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 poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week.

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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Contributor Book Launch!

Birdsongs: Poems 2020-2023, C.M. Crockford

Publisher: Alien Buddha Press
Publication Date: March 2, 2024
Format: Paperback

Birdsongs: Poems 2020-2023 is a mesmerizing collection that transcends the boundaries of language to immerse readers in a kaleidoscope of emotions. Crockford’s evocative verses paint vibrant landscapes where desire, resilience, and nostalgia take flight like free-spirited birds. From the raw intensity of “Animal” to the reflective echoes of “Winter’s Visit,” this book invites you on a poetic journey through the intricate melodies of life. With each poem, Crockford unveils a world where nature, love, and societal reflections blend seamlessly, creating a symphony of words that resonate long after the final verse. Birdsongs is an enchanting testament to the power of poetry, capturing the essence of existence with a grace that is both timeless and profoundly relevant.

C.M. Crockford is a writer and editor originally from New Hampshire. He’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Adore and Mark The Place, and his debut full-length, Birdsongs, will emerge in March 2024 from Alien Buddha Press. Crockford lives in Philadelphia with his cat Wally. 
Find out more at cmcrockford.net.

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Chapbooks

Snake Lore, Jane Morton

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

Jane Morton’s debut chapbook Snake Lore explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together—a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns—the beauty and the harm that they potentiate—converge and haunt.

Jane Morton is a poet based in Birmingham, Alabama. They received their MFA from the University of Alabama, where they were Online Editor for Black Warrior Review. Their debut chapbook Snake Lore won the Black River Chapbook Contest from Black Lawrence Press, and their poems have been published in journals including Gulf Coast, West Branch, Ninth Letter, Boulevard, Passages North, and Poetry Northwest. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and they have received a Fulbright Fellowship and a Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship for the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. They currently teach English and creative writing at the University of Alabama.

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Country Songs for Alice, Emma Binder

Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: March 3, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Country Songs for Alice, a nonbinary, queer narrator passes through the crucible of love, romance, and heartbreak against the backdrop of rural America—a landscape which offers luminous belonging, even as the hazards of homophobia, loneliness, and isolation loom large. Part roadtrip, part mixtape, these poems are explorations of love, music, romance, pageantry, loneliness, and belonging in the rural places and small towns that seem to preclude queer culture. Country Songs for Alice not only tells the story of a relationship and its dissolution but reclaims country western imagery and aesthetics for a queer audience, dousing the narrator’s experience in the language of cowboys, horses, rodeos, trucks, and desert skies.

Emma Binder is a writer from Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. They received their MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and were previously a Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

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Whirs, Snaps, Clicks and Clacks, Max Kerwien

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

Whirs, Snaps, Clicks and Clacks is a collection of poetry about the human body. Like knees cracking or a slight sigh, there are noises we make just going about our day. They add a soundtrack to our lives, sometimes harmless, sometimes ominous. Max Kerwien, informed by his experience with disability and Crohn’s Disease, writes on the inconvenient responsibility of having a body.

Max Kerwien is a disabled poet and comedian. In 2016, he won the Joan Grayston Poetry Prize. His work has been published in Arboreal Magazine, Bricolage, decomp Journal, and more. He lives in Los Angeles, where he aspires to one day be a stunt double for the Muppets.

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Split, Jade Han

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

Split gives voice to the declarations and the dreams of a boundless spirit perpetually aspiring for more, and to break free of the boundaries and boxes the world so desires to keep them in. A soul accustomed to living in the liminal in-between, between ethnicities, cultures, and the gender binary, Han explores the spaces where belonging exists, where it never has, and where they have forged it for themself.

Writing imbued with contradictions reflects the inconsistencies in the expectations of an insatiable, never-satisfied world. Breaking down and inspecting the concept of identity from every point of view, Han removes the idea of the self from every other voice telling them who to be, creating a space where the self can simply exist.

Jade Han is a mixed Korean and Mexican poet from Chicago, IL. They were a featured poet in Papers Publishing and have been published in Outland Magazine, ONE ART Poetry Journal, Flurry Magazine, and Cool Beans Lit. Their work explores the different aspects of their identity and how they interact with one another. Han is currently a staff member of Ignatian Literary Magazine and a staff poet for Dalika Magazine. Alongside writing, they work as a barista and spend their time skateboarding and sketching.

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Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II, Julie Weiss

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

If you loved The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, you´re in for another tantalizing treat:

The pages of Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II are roaring. Julie Weiss will make you hunger for “café con leche,” “caramel- dipped / castaña de mazapán,” deep-fried churros dipped into “an ecstasy of chocolate.” This collection enchants and aches. I am obsessed with these lovers and the world they inhabit, the “gasp of mountains / in slumber, voluptuous under snow- woven / blankets.” Weiss has left me teetering, and “I’d risk it all again and again.” —Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and a chapbook, The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, published by Bottlecap Press. Her “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a finalist for Sundress’s 2023 Best of the Net anthology. She won Sheila-Na-Gig’s editor’s choice award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite‘s 2021 Microchap Series. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in Rust + Moth, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, Wild Roof Journal, and Ghost City Review, among others. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/

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in storyboard, melanie h. manuel

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

melanie h. manuel’s debut chapbook, in storyboard, is a collection of poems that are elegiac by nature. It is about understanding life experiences—such as falling in love, the loss of a loved one, the acceptance of that kind of loss, and heartbreak, to name a few—through the act of watching. The use of film, television, and Philippine mythology serves as lenses for better understanding these themes of grief, love, loss, and vulnerability. 

From Wong Kar-wai’s classic film, Fallen Angels (1995) to Marlon Fuentes’s docudrama, Bontoc Eulogy (released in the same year), we are asked to embody the scenes of the films; where one ruminates on loving from afar and being loved from afar and what that all means as an observer and actor, the other ruminates on the horrors unfolding during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as the persona of the camera. This sort of retelling falls in line with the other thread of this collection—Philippine myth, by drawing on childhood superstitions and the misunderstood story about the manananggal as its own way of mythmaking. 

in storyboard culminates into a journey toward understanding what it means to reconcile with loss, its unpredictable journey—how even in grief, clarity can be found.

Melanie H. Manuel is a Filipina American poet. She attends SDSU for her MFA in poetry. She is a recipient of the Prebys Creative Writing Scholarship, the Master’s Research Fellowship, and most recently, the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship. She teaches in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies and English and Comparative Literature departments. Her work has been published by Third Iris Zine, North American Review, Grist: A Literary Journal of Arts, boats against the current, Los Angeles Review, and The Shore. She also has forthcoming work with minnesota review, Porkbelly Press, Quillkeepers Press, and Zone 3 Press.

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How To: life lessons in poetry, Grace Dellis

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

Stacked haiku, prose poetry, and free verse poetry come together in Grace Dellis’s second chapbook, How To: Life Lessons in Poetry. A peek into the daily navigations of life, How To moves from serious to silly, offering a selection of poems that are biting, thoughtful, clever, and deeply human. Where her first chapbook recollected a particular moment in time, How To gives us a broader look into the way poets see the world – with fierce curiosity, sharp humor, and profound kindness.

With poems about poetry, personhood, faith, friendship, anger, grief, and more, How To invites us to explore the age-old question: how do we live a meaningful life? The answers range from anger (How to Burn Bridges) to unraveling (Notes on the Human Condition) to sarcastic (How to Survive Capitalism), and everything in between. Grace’s poems remind us that life is often hard, requiring care and attention, but it is also a thing to be enjoyed; the playfulness she incorporates into much of her work, even when writing about the difficulty of staying safe as a woman, or about the emotions that arise when signing divorce papers, or the challenge of walking away from a long-held faith, creates a reading experience that feels acutely personal.

George Eliot wrote, “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” In How To, Grace explores the countless ways we share the weight of life. As we learn from each other, tapping into the unique perspectives that are born from shared experiences, difficulty subsides. How To: Life Lessons in Poetry is, in this way, one poet’s offering to her readers – that in life’s most arduous moment, we can find someone else who has felt the same thing.

Grace Dellis is a poet and single mother living in Huntsville, AL. She serves on the Board of Out Loud Huntsville, a thriving community of spoken word artists in Alabama. Her work has appeared in various journals, anthologies, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; How To: Life Lessons in Poetry is her second chapbook. You can connect with her on Instagram, @gracedellis.

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Full-length

Editor’s Pick
Read review at Another Chicago Magazine

Murmur, Cameron Barnett

Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

The second book by NAACP Image Award finalist Cameron Barnett, Murmur considers the question of how we become who we are. The answers Barnett offers in these poems are neither safe nor easy, as he traces a Black man’s lineage through time and space in contemporary America, navigating personal experiences, political hypocrisies, pop culture, social history, astronomy, and language. Barnett synthesizes unexpected connections and contradictions, exploring the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and the death of Terence Crutcher in 2016 and searching both the stars of Andromeda and a plantation in South Carolina. A diagnosis from the poet’s infancy haunts the poet as he wonders, “like too many Black men,” if “a heart is not enough to keep me alive.”

Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh-based poet and teacher. He is the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water, winner of the Autumn House Press Rising Writer Contest, and finalist for an NAACP Image Award.

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Gay Girl Prayers, Emily Austin

Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

The extreme level of sass in Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers does not mean that this collection is irreverent. On the contrary, in rewriting Bible verses to affirm and uplift queer, feminist, and trans realities, Austin invites readers into a giddy celebration of difference and a tender appreciation for the lives and perspectives of “strange women.”

Packed with zingy one liners, sexual innuendo, self-respect, U-Hauling, and painfully earnest declarations of love, this is gayness at its best, harnessed to a higher purpose and ready to fight the powers that be.

Emily Austin currently resides in Ottawa/the territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. She is the author of the novel, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, which was longlisted for The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, and a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. She studied Library Sciences, English Literature, and Religious Studies at King’s University College and Western University.

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A Night in the Country, Laura Newbern

Publisher: Changes Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

The “country” of these poems is not, or not only, the idyllic backdrop of a pastoral scene; it is also, more ominously, the kind ofcountry defined by a flag, dark borderland, and violent history. In other words: place of separation. Writing about the works ofBellini, Newbern shifts focus away from the paintings’ subjects and into the scenery where landscape is what constitutes the irreducible distance of the subjects from every other thing. “The Madonna ofthe Meadow cannot also be the Madonna not of the Meadow,” Glück writes in her foreword. “No one thing can be everything.” A Night in the Country is haunted by figures of loneliness who attend to their isolation with a spirit of religiosity, for them a necessary art. This is a quietly astonishing book about the enduring discrepancy between what we hope for and what is possible.

Laura Newbern is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for Kore Press. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, and The Georgia Review, among others. The recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she grew up in Washington, D.C. and currently lives and works in Georgia.

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Same After Life, Tony Mancus

Publisher: GASHER Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Same After Life wades into and through the dreamlike spaces in an imagined post-life trajectory using a crown of sonnets and a few other grounding threads to pull the reader back into our shared and semi-habitable reality. A book that is haunting, meditative, expansive, careful, charged, and imaginative— this elegiac beast suspends us in a space of possibilities for Being post-being.

Tony Mancus is the author of several chapbooks and All the Ordinariness (The Magnificent Field). He works as an instructional designer, serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse, and lives in Colorado with his wife, son, and two yappy cats.

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Crisis Actor, Declan Ryan

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor chronicles various kinds of failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees, a hanged donkey and a bloated rat, solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths—these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash in rueful self-accusation and laconic skepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage, and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightness of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who—in Matthew Arnold’s words—”has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself.”

But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous afternoons in pubs cheering for hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach toward grace and redemption.

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo, Ireland. His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, and Boxing News. He lives in London, England.

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Makeshift Altar, Amy M. Alvarez

Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

Amy M. Alvarez explores the cultural, spiritual, and place-based experiences of Afro-Caribbean and African American diasporic peoples in this haunting and emotionally charged collection of poems that meditates on the meaning of home and existence. Born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents, Alvarez draws readers into a journey of self-discovery and identity, connecting the past with the present while highlighting the complexities of navigating life as a multicultural American. The musicality of her language weaves together themes of environment, family, and migration, as well as her own ancestry as a Black Latinx woman. Makeshift Altar is an intimate collection that explores identities forged by colonialism and displacement and shaped by individual choice and collective power.

Amy M. Alvarez‘s work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, swamp pink (formerly known as Crazyhorse), and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Alvarez is coeditor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology and teaches writing and literature at West Virginia University. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet.

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cue, Siwar Masannat

Publisher: Georgia Review Books
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

With cue, Siwar Masannat follows up her prize-winning debut with poems that wrestle with intimacy and distance. Departing from love as a force of creation, cue’s intertextual experiments and lyric poems map environmental relations and pose questions about privacy and visibility, love and family, gender, and ecological agency.

Masannat responds to artist Akram Zaatari’s excavation of studio portraits by Hashem El Madani. Captured between the 1940s and 1970s in the Lebanese town of Saida, El Madani’s photographs are living artifacts of a transnational modernity. They archive performances of gender and romance that seek to circumvent respectability politics. The private-public, then, emerges as a paradox at the heart of cue’s composition. The desire to commune with and re-transmit the photographs and their stories is accompanied by the speaker’s understanding of how visibility may be coopted and how privacy, at once essential and weaponized, is unevenly enjoyed, opportunistically deployed, and systematically encroached upon.

Siwar Masannat is a Jordanian writer. 50 Water Dreams, her debut collection of poetry, was selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Competition and published in 2015. Managing Editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner, Masannat currently works at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Most recently, Masannat’s writing appeared in Mïtra: Revue d’art et de littérature, 7iber, Fence, and Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, among others.

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States of Emergency, Yoyo Comay

Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

States of Emergency is a book-length poem about the apocalyptic present, written in a language whose meaning is liquid and full of slippage, always spilling out from its container. In Yoyo Comay’ s hands, words roil, churn, and surge. By taking on different mood and modes, from the prophetic to the colloquial, he has created a form that is a constant unravelling— a leap of faith into intuitive meaning, a letting go into ongoingness. “ I am catapulted into where I am,” he writes, “ and the air concusses around me.” Comay sees poetry as a visceral experience: a state of immanence, embodiment, emergence, emergency. This is poetry as diary and seismograph, an infinite scroll for the end of days.  It is a debut like no other.

Yoyo Comay is a poet and musician from Toronto. He released his first EP of original music Crushed under the name Sufferin Mall in 2022. His work has appeared in The Peripheral Review, Commo Mag, Touch the Donkey, Metatron Press, and Small Walker Press. He is also a co-founder of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective. States of Emergency is his first poetry collection.

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Burning Sage, Meghan Fandrich

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

On the day that Lytton, BC burned to the ground, Meghan Fandrich ran from the flames. She saw the village turn into a black pillar of smoke, and went home after a month-long evacuation to its ashes. Her house, on the edge of the fire, was saved; her community and her small business were not. Life as she knew it was gone, and somehow, in spite of the trauma and the ongoing onslaught of natural disasters, she had to keep going. Living. Surviving. Burning Sage shares Meghan’ s deeply personal story of the fire, the ensuing trauma, and the path out of it. But it is also a human story, a universal story, of loneliness, fragility and beauty. The poems follow the arc of shock, fear, and anger, and the impossibility of single parenting in a burned-up town. They tell of a connection, a love, and the way that feeling understood can help us understand ourselves. The poems in Burning Sage share a vivid portrait of grief and heartbreak and, ultimately, of healing.

Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’ pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For the past decade, she ran Klowa Art Café , a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’ s debut poetry collection.

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Origins of the Syma Species, Tares Oburumu, Kwame Dawes

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Tares Oburumu’s collection is a brief history of where he came from: Syma, a neglected oil-producing region of Nigeria. After growing up with a single mother in the creek- and brook-marked region, and himself now a single parent, Oburumu examines single parenthood and how love defines family circles. Mixing music, religion, and political critique, Origins of the Syma Species evokes pasts and futures.

Inspired by the relative chaos found in the origin of things, Oburumu’s poems explore how the beauty of chaos binds us to our ancestral roots. In his poems Oburumu identifies with anyone who is a single parent or is dealing with the lonely trauma of a broken home. His poems instill hopefulness in a world that has the means to throw many into poverty and agony.

Tares Oburumu lives in Yenagoa, the south side of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. He is the winner of the Green Author Prize for poetry. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Bluepepper, Woven Tales Press, Afrocritik, and Eunoia Review, among many other journals.

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Our Air, Nora Treatbaby

Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback

Immersed in a tangled weave of contemporary life where big box stores and suburban parking lots coexist alongside the instructive silence of juniper trees and a pulsing waterfall, Our Air sketches the possibilities of eco and social interdependence during late-stage capitalism.Their inscriber, Nora Treatbaby, is a trans woman reckoning with the constraints of gender categories, when being a woman is “an implausible dream” and “an insane vibration.” With sincere curiosity and a sprinkling of levity, these poems advocate for the world-building potential available in a material commitment to gentle friendship with all networks of life on Earth.

Nora Treatbaby is a writer and artist based in New York State. Our Air is her first book. She has published two chapbooks, I <3 2 Swim (2022) and Hope Is Weird (2020).

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Antillia, Henrietta Goodman

Publisher: The Backwaters Press
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

The title poem of this collection refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a “resident ghost” who makes the domestic realm of “the cradle and the bed” uninhabitable. The ghosts are sons, fathers “asleep in front of the TV,” and a variety of exes—“lost boys” with names like The Texan and Mr. No More Cowboy Hat whom Henrietta Goodman treats with snarky wit but also with grief, guilt, and love.

Although memories pervade this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.

Henrietta Goodman is an assistant professor of English at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. She is the author of All That Held Us, Hungry Moon, and Take What You Want.

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Quicker Than the Eye, Joe Fiorito

Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

In  his third collection of verse, Quicker Than The Eye, Joe Fiorito continues to craft short, sharp poems that define the harder edges of urban life. His principal tools are a  photographer’s eye for detail, and a musician’ s ear for the sound of the human voice. Now, in Quicker Than The Eye, Canada’ s poet of the streets turns his gaze inward, writing about the influences of early love, family tragedy, and the search for meaning in a world where “ the desolate things are mine.” A master of spare, razor-sharp language, Fiorito manages to strip sentiment from memory in order to find tenderness and enduring truth on the margins of the city.  He has never written more austerely or more beautifully.

Born in Fort William, Ontario, Joe Fiorito’ s awards include the National Newspaper Award for Columns, the Bressani Prize for Short Fiction, and the City of Toronto Book Award. He is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including two collections of poetry, most recently All I Have Learned Is Where I Have Been (2021). He is married and lives in Toronto.

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Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman

Publisher: Signal Editions
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman’ s brilliant new collection, comes to terms with the question of legacy— what we leave behind as a species, as citizens, and as parents. Marked by the lucidity and precision she has been celebrated for, the poems encompass the monuments of Western civilization, a climate in decline and the pandemic. The title is inspired by the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, destroying the wooden roof-frame  known as  La Forê t; it also alludes to “Cathedral Grove,” otherwise known as MacMillan Provincial Park, one of the last old growth stands on Vancouver Island. In poems of praise and lament for our fractured world— “Everything is becoming more itself / or something else,” she writes— Glickman has tapped into a magnificent vein of lyric richness.

Susan Glickman’ s  most recent book is  Artful Flight: Selected Essays 1985-2019. She is the author of seven books of poetry, four novels for adults, three novels for children, and a work of literary history. She lives in Toronto where she works as a freelance editor and is learning to paint.

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Letters from the Black Ark, D.S. Marriott

Publisher: Omnidawn
Publication Date: March 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

The poems in this collection center on the word “dub,” which accrues a subtle lyrical connotation throughout its various forms and meanings—to bestow, vest, crown, and also to suspend, reverb, echo, and sever. Dub poetry plays with revealing and concealing, while also pointing the way to the conditions that produce black poetic music. In D.S. Marriott’s poetry, tragic catastrophes of current black existence—London knife crime, the Windrush scandal, Grenfell, and deadly race violence—are portrayed as questions of language. To speak this language, as Marriott’s poem show, is to take on the forces that cause rupture. Throughout these poems of loss, exile, and obliteration, the poet foresees his downfall and metamorphosis, ultimately realizing too late that he cannot transcend the reverberations and echoes laden with black social death.

D.S. Marriott is the author of Before Whiteness, Lacan Noir, Whither Fanon?, and Hoodoo Voodoo. His poetry has appeared in Chicago Review, PoetryLondon, LosAngeles Review of Books, Snow, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Review, and Paris Review. He currently lives in Atlanta, where he is the Charles T. Winship Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.

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Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, Margarita Pintado Burgos, Alejandra Quintana Arocho

Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Publication Date: February 27, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see.

Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.

With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish. Alejandra Quintana Arocho’s sensitive English translation renders the stark force of these poems without smoothing over the language of the original.

This collection is for anyone who has felt the weight of beauty that remains hidden. It is for those who have left behind a mother, a father, a country. It is for those who know that there is no way out of the poem, for those who have had to live off a house of words and need that house to be as real as possible. Pintado Burgos writes as a woman, exile, daughter, sister, lover, and artist empowered by the restorative potential of the creative phenomenon.

Margarita Pintado Burgos is the author of three books of poetry, the latest of which is Simultánea, la marea. She is a full professor of language and literature at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Alejandra Quintana Arocho is a writer and literary translator whose publications include a centennial bilingual edition of Gabriela Mistral’s first book of poems, Desolación.

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The Scarecrow of My Former Self, Sarah Stockton

Publisher: MoonPath Press
Publication Date: March 4, 2024
Format: Paperback

Sarah’s full-length collection, The Scarecrow of My Former Self, focuses on the themes of illness and resilience. It was a finalist for the Albiso Award.

Sarah Stockton is the author of the chapbook Time’s Apprentice (dancing girl press, 2021) and Castaway (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Sarah’s poems have appeared in wide-ranging publications including EcoTheo Review, Glass Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, About Place Journal, Rise Up Review, and many more. Sarah has an extensive background in university teaching, workshop facilitation, freelance writing and editing, and is the author of two books on spirituality and spiritual direction. Sarah consults with poet peers, emerging poets, and poet elders on a regular basis, as part of RMR’s commitment to best practices in poetics and publishing accountability. Whether reading, writing, studying, or teaching, poetry has been a part of Sarah’s life for over 40 years.

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