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.
Cowboy Park, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
“There are fevers you still wish to forget,” writes Eduardo Martínez-Leyva, but how fortunate for the rest of us that he remembers. These tenderly crafted autobiographical poems pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation—or at least a salve. Housed in the lived experiences of a queer Latinx person born and raised in the border town of El Paso, Cowboy Park seamlessly blends themes of masculinity, identity, and the immigrant experience, offering a new perspective on the iconic image of the cowboy and a deeper understanding of the complexities of human experience.
The detainment and deportation of Martínez-Leyva’s brother grounds this exquisite collection in the all-too-common familial tragedy of political violence and discrimination. Martínez-Leyva honors the people, language, culture, and traditions that shaped him, revealing the indignities, large and small, experienced by a community that is too often misrepresented and maligned. “My voice was the only thing keeping us warm,” he writes, and the warmth from this striking debut collection is beautiful to behold.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants and earned his MFA from Columbia University. His work has appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He teaches and resides in New York City.
Surveille, Caitlin Roach
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Caitlin Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. This is a book about control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.
Caitlin Roach earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their two sons.
The Loom, Andy Weaver
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
Andy Weaver led a life of quiet contemplation before becoming a father at the age of 42. Within three years he had two sons; two small, relentless disruptions to an existence which had, for a very long time, been self-sustaining and tranquil.
The Loom is a book about love. It is a book about frustration, confusion, crying, and being sticky. It is a book about doubt, unreadiness, fear, sleeplessness, and pressure. It is a book about parenthood. But mostly, it’s a book about love.
Andy Weaver presents a series of lyric poems which stand on their own yet weave together to create a complete whole, like childhood days. He shares the beauty of parenthood, and it’s unexpected frustrations, and the surreality of an experience that is at once deeply universal and completely personal. With self-awareness and a deep vein of humour, he translates the total submission to unconditional love the parenthood demands.
Andy Weaver is a settler writer and scholar. He is an associate professor of creative writing, contemporary poetry, and poetics at York University in Toronto and author of the poetry collections Were the Bees, Gangson, and This.
The Middle, Stephen Collis
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Written amid wildfires and atmospheric rivers, The Middle extends Stephen Collis’s investigation of threatened climate futures into a poetics of displacement and wandering. The fulcrum of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain, The Middle hikes the shifting treelines of our warming world to reflect on the way all life is on the move. Focusing on the human-plant relationship, each of The Middle’s linked sequences employs various forms of citational practice, rooted in the idea of a “poetic commons,” a kind of literary seed dispersal where words are blown, carried, and scattered from one textual field to another, akin to all the plants and animals in motion on our dangerously heating planet.
Stephen Collis is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), On the Material (2010), winner of the BC Book Prize, and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018) – all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, and in 2019 Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. The Middle is the second volume of a trilogy begun with A History of the Theories of Rain. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
cop city swagger, Mercedes Eng
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Investigating whose safety really matters in the most expensive city in the nation, cop city swagger conducts a threat assessment of Vancouver’s police. Holding close lived and living connections to the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown neighbourhoods, Eng juxtaposes the police’s and the city’s institutional rhetoric with their acts of violence against marginalized people, presenting a panoramic media montage of structural harm and community care.
Mercedes Eng is the author of Mercenary English, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, my yt mama, and cop city swagger. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review* and The Abolitionist. She was the Writer-in-Residence and a Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and recently co-curated her first exhibition with Keimi Nakashima-Ochoa, Inside/Out: the art show my dad never had* Mercedes teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she organizes the On Edge reading series.
Chambersonic, Oana Avasilichioaei
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Chambersonic imagines the book as an acoustic chamber. This collection of poems, essays, performance scores, and audio recordings comes alive with documents, rehearsals, and reverberations, all populated by an ensemble of players, instruments, and materials that make sound together. A conductor fades in and out; the audience acts as choreographer; agencies, noises, and situations test their volumes and energies – until voices morph into rebellious notation, signalling the near-silenced, the dissonant, and the ignored.
Oana Avasilichioaei is a poet-artist, sound performer, and translator interested in polyphonic poetics, phonotophes (intermediary spaces between words, sounds, and images), and states of listening. Distinctions include the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation, and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation. She has been a writer-in-residence at Green College, UBC, and the University of Calgary and an artist-in-residence at Simon Fraser University and OBORO, among others. See oanalab.com.
No Signal No Noise, A Jamali Rad
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero.
A Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise, epic poem, and experimental novel. It is the first installment in The Self-Inscribing Machine series, a speculative history of the binary and its prototypes, that traces concepts of Self and Other as well as the mathematical, cultural, and philosophical foundations of the machines that drive the contradictions of capital.
A Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently living on the Traditional Territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and Lūnaapéewak Peoples. They have published two full-length books of poetry: for love and autonomy (Talonbooks, 2016) and still(Talonbooks, 2021). Their most recent work is the chapbook WHAT I WANT (Model Press, 2022). Jamali Rad also co-founded the journal About a Bicycle and the small poetry publisher House House Press.
The Odd Month, Valeria Meiller, Whitney DeVos (Tr.)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
Known colloquially as “the odd month” for its unusual number of days, February in the rural Argentine imaginary has historically represented an auspicious time: the only month without rain, in which that season’s crops are gathered, celebrated, tallied, and accounted for. Drawing on this idea, The Odd Month charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.
The poems are informed by the Argentine rural literary tradition while reflecting on the ways a once-idealized landscape has since been transformed. As these ecologically engaged poems show, if on the one hand there is the law—of the family, of religion, of animal domestication, of trickle-down economics, of national identity—attempting to produce order through different systematizations of the natural, on the other is the way in which animal and plant life put these laws into crisis and resist being mastered by humans.
Valeria Meiller is an Argentine writer and scholar who is assistant professor of social and environmental challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is the author of four collections of poetry in Spanish.
Whitney DeVos is a writer, translator, and scholar specializing in literatures of the Americas. She is the translator of Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec and The Semblable by Chantal Maillard as well as a cotranslator of Carlos Soto Román’s 11 and Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace / Lo común. With Valeria Meiller and Javiera Pérez-Salerno, she coedits Ruge el bosque, a series of regional ecopoetry anthologies aimed at a global hispanophone audience. A 2022 NEA fellow, she lives and works in Mexico City.
Birthing Butterflies, Claudia May
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
Birthing Butterflies aligns the metamorphosis of butterflies, a symbol of transformation and resurrection, with nineteenth-century Black enslaved mothers. Like a cocoon, their wombs nurtured and birthed memories that sustained Black life. Just as butterflies take flight from the confines of their self-built shells, these poems explore how Black enslaved mothers inhabited Black love, joy, agony, freedom, and rebirth. They soared above the systemic structures of slavery set on diminishing their human dignity and dismantling their communal regard.
Claudia May is a poet, an award-winning children’s book author, a storyteller, scholar, Hedgebrook alum, and nature lover.
The Last Bed, Lee Varon
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
Whether its serving those who come to a soup kitchen to receive a warm meal and some respite from the streets, taking solace in observing birds in nature, dealing with her own son’s addiction as he cycles in and out of rehab, or sitting with other parents in support groups, Lee Varon depicts the harsh realities of an epidemic that is gripping many in our country. The Last Bed is also about grit, tenacity and fortitude. Varon shows the reader that even in the most difficult circumstances there is beauty and hope. Ultimately this book is about strength and resilience; frayed relationships are often mended and recovery grows roots and takes hold for many.
Lee Varon is a writer and social worker who has personal experience with members of her own family who have substance use disorder. She is a co-editor of Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and Those Touched by Homelessness and author of the children’s book: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery published in 2021.
Rare Fuel, Rex Wilder
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Rare Fuel, Rex Wilder’s fourth book, winner of the Finishing Line Press Donna Wolf-Palacio Poetry Prize, the author is “the Virgil who guides us through the underworld of his own personal hell” (George Bilgere), “his time as an inpatient in a mental health facility, alongside the kindness, the weirdness, the characters and the discoveries he made there. You can place it alongside the language’s other great verse chronicles of madness: Christopher Smart, say, or Ivor Gurney” (Stephanie Burt). The book resonates with the wisdom of a man “deeply invested in the mortal world,” as A.E. Stallings once highlighted. The poems ring with “the exhilaration of freedom from the chains of confinement” (Grace Schulman). Rex Wilder does not merely return to form here; he transcends it, offering readers a rare and vibrant fuel to illuminate their darkest nights.
A Friendly Little Tavern Somewhere Near the Pleiades, Buff Whitman-Bradley
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In this new volume, A friendly little tavern somewhere near the Pleiades, the poet continues making us laugh and sigh, and sometimes gasp in astonishment, with his melancholy, ecstatic, imaginative, philosophical, and utterly charming poems about life, age (old and young), nature, the theological debates of ants, the nectar-besotted revelries of bees, whimsically imagined after-lives, and the poet’s own glee at his little granddaughter’s assessment of him: “He’s a good guy/but he’s really slow.
Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poetry has appeared in many print and online literary journals. His latest book is And What Will We Sing? (Kelsay Books). He podcasts his poems at thirdactpoems.podbean.com. He and his wife, Cynthia, live in northern California, close enough to three of the granddaughters to have plenty of rip-roaring good times. Buff Whitman-Bradley is a poet of life’s little moments, of nature, and in earlier volumes, of political poems that rage with compassion. One of his previous collections, At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, is a book of swan songs, but songs from a swan that isn’t much interested in pathos, whining, or tragedy. This swan shrugs its extravagant wings at mortality and sings its songs with grace, wit, economy, a perfect ear, and understated profundity.
Conversations with the Kagawong River, Sophie Anne Edwards
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
A site-specific engagement with an ecosystem of Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island), Conversations with the Kagawong River raises the possibility of collaboration with the more-than-human. The author spent several years learning to listen to the Gaagigewang Ziibi (Kagawong River) and to follow the rhythms and patterns of its flora and fauna, the weather and the water. She invited the participation of various collaborators – woodpeckers, otters, currents, ice, grasses. The resulting poems, supported by local Elders, language speakers, and historians, make visible the colonial, environmental, and social processes that construct an ecosystem and (settler) relationships to it.
sophie anne edwards (she/her/settler) lives on Mnidoo Mnising, Manitoulin Island, in Northeastern Ontario with her dog Bea and a roster of other WWOOFers who help in the garden. Her first loves were books and the water until the birth of her daughter Emilie Aude. Her writing has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and published by numerous journals and micropresses across Canada. Sophie holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies and a Certificate in Creative Writing from Humber Collegeand is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Queen’s University.
In Inheritance of Drowning, Dorsía Smith Silva
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Format: Paperback
In this striking debut, Dorsía Smith Silva explores the devastating effects of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, highlighting the natural world, the lasting impact of hurricanes, and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans. These poems also focus on the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the racial, social, and political injustices that occur every day. Smith Silva writes with a powerful, gripping voice, confronting the “drowning” of disenfranchised communities as they are displaced, exploited, and robbed of their identities, but remain resilient. Written with unflinching language and vivid imagery, In Inheritance of Drowning reveals the many facets of the lives of marginalized people.
Dorsía Smith Silva is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, Best New Poets nominee, Obsidian Fellow, poetry editor of The Hopper, and professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Her poetry has been published in the Denver Quarterly, Waxwing, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Good Girl, editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering, and the coeditor of seven books.
Something Close to God, Erika Del Carmen Ruiz
Publisher: Querencia Press
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Something Close to God” explores the themes of redemption, identity, and overcoming adversity in the face of cisheteropatriarchal expectations. This collection of poems is unafraid to scream at God and demand answers from the great void. It also delves into the catharsis of grief and follows the speaker through the trajectory of making peace with the act of letting go. In their work, Erika Del Carmen Ruiz heavily explores the concept of confessional poetry, connecting trauma with artistic expression. The book offers a deeply personal and revealing examination of intense emotional struggles, allowing the reader to gain a profound understanding of these experiences.
Erika Del Carmen Ruiz is an agender fem (they/them) poet and organizer from San Bernardino, California. Erika received their B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Redlands in 2017. They have published poetry in The Redlands Review and shufPoetry and was also the Poetry Editor for the LGBTQ youth literary magazine inQluded before it disbanded in 2020. They have also published articles on The Body Is Not An Apology and Chronicles of a Mixed Fat Chick. Outside of writing, Erika is co-founder of the Inland Empire Prism Collective, an LGBTQ-led organization in Southern California. You can find them @erimikat on Instagram.
A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, Brynja Hjálmsdóttir, Rachel Britton (tr)
Publisher: Circumference Books
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder, written by contemporary Icelandic poet Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and translated by Rachel Britton, one woman lives in a glass ball that is being shaken by someone else. This book of poems, however, is always shaking itself up, leaping between the extreme and the daily, the gross and the delicious, between being scared and being scary. These surreal, visceral, and somehow polite poems explore what it can be like to be a woman and to slither through and away from threat to find voice and form and power, no matter how strange. The apocalyptic utopia we arrive at in this book—The Whore’s City—is a perfect model to move to in one’s head: feminist, funny, odd, and a little disgusting, all towards transformation.
Brynja Hjálmsdóttir is from Reykjavík, Iceland, and is the author of two books of poetry and a novel. Her first book, Okfruman, was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by the Icelandic Booksellers’ Choice Awards and was nominated for the Icelandic Women’s Literary Award. Kona lítur við (A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder) was nominated for the Maístjarnan Poetry Award. In 2022, Hjálmsdóttir received the Ljóðstafur Jóns úr Vör poetry prize and the Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Encouragement Award. Her work has been translated into six languages.
Rachel Britton is a writer and translator from New York, based in Iceland. She holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the State University of New York at Geneseo and is pursuing an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Iceland. She has received support from the Fulbright Commission, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and the Icelandic Literature Center.
Flag, Imani Elizabeth Jackson
Publisher: Futurepoem
Publication Date: November 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
These poems show us new ways to think, to feel, to be, to see a wave like rolled velvet out at sea. Like water, they remember all the sediment around a word, a history, that sea, a river, and with Jackson’s steady guidance, they unearth what can and can’t be unearthed. I have read them many times, and I will read them many times again, for Flag unveils a new eco-thinking, a flag I hold dear, a banner of love and care. —Eleni Sikelianos
Imani Elizabeth Jackson is the author of the chapbooks Context for arboreal exchanges (Belladonna*, 2023) and saltsitting (g l o s s, 2020), and, as mouthfeel, co-author of Consider the tongue (Paper Machine, 2019) with S*an D. Henry-Smith. Flag is her first full-length collection.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/12 and 11/18 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
PCR is calling for submissions of original poetry for the first time between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15. We’re also opening to submissions of poem excerpts from full-length collections. Read this post for details!
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/5 from Querencia Press, Grid Books, Finishing Line Press, Fireside Industries, Princeton University Press, BOA Editions Ltd, Bloodaxe Books, Button Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press, Persea, W. W. Norton and Omnidawn.
Chapbook Poem: copper by nat raum
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2024, “copper” from salt box by nat raum, along with a few words from the poet.
Poetry Chapbooks (October 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in October 2024 by Two Sylvias Press, Yavanika Press, The Poetry Box, Variant Lit, Kith Books, Newfound, Black Lawrence Press, Diode Editions, Nine Syllables Press, Querencia Press, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/12 from Querencia Press, CavanKerry Press, Talonbooks, Finishing Line Press, Black Ocean, University of Calgary Press and University of Wisconsin Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/19 from Copper Canyon Press. Random House, Winter Editions, Books and Finishing Line Press.