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 Thursday, we’ll be publishing an update about what poetry titles we know are publishing in the following week.

Note: Information, including product descriptions, are provided by the publisher. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.

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Full-length

Late Gifts, Richard Price

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Publication Date: 12/14/23
Format: Trade Paperback

Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book’s occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child’s future makes more urgent the environmental and political themes which have long been a concern for the poet. Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems ‘Shore Gifts’ and ‘Shore Thefts’, and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, ‘He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.’

Richard Price is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library and a tutor at the Poetry School, London. He has published over a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993, including Lucky Day (2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. A year later, Small World (2012) won the Creative Scotland Award in his home country. It was followed by another Guardian Book of the Year, Moon for Sale (2017), which was also shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year.

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Siteseeing, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt

Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication date: 12/15/23
Format: Trade Paperback

Between February 2021 and March 2022, Ariel Gordon and Brenda Schmidt wrote a collaborative poetry manuscript, formatted like a call and response. Ariel intended to write about urban Manitoba, the city and its trees, and Brenda was to write about rural Saskatchewan and birds. Over the course of the year, the matter of place took over and the intentions branched and flew apart. They both wrote birds and trees but also moose and mushrooms, pronghorns and wild turkeys, and people making their way through it all. They wrote climate as it was manifested in drought-stressed trees and stunted crops covered in grasshoppers, in wildfires and wildfire smoke hanging over the prairies. They wrote home as they found it.

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg-based author of two collections of urban-nature poetry, both of which won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. Gordon also co-edited the anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018) and is the ringleader of the National Poetry Month in the Winnipeg Free Press project. Her most recent book is Treed: Walking in Canada’s Urban Forests (Wolsak & Wynn, 2019).
Brenda Schmidt was the seventh Saskatchewan Poet Laureate. Author of five books of poetry and a book of essays, her work has been nominated for a number of Saskatchewan Book Awards over the years, received the Alfred G. Bailey Prize for Poetry, and is included in The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition. She now lives on the dry side of a hill in central west Saskatchewan where she’s exploring the art of xeriscaping.

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A Very Large Array, Jena Osman

Publisher: DABA
Publication Date: 12/19/23
Format: Paperback

This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman’s acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming “official” language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.

Jena Osman’s (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

Poet Jena Osman earned an MA in poetry and playwriting from Brown University and a PhD in English from the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. She is a professor at Temple University.

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You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis, Kelly Weber

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: 12/20/23
Format: Paperback

Set against a rural plains landscape of gas stations, wind, and roadkill bones littering the highways, You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is a love letter to the nonbinary body as a site of both queer platonic intimacy and chronic illness. Looking at art and friendship, Kelly Weber’s poems imagine alternatives to x-rays, pathologizing medical settings, and other forms of harm. Considering the meeting place of radiological light and sunlit meadows, the asexual speaker’s body, and fox skeletons, these poems imagine possible forms of love. With the body caught in medical crisis and ecological catastrophe, Weber questions how to create a poetry fashioned both despite and out of endings.

You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis explores forms with plainspoken prose poems with a mix of short poems and longer lyric sections that navigate insurance systems and complicated rural relationships to queerness.

You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Mary Jo Bang.

Kelly Weber (she/they) is the author of We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place. She is the reviews editor for Seneca Review and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in a Best American Poetry Author Spotlight, Gulf Coast Online, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Hayden’s Ferry Review Online, Southeast Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University.

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Black Box Syndrome, Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: 12/20/23
Format: Paperback

Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s Black Box Syndrome is a series of poems—or “black boxes”—based on black hexagrams in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text. Following the aleatoric tradition popularized by the surrealists and extended by the work of John Cage and Jackson Maclow, these poems cast their lenses on the hazards of the incessant financialization of everyday life. Synthesizing chance-operational aesthetics with Aztec anatomical science, conspiracy theory with systems theory, and the black box model with the concept of the “influencing machine,” Black Box Syndrome explores tensions between lyric excess and digital compaction in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma is a Xicano poet based in Chicago. He is the author of a chapbook, Spring Tlaloc Seance, and the book Place-Discipline, also published by Omnidawn. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Postmodern Culture, Fence, Jacket2, Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere.

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On Certainty, Karla Kelsey

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication date: 12/20/23
Format: Paperback

In the poems of On Certainty, an unnamed woman in a strangely familiar dystopia narrates a story of power and decline, where the Tyrant has gained ascendency and the Philosopher is dying. Here, the Tyrant rules over a decimated ecology filled with android deer, burnt towns, and exhausted individuals dependent on virtual reality augmentation. In choosing whether to take the Philosopher’s place in a struggle against the Tyrant, the narrator must consider how her decision may perpetuate the currently existing catastrophic systems.

Weaving together speculative fiction, philosophical aphorism, lyric fragment, and documentary technique, On Certainty echoes the contemporary world that can feel simultaneously quotidian and strange.

Karla Kelsey‘s poetry books include Blood Feather; A Conjoined Book, also published by Omnidawn; Iteration Nets; and Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, selected by Carolyn Forché for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Her book of experimental essays, Of Sphere, was selected by Carla Harryman for the 2016 Essay Press Prize. With Aaron McCollough, she copublishes SplitLevel Texts, a press specializing in hybrid genre projects.

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Looking and Seeing, Seeing and Looking, Damon Potter, Truong Tran

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: 12/20/23
Format: Paperback

This book brings together different perspectives under two titles, considering the lives and experiences of two friends, one Vietnamese American and one white. Looking And Seeing is a poetic work of yearning, regret, and righteous indignation. In Truong Tran’s poetry, what is said and what is written reveal our complexities. Composed as an investigation of his own being and body as a brown person moving through white spaces, this collection moves alongside Tran’s friend and collaborator Damon Potter. Seeing and Looking offers a record of Potter’s perspective as a white man examining who he is and wants to be and the complications of trying to be good while also benefiting from histories of oppression. Potter considers death—both his own future death and the deaths of his friends—while grappling with how to witness horrors, wonders, and his self.

Damon Potter is coauthor of 100 Words with Truong Tran. He works as a gardener in San Francisco.
Truong Tran is a writer, visual artist, and teacher at Mills College, Oakland. Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and he currently lives in San Francisco. He is the author of seven previous collections of poetry: The Book of Perceptions; Placing the Accents; Dust and Conscience; Within The Margins; Four Letter Words; 100 Words, coauthored with Damon Potter; and Book of The Other, recipient of the American Book Award and CLMP’s Firecracker Award for Poetry. He is also the author of one children’s book, Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant To Say Please Pass the Sugar. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 12/14 and 12/31 here? Contact us to let us know!