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.
Love Prodigal, Traci Brimhall
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
Fiercely self-aware and “utterly present tense,” Traci Brimhall’s Love Prodigal lives in the messiness of starting over. As Brimhall grieves a divorce and a new diagnosis, cycles of loss, heartbreak, family trauma, and chronic illness appear. There is an urge to detach, to go numb. Yet, pain is always returned as a gift—the beautiful vulnerability of feeling. In conversation with Da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bachelard, images of the phoenix appear throughout the collection; its metaphor promises an easy and endless cycle of rebirth—a forever life, forever alone. Brimhall rejects this idea, instead reaching for the slow, messy, and imperfect process of healing. When the body becomes a site the poet “cannot live in or leave,” she finds strength in the beauty of the natural world, in motherhood, in desire, in new love, in “a thousand small pleasures that made [her] want to live.” Told through various forms—aubades, a prose crown of sonnets, an admissions essay—Love Prodigal says yes to second (and third and fourth) chances. The heart gets bigger every time it heals.
Traci Brimhall is the author of five books of poetry and currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Kansas. She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, Slate, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry, among others. Brimhall teaches Creative Writing at Kansas State University and lives in Wichita.
Water, Water, Billy Collins
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
In Water, Water, Collins combines his vigilant attention and respect for the peripheral to create moments of delight, while revealing more about himself as a poet than we’ve ever encountered. Common and uncommon events are captured here with equal fascination, be it a cat leaning to drink from a swimming pool, a nurse calling a name in a waiting room, or an astronaut reciting Emily Dickinson from outer space. With his trademark lyrical informality, Collins asks us to slow down and glimpse the elevated in the ordinary, the odd in the familiar. It’s no surprise that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both call Collins one of America’s favorite poets.
Billy Collins is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. He is the author of twelve collections of poetry, including the bestsellers Aimless Love, The Trouble with Poetry, and Sailing Alone Around the Room. He is also the editor of Poetry 180, 180 More, and Bright Wings. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins also served as New York State Poet. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife, Suzannah.
What the Earth Seemed to Say, Marie Howe
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: November 25, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
With its ‘radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions’ (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of her four previous collections – including Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood, and What the Living Do (1997), a haunting chronicle of personal loss – and contains more than fifteen new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about ageing while walking the dog, Howe is ‘a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy’ (Dorianne Laux).
Marie Howe is the author of five books of poetry. Her retrospective, What the Earth Seemed to Say: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), draws on four collections published in the US: Magdalene (W.W. Norton, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Marie Howe’s brother John, who died from AIDS in 1989. Stanley Kunitz selected her for a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1988. Her other awards include grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She served as the first Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014, and is poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City. She has taught at Tufts University and Dartmouth College, among other institutions. In 2018 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence.
lowercase aesthetic, Riley P. Murdock
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 22, 2024
Format: Paperback
lowercase aesthetic contemplates the attachments we form to our sorrows and the messy paths we take to move on from them. Its poems center on triumphs and tragedies both universal and deeply personal, such as the struggles of living with ADHD, the profound loss of beloved pets, and the pain of longing for a distant partner — even if they’re only gone for the evening. Bouncing from sarcastic humor to existential angst and everything in between, love sprouts through the book even in its most cynical moments.
Riley Murdock is a reporter working from home in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Riley graduated from Michigan State University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and started working full-time in Saginaw later that year. Writing for a living makes it harder to write for fun, but poetry helps him stay grounded and process a never-stopping, ever-changing world. He has slowly learned to find inspiration in joy.
Alan Gilbert, The Everyday Life of Design
Publisher: Winter Editions
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
Bleak, absurd, elegiac, and politically incisive, Alan Gilbert’s sprawling epic poem is a document of these broken times, with a glint of hope for a better tomorrow. The Everyday Life of Design opens wide to the world in a variety of styles and voices. Ranging fast and low across current social, physical, and media landscapes while trapped in a world structured to extract as much data and capital as possible, these poems inhabit precarious spaces while also seeking to elude them. Building on the legacies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Anne Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy, and Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy for the four elements, Gilbert’s project grows over time with additional poems, rearrangements, and revisions. The present 300+ page volume represents the second revised and expanded iteration of Gilbert’s ongoing magnum opus.
Fires Seen from Space, Betsy Fagin
Publisher: Winter Editions
Publication Date: November 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
Betsy Fagin’s third book of poems dwells in the interstices of profound grief and abject wonder, softening into the complexities of human-driven extinction in search of what refuge remains for life in the pyrocene. Bearing witness to present calamities, Fires Seen from Space investigates impermanence within planetary poly-crisis. Through ekphrastic poems and engagements with older texts, Fagin discovers enchantment within disintegrating forms and corrupted systems. These poems celebrate moments of simplicity and ease while facing catastrophic change, weaving deep relational webs to bind isolated efforts of resistance.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/19 to 11/25 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.