry in an extended meditation on and through Masaoka Shiki’s late-life writing. Shiki, a Japanese poet and critic who died in 1902 of tuberculosis at the age of 35, revitalized the form of haiku. His work, a study in looking, documents his experience of confinement with a spare immediacy and a rich sense of the visible outside world he could not directly access. The Glass Clouding wrestles with the limits of translation, using experimental forms, image, parallel texts, and prose to question what translation can and cannot make visible.
A Japanese poet and essayist, Masaoka Shiki was born in 1867 in Matsuyama, Japan. He attended University Preparatory College and Tokyo Imperial University, before dropping out from the latter due to illness. He worked for a newspaper and signed up as a war correspondent to China in 1895. Shiki was influential in developing a modern style of Japanese haiku and tanka. He wrote a book on his poetics, Utayomi-ni-atauru-sho (A Book Bestowed on Composers of Poems) and also edited the journal Hototogisu (Cuckoo). He died of tuberculosis in 1902.
Abby Ryder-Huth is a poet and translator from Michigan.
Notes of the Phantom Woman, Iana Boukova, (Tr.) John O’Kane, Ekaterina Petrova
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
With a near-compulsive insistence, Notes of the Phantom Woman addresses the question of what reality is and how we construct it. Ranging in subject from the presence of pigeons in the city, the dead ends of logic, how geological time becomes personal, and the boundary between statistics and Hell, the poems are connected by a rigorous inquiry into the illusions of thinking, the blind spots of utopianism, and the trouble with moral positioning. Results of such a task are—predictably—unpredictable; a healthy dose of black humor helps the poetry go down.
Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet and writer. She is the author of four poetry books, two short story collections, and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman was published in 2018 and received the National Award for most outstanding book of Bulgarian poetry. A Greek-language version of it was also published in Athens simultaneously under the title Drapetomania. English translations of her work have appeared in Best European Fiction 2017, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Absinthe, The Southern Review, and Exchanges among others. She lives between Sofia and Athens, where she is an editor on the board of the influential Greek poetry magazine FRMK.
Mongrel Kampung, Mikael Johani
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems of Mikael Johani’s second collection Mongrel Kampung are mixed, mutated utterances of a heteroglossic headspace, a home at once familiar and foreign, backwards and forwards, I and another. Sometimes a poem is in English but refers to a world in which English is never spoken. It may contain a phrase in Javanese or Greek or Arabic or Aussie, but is intended for an audience who will never understand what it means. It may retell a dialogue in multiple languages, but in the poet’s hands all languages blur into one language. These poems are translingual mini-tomes—tirades, historiographic treatises, love letters, protest songs, errant tweet threads. The spritz, spritz of cosmopolitan intimacies sprayed from an heirloom perfume atomizer beside an open sewer. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus cap tikus.
Mikael Johani’s first book of poetry, We Are Nowhere And It’s Wow, was published by Post Press. His poems, translations, and essays were published in to let the light in, Poems by Sunday, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Book of Jakarta, #UntitledThree, On Relationships, Asymptote, The Johannesburg Review of Books, AJAR, Vice, Kerja Tangan, Popteori, and others. He was a writer-in-residence in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) programme in 2022. He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he organises the monthly spoken word night Paviliun Puisi.
Black Box Named Like to Me, Diana Garza Islas, (Tr.) Cal Paule
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Black Box Named Like to Me challenges the limits of syntax and image to hold the full scope of the imaginary in its grasp, touching on questions of motherhood, the future, memory, and the acquisition of language. The page is a zone for play, here, both in the translation and the original Spanish; words and ideas undergo radical transformation to best serve the purpose of the poems, shapeshifting at will. Vocal momentum drives these poems onward and outward with a force that is just as funny as it is poignant. It is Garza Islas’s first book, and the first to be translated into English.
Diana Garza Islas (Santiago, Nuevo León, México, 1985) is the author of Caja negra que se llame como a mí (Bonobos), Adiós y buenas tardes, Condesita Quitanieve (El Palacio de la Fatalidad), and Catálogo razonado de alambremaderitas para hembra con monóculo y posible calavera (Conarte). Excerpts from this yellow cycle of books can be found in the anthology En el fondo todo poema es yo de niña mirándola (La Cleta Cartonera). She published El sol es verde si lo miras (UANL) as part of a green cycle of books. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Primer infolio de las Vidas reunidas de Almería Smarck (UAEMEX) and La czarigüeya escribe (An.Alfa.Beta).
she followed the moon back to herself, Amanda Lovelace
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
from bestselling poetess amanda lovelace comes she followed the moon back to herself, an autobiographical standalone poetry collection that follows a woman who—through heartbreak, bottles of rosé, & the general messiness of life—felt like she completely lost who she was. each bitesize poem shines a light on where she’s been & how she’s managed to overcome it all, offering a dose of hope & moondust to all who join her on the journey back to herself.
amanda lovelace (she/they) is the author of several bestselling poetry titles, including her celebrated “women are some kind of magic” series as well as her “you are your own fairy tale” trilogy. they are also the co-creator of the believe in your own magic oracle deck & the cozy witch tarot deck, & the author of make your own magic: a beginner’s guide to self-empowering witchcraft. when she isn’t reading, writing, or drinking a much-needed cup of coffee, you can find her casting spells from her home in a (very) small town on the jersey shore, where she resides with her poet-spouse & their three cats.
In Her Light, Christi Steyn
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publication Date: October 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Christi Steyn has made a name for herself across social media as a poet who speaks right to the heart, allowing readers to connect and feel seen; In Her Light is a beautiful example of this talent and skill at work. Her second collection of poems—and the follow-up to 2022’s What the Moon Gave Her—takes readers struggling with mental health by the hand, helping them to find their own inspiration and beauty within themselves.
Encouraging and honest, In Her Light is a beautiful evolution of Christi Steyn’s talent as a writer and a conduit of hope.
Christi Steyn was born in South Africa, where she studied English, theater, and education. She is an avid lover of the ocean, spontaneous dance sessions, and conversations with the mountains. Having amassed millions of followers worldwide for her captivating readings of poetry, Christi hopes to make her readers fall in love with words. She believes in adventure and the beauty of storytelling and strives to continue connecting with others through her poetry.
Mondegreen Riffs, Angeline Schellenberg
Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In her own words, “I mishear the most beautiful things.” Acclaimed poet and spoken word artist Angeline Schellenberg pulls focus on societal convention and norms surrounding autism in her groundbreaking collection of poetry. The collection riffs upon the mondegreen, a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song in connection to her lifelong struggle with autism.
Weaving the sights and sounds we perceive with the questions we dare to ask, Mondegreen Riffs explores the intersection of sensation, meaning, and wonder. This collection intertwines three series: prose poetry on the social history of color; pieces impersonating musical instruments; and lyrical answers to odd online inquiries such as “If I eat myself, would I become twice as big or disappear completely?”
Angeline Schellenberg’s debut Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016) won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for Poetry. In 2019, she published three chapbooks and received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. Angeline hosts Speaking Crow—Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic. Her most recent collection is Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020).
Apple Thieves, Beverley Bie Brahic
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
‘I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,’ Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell – ‘an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely’ – collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in ‘Root Vegetables’. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris – ‘Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction’ – ‘time-hedged cottages’ and the earthbound in all its fragility.
Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver. Apple Thieves is her fifth collection of poetry after Catch and Release, winner of the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize; The Hotel Eden; The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation; White Sheets, a 2013 Forward Prize finalist for Best Collection and PBS Recommendation; and Against Gravity. Her many translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Hé lè ne Cixous and Charles Baudelaire. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant.
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, Renée Sgroi
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Format: Paperback
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is an exploratory journey that examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. Enunciated from both a human perspective and from the imagined voices of the plants and animals that actually live in the garden itself, this collection also explores conceptual and visual articulations that function to disrupt our assumptions about poetry, meaning, and language. Woven through these dialectical conversations is a dominant elegiac thread that explores the territory of grief while simultaneously grappling with the possibilities for hope against the limits of language. The book concludes with a meditative essay or “Author’s Notes” that describe the processes and approaches employed and also work to pose questions that maintain the integrity of the entire manuscript’s fluidity, experimental form, and openness.
Renée M. Sgroi holds a PhD in Education from the University of Toronto, an M.Sc. in Creativity and Change Leadership from SUNY Buffalo State, and works as a post-secondary educator. A runner up in the UK’s 2020 erbacce poetry prize, her debut poetry collection, life print, in points, was published that year by erbacce-press. Renée’s poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including Pinhole Poetry, The /temz/ Review, The Windsor Review, The Beliveau Review, Lummox (U.S.), Prairie Fire, The Prairie Journal, Fresh Voices, and many others. Renée is a contributing editor to Arc Poetry Magazine. Her second poetry collection is forthcoming in 2024.
Wolf Point, Red Shuttleworth
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Wolf Point steps into the raw and rugged landscape where the beauty of desolation meets the complexity of human experience. Shuttleworth’s striking collection draws readers into a world where mirages shimmer at the edge of reality, and life’s stark truths are laid bare under the vast, open skies of a high-desert town. Through vivid imagery and profound emotion, Wolf Point explores the thin line between survival and despair, capturing the essence of the human condition in its most unguarded moments. From the haunting “Mirage at Graveyard-Border” to the poignant “When They Wash the Dead,” each poem is a journey through the heart of America’s forgotten spaces, where every crater-faced stranger, every piece of skittering debris, tells a story of endurance and loss. As Shuttleworth delves into the soul’s deepest recesses, from the despair of love lost in “Pocket Full of Quarters” to the eerie tranquility of “Likeness,” where past and present collide. It’s a world where autumn brings not just the miracle of changing leaves, but meteor nights and bone particles on the wind, where tattered missionaries and one-eyed kings roam streets that echo with the ghosts of the American dream.
Red Shuttleworth is the Western Heritage Wranger Award-winning author of Woe to the Land Shadowing: Poems. His Western Settings: Poems received the first Western Writers of America Spur Award. He was a 2017 Tanne Foundation Award-recipient for playwriting and for poetry, which funded the writing of Americana West: A Century of Plays and Monologues.
The Thankless Paths to Freedom, Medbh McGuckian
Publisher: Wake Forest University Press
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Has there been a more thankless path in recent history than the one we are on now? Medbh McGuckian’ s newest volume asks this question, conceived in the years between the centenary anniversaries of the 1916 Rising and the establishment of the Northern Irish State in 1921. Poems are preoccupied with imprisonment, from the County Down Maze Prison to the sentencing of revolutionary nationalist Constance Markievicz, as violence mingles with a dreamlike glow: “ The unintended beauty of this map / of bomb damage.” McGuckian’ s familiar angels flutter at the edges of poems alongside images of Mars and the earth-like alternate universe of Kepler452b. An invisible illness haunts many of the poems— “ One longs to go to a hospital and have something / cut out.” Written between personal and public histories, based in both borrowings and startling associations, McGuckian continues to craft a singular lyric subjectivity open to the multiplicity of experience: When I was in my right mind my body was doing its best without me— when I say ‘ talking to myself’ I mean there are two of me. — From “ The Plume Trade”
Medbh McGuckian lives with her family in Belfast, where she was born, raised, and educated. She graduated from Queen’ s University Belfast and was the first woman to be named writer-in-residence there. She is the author of nearly twenty individual volumes of poetry, as well as two Selected Poems (1997, 2015). Her many awards include the Eric Gregory Award, the Poetry Society’ s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the Forward Prize for Best Poem. Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, where she now lives with her husband and four children. She received both a BA and MA from Queen’s University, where, alongside Paul Muldoon, she studied under Seamus Heaney. In 1985, she returned to Queen’s as the university’s first female writer-in-residence. She has also held residencies at the University of Ulster and Trinity College, Dublin, as well as universities in America. Medbh McGuckian published her first two chapbooks in 1980 before her first full-length collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 10/29 and 11/4 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.
Chapbook Poem: After the Hurricane Stole My Hammock by Alex Gurtis
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for October 2024, “After the Hurricane Stole My Hammock” from When the Ocean Comes to Me by Alex Gurtis, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/22 from Duke University Press Books, Finishing Line Press, Knopf, Stephen F. Austin University Press, Button Poetry, Andrews McMeel Publishing, University Press of Florida, June Road Press, Autumn House Press, Alice James Books, Nightboat Books, Black Ocean, Book*hug Press, Beacon Press, Burrow Press, Other Press, The Song Cave and Copper Canyon Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 10/29 from Wake Forest University Press, Stephen F. Austin University Press, Carcanet Press Ltd, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Ugly Duckling Presse, Texas Review Press, Tupelo Press, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Belle Point Press, University of Nebraska Press, The Song Cave and Book*hug Press.