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.
If I Gather Here and Shout, Funto Omojola
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: November 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical “figures” of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.
Funto Omojola is a poet, performer, and visual artist. They have received fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, and the Poetry Project, and their work has been published in the Boston Review, Pigeon Pages, and Ghost Proposal, among others. If I Gather Here and Shout is Omojola’s book.
Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, Duy Doan
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: November 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, the climate has changed, and what mostly remains are zombies meandering through a world where we only have brief memories—where connection (human and zombie) is now only made possible thanks to bits of the salvaged wreckage that was left behind in the apocalypse.
The poems pay homage to horror movies, riff on childhood mad libs, and scatter Vietnamese diacritics over text about iPhones, neurotransmitters, phobias, substance abuse, fleas, and vomit. The stakes are high: these pages are preoccupied with suicide from the start, especially with the deaths and legacies of poet Anne Sexton and Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung, but they also find ways to smile and serve from fixed narratives, which is where the zombies come to the forefront, wandering through a world where our only shared experiences are fading memories of the final times we encountered chance momentousness in our lifetimes. Macabre humor is combined with formal inventiveness.
Duy Đoàn (pronounced zwē dwän / zwee dwahn) is the author of We Play a Game (Yale University Press), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Duy’s work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, and elsewhere. He has been featured in PBS’s Poetry in America and Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Blog. He received an MFA in poetry from Boston University, where he later worked at the Favorite Poem Project.
Set Change, Yuri Andrukhovych, Ostap Kin (Tr.), John Hennessy (Tr.)
Publisher: NYRB Poets
Publication Date: November 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Yuri Andrukhovych is one of the most compelling and influential contemporary Ukranian writers, the author of a body of work that ranges from the novel to the essay to poetry and that stands out in every genre for being thoughtful, playful, free-spirited, and astonishingly new. His career took off in the waning years of the Soviet Union, when underground artists and writers and the rumbles of rock music coming from abroad all helped to bring the walls of the sclerotic Communist empire tumbling down. Set Change draws on the poetry Andrukhovych wrote in the eighties and nineties, before he turned his attention to prose. The collection shows him beginning on a quest to represent and do justice to Ukraine’s long history of violence. He explores the overlapping and shifting borders of Eastern Europe, while also venturing into realms of fantasy and myth. Again and again, he returns to the idea of the city as a space of carnivalesque disguise and discovery. Drawing on the rich resources of Ukranian literature, from the amplitude of the baroque to the austerely powerful configurations of the lost modernist generation, Andrukhovych’s poems are ironic and elegiac, witty and allusive, lyrical, experimental, and political. As translated into English by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, they offer readers a powerfully transformative vision of the place of poetry in a fractured world.
Yuri Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. In the mid 1980s, he cofounded the poetical group Bu-Ba-Bu (Burlesque-Blaster-Buffoonery), which rebelled against socialist realism and instead promoted a new poetic ethos of aesthetic freedom and the ludic. Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in contemporary Ukrainian literature, he is the recipient of the 2014 Hannah Arendt Prize and the 2016 Goethe Medal. He lives in Ukraine.
Ostap Kin is a translator of Ukrainian poetry. He is the editor of New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City, which won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Prize for Best Translation, and his cotranslation with John Hennessy of Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography was a cowinner of the Derek Walcott Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
John Hennessy is a poetry editor at The Common and the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, Believer, Harvard Review, and HuffPost. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Frontlines and Lifelines: Collected Poems from an Army Doctor in Crisis and War, Timothy Hodgetts
Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
Publication Date: November 28, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
This work captures personal experience of the Army’s Surgeon General as a military doctor in crisis and war, spanning 30 years from Northern Ireland; through Kosovo to the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns; culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukraine war. Poetry provides the ability to say what is otherwise difficult or unpalatable. Some of the poems are critical and challenging. Some are humorous, as dark humour is a well-recognised resilience tool of the soldier. All are observational—and all are grounded in the realities of crisis and conflict. It is likely you have read war poetry from the perspectives of the combat soldier: but this book is the alternative perspective of those who manage the consequences of war. The work exposes that saving lives in conflict, picking up the human pieces, takes a toll on the careers. Writing these poems has been a means for the author to sustain mental resilience and to cope with serial morally injurious events.
Major General Timothy Hodgetts CB CBE is an Army doctor, culminating his forty-year career as Surgeon General to the UK Armed Forces; Master General of the Army Medical Services; elected senior medical adviser to NATO; and Honorary Surgeon to the King. As Defence Professor of Emergency Medicine, he led a revolution in combat casualty care during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns to achieve unprecedented patient survival. An inventor, thought leader, educator and inspirational speaker he is a leading influencer of emergency, disaster and military medicine of his generation.
The Flightless Years, Jamie L. Smith
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems and essay fragments in The Flightless Years investigate the relationship between memory, myth, and meaning. When our heroes fail us, and we can’t reconcile our love for someone with their actions, do myths and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves help or harm? Over the course of The Flightless Years, a beloved friend commits a violent crime, a mother’s mental illness destabilizes the speaker’s childhood, and the speaker’s own addiction wreaks havoc on her relationships. Still, Icarus flew before he fell, and Persephone returned from the underworld. The figures present in these pages, however flawed, find their thrills, and revel in beauties ranging from the crushed glass that glitters like stars on the sidewalk to the greater cosmos and constellations.
Jamie L. Smith holds an MFA from Hunter College (2020) and is a PhD candidate in English Literature & Creative Writing at University of Utah (2024). Her poems, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, Southern Humanities Review, Tusculum Review, The Write Launch, Red Wheelbarrow, and elsewhere. She lives and writes between Salt Lake and New York City.
Light in Dark Spaces, Margery Hutter Silver
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Drawing from the author’s 90 years of experience, the poems in this collection arise from her love of family, of cherished friends, and of those moments in nature that fill us with awe. As in life, there is also loss. These poems address most vividly the losses of old age–loss of loved ones, of friends, of physical abilities. They can be poignant and sad, yet often surprise the reader with their optimism and humor. They reveal a love of life and an acceptance of life’s losses, but always with the intent to move ahead, continuing to find poetry in each new day.
Margery Hutter Silver is a former editor and clinical neuropsychologist. In her 80s, she started seriously writing poetry. Drawing from 90 years of experience, her poems rise from her love of family, animals, and those moments in nature that fill us with awe. Her poems about the losses of old age are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and sometimes sad. She lives in Lasell Village in Newton, Massachusetts, a few miles from her two daughters and four grandsons.
Night Music, B. J. Buckley
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: November 29, 2024
Format: Paperback
Night Music’s beautiful poems explore the intimate, intricate connections of humans with each other and with the natural world. In first-person voices which mediate upon, reflect, and inhabit the works of 18th century Japanese woodcut artist Hiroshige; 19th century Polish composer Friedrich Chopin; and 20th century Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, these poems traverse landscapes both internal and external, physical and emotional. All the sights, sounds, fragrances, tastes, and textures of our fragile world, all the vulnerable nuances of our hearts and spirits, are here.
Montana poet and writer B. J. Buckley has taught in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for nearly five decades. Her work appears widely in print and online journals, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in rural central Montana with her sweetheart, two dogs, and too many cats.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 11/26 to 12/2 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.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/26 from Nightboat Books, Alice James Books, NYRB Poets, Unicorn Publishing Group and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry titles for December 2024 from Green Linden Press, After Hours Editions, White Stag Publishing, Anvil Press, Eulalia Books, Empty Bowl, The Song Cave, Variant Literature, University of Nevada Press, LSU Press, Bloodaxe Books and Tupelo Press.
Poetry Chapbooks (November 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in November 2024 by Kith Books, Kernpunkt Press, Finishing Line Press and Bottlecap Press.
Chapbook Poem: After Tragedy by Caiti Quatmann
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for December 2024, “After Tragedy” from Yoke by Caiti Quatmann, along with a few words from the poet.
Review: The Two Hearts Inside Us by Jill R. Burkey
“Jill R. Burkey dares to question in her chapbook, The Two Hearts Inside Us, because ‘questions breed possibility.'” Read the full chapbook review by new PCR contributor, Shelli Rottschafer.