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.
Chapbooks
moments like these, Julianna Crandall
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
At the age of fifteen, broken-hearted and full of some insatiable, unknown longing, I looked myself in the mirror and wrote a poem. It was simple, it was sweet, it changed everything and nothing. Adolescence is such a delicate time where up seems down and left seems right; for me, putting the chaotic and unknown into words allows what is blurry to shift back into focus. For that fifteen-year-old girl, that first moments like these poem became a cornerstone that shaped the foundation of the rest of her teenage years.
These are letters to myself. These are little checkpoints along the road I call my life. There always have been and always will be moments like these, where we become aware of the bittersweet, magnificent burden it is to live. Welcome to the inner mind of a past version of myself, spanning ages 15 to 18, in which I attempt to swallow life’s bitterest pills and sweetest desserts. There are moments like these, many more moments to come.
Julianna Marie Crandall is a twenty-year-old emerging author and poet, currently studying for her BA in English: Creative Writing at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has had two works previously published through the Southern Lakes Anthology in poetry and prose. Julianna hails from Milton, Wisconsin, where she grew up with her parents, two siblings, and hundreds of miles of near-empty backroads. Her endless love affair with life leaves her constantly attempting to put the human experience into words. It is by God’s grace alone that she ever succeeds in doing so.
Calving Season, Debbie Collins
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Debbie Collins offers up her sophomore chapbook effort, Calving Season, with keen insights of a world that most people today seldom see. Collins, who grew up in Southside and East End suburban Richmond, spent the summers and weekends of her youth on her grandparents’ farms in southwest Virginia. It is there where she became well acquainted with the practicalities of life and death on a working farm. “Buzzards were circling low, // the grass all clover and dew” starts to set the reader’s expectation, and the hard truth when life just doesn’t work out:
We could hear the mother bellowing
for her stillborn calf, a heart-rending sound
The reality of that delicate new life that fails and how the custodians of the land have to do what needs to be done is thoughtfully rendered but also stark: “Grandad drove out in his truck // and hoisted the calf into the bed, // its perfect black coat still slick with birth.”
In contrast to learning the stories of life and death on a farm, Collins also delves into city life and a some of the harsher realities. “…above the city din, the air ringing with the // music of trash cans being thrown around,” lends a discordant but vibrant voice in “Richmond, Monday Morning”. Here, she brings into focus the lives of those on the fringes, the devalued, and “the kings and queens of the street, the royalty of // the city, all tattered robes and tragic smiles”.
Collins shares a life of experiences, challenges, and ultimately, happiness, in Calving Season. The book examines life and death, joy, and intense conflict. Taken together, farm life and city life, she explores both with results that are startling and true.
Debbie Collins reads and writes from Richmond, VA. Her stories have been published in both online and print journals including Panoplyzine, Streetlight Magazine, and Third Wednesday. Additionally she has been nominated for Best of the Net. Debbie spends her a good deal of time at home roaming the streets of the city in search of the best cup of coffee.
Things Left Undone, Angelique Giammarino
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Things Left Undone is an exploration of yearning, guilt, and how tenderness and resentment can braid together. It examines the visceral animal body, the changing of seasons, and the slow fictionalizing of the beloved through fantasy.
These poems have been collected from a body of work written from 2017 to 2023. Their collection represents a punctuation mark on a phase of the author’s life.
Angelique Giammarino is an amateur poet living and working in upstate NY. She falls in love easily and well, celebrates nature, and lives deliciously.
Rez Void, Jake Arrowtop
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Rez Void is a collection of poems intended to be as “unsacred” as possible. My interest lies in the seedy and dark experiences that come with growing up on an Indian reservation. Many of the themes are universal but they are informed completely by the unique, complicated, and sometimes messy experience of growing up as Amskapi-Pikuni in northern Montana.
In keeping with these unromantic notions of Indigeneity, the poems thematically deal with rugged and rough realities while also taking petty potshots at common modes of “Indigenous” expression. My aim is to shirk any notions of “resilient healing” as a poetic trope that can be found in many examples of Indigenous writing.
Instead, you’ll find the musings of a cranky NDN man trying his damndest to be the crabbiest crab in the bucket. With that said, life can be full of wonder and there are pockets of celebration to be found in the collection, based mostly in community, relationships, and the inescapable beauty of fatherhood.
Jake Arrowtop is Amskapi-Pikuni from Heart Butte, Montana. Jake grew up on the Blackfeet reservation where he currently teaches ELA at an alternative school. He earned a degree in Creative Writing at the University of Montana where he was named a James Welch Scholar. His fiction has appeared in Hemingway Shorts and Scribble Magazine and he strives to write culturally relevant poetry and prose that reflects his heritage and the unique experience of growing up Indigenous. Jake enjoys hunting, fishing and hanging out with his partner and new baby.
Full-length
A Year of Last Things, Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Following several of his internationally acclaimed novels, A Year of Last Things is Michael Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed.
Moving from a Sri Lankan boarding school to Molière’s chair during his last stage performance, to Bulgarian churches and their icons, to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Michael Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him.
Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels, including Coming Through Slaughter, The Cat’s Table, and Warlight; a memoir, Running in the Family; a nonfiction book on film-editing, The Conversations; and several books of poetry, including The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting. Among other accolades, The English Patient received the Booker Prize in 1992 and was made into a film by Anthony Minghella; Anil’s Ghost was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.
Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: March 22, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Amie Whittemore’s Nest of Matches is a lavish declaration of the beauty of the natural world, queer identity, and of the imagination set free. Whittemore’s third collection explores the complexities of love—romantic, familial, and love for place—and wonders at cycles of life, finding that: “Every habit / even love—strangest / of them all—offers exhaustion / and renewal.” Moving seamlessly from meditations on the moon’s phases to explorations of dream spaces to searches for meaning through patterns of love and loss, Whittemore’s work embodies the mysteries of dichotomies—grief and joy, consciousness and unconsciousness, habit and spontaneity—and how they coexist to create our identities. Throughout the collection, Whittemore reveals how interior nature manifests into exterior habits and how physical landscapes shape the psyche.
Amie Whittemore is the author of Glass Harvest and Star Tent. She was the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, and her poems and prose have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.
The Palace of Forty Pillars, Armen Davoudian
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Wry, tender, and formally innovative, Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, tells the story of a self estranged from the world around him as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. It is a story darkened by the long shadow of global tragedies—the Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia. With masterful attention to rhyme and meter, these poems also carefully witness the most intimate encounters: the awkward distance between mother and son getting ready in the morning, the delicate balance of power between lovers, a tense exchange with the morality police in Iran.
In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars—but, reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of Davoudian’s magical, ruminative poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, a home for the speaker, who is unable to return to it in life.
Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and lives in California.
you, Chantal Neveu
Publisher: Book*Hug Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship.
Personal autonomy and the formation of “self” are nourished here by multiples—I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.
Chantal Neveu is the author of several books of poetry, including you; La vie radieuse (This Radiant Life, winner of the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and the 2021 Nelson Ball Prize); coït (Coït); and Une spectaculaire influence (A Spectacular Influence). She has created numerous interdisciplinary literary works, in Canada and abroad. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She has held residencies at Maison de la poésie de Nantes (France), Passa Porta and Villa Hellebosch (Belgium), and Villa Waldberta (Germany). Neveu lives in Montreal.
Erín Moure is a Montréal poet and translator curious about what’s active in the poetry of others. Moure’s most recent books are Kapusta and Insecession, a biotranspoetics published in one volume with her translation from Galician of Chus Pato’s biopoetics, Secession. Other recent translations include White Piano by Nicole Brossard, translated with Robert Majzels from the French, and Galician Songs by Rosalía de Castro, translated from the Galician.
A Blueprint for Survival, Kim Trainor
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: March 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
A Blueprint for Survival begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, “Seeds,” which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to our current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the beautiful cell.”
Kim Trainor is the author of Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*hug Press, 2018), and A Thin Fire Runs Through Me (Goose Lane Editions, 2023). Her latest book is A Blueprint for Survival (Guernica Editions, 2024). Her poetry has won the Gustafson Prize, The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest. In 2018, she was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Trainor’s work has appeared in the 2013 Global Poetry Anthology and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2014. She lives in East Vancouver.
Daywork, Jessica Fisher
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
Jessica Fisher brings “the faraway close,” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each “day” is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.
In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time is also a tether, rendering violence, beauty, grief, and art separate merely by a matter of days. “So you see once again,” she writes, “violence is to beauty / as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath.”
Like the fresco itself, Daywork is committed to a time- and site-specific art, and to the daily work of creation. At once an elegiac meditation and a brave unearthing, this book expertly discerns the monumentalizing portrayals of history and its violences, while boldly illuminating other crucial accounts of everyday existence.
Jessica Fisher is the author of Daywork. She is also the author of Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Inmost, which was awarded the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her honors include the 2012 Rome Prize, a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellowship in Poetry, and a research grant from the Hellman Foundation. She holds a PhD from University of California at Berkeley and is currently an associate professor of English at Williams College. She lives with her family in Western Massachusetts.
The End of Everything and Everything That Comes after That, Nick Lantz
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Format: Paperback
A chicken lives for eighteen months after its head is cut off. Tourists pose with an inflatable sex doll at the 9/11 memorial. A sex-reveal party starts a wildfire in a forest named for a conquistador. The author’s cancer treatments are intertwined with the rise of domestic fascism. “Is that something I should put in a poem?” asks Nick Lantz; the resounding answer is yes!
Mixing sincerity with irony, lyric with vernacular, Lantz’s collisions of style and subject are at their most vibrant in the long sequence at the center of the collection, a series of poems that brilliantly capture the disruption and disorder of our lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in breathless, unpunctuated verse. Depicting the uncanny dissonance of living during and beyond events that feel world ending, this volume reminds us of the ways in which we carry our own traumas and the traumas of history with us in our daily lives.
Nick Lantz is the author of four previous books of poetry, including You, Beast and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology and his awards include the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lantz teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 3/19 to 3/25 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
New Poetry Titles (2/27/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 2/27 from Alien Buddha Press, GASHER Press, Bottlecap Press, University of Arizona Press, Omnidawn, Signal Editions, Guernica Editions, The Backwaters Press, University of Nebraska Press, Caitlin Press Inc, Autumn House Press, Georgia Review Books, The University of Kentucky Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Brick Books, Changes Press, Tupelo Press, Black Lawrence Press, and MoonPath Press.
March ‘24: Welcome to Issue 2
Read a note from editor Aiden Hunt about our second bimonthly issue, contributor accomplishments, and things to come.
New Poetry Titles (3/5/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 3/5 from Graywolf Press, Knopf, Bottlecap Press, powerHouse Books, Milkweed Editions, Acre Books, Seagull Books, The University Press of Kentucky, Yale University Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin Books, Able Muse Press, Button Poetry, Miami University Press, Eyewear Publishing, Black Ocean, Seren, MoonPath Press, and Book*Hub Press. Editor’s picks from Diane Seuss and Cindy Juyoung Ok.
Contributor Poem of the Month: The Plan
Read the Contributor Poem of the Month for March 2024, “The Plan” by C.M. Crockford, along with a few words from the poet.
New Poetry Titles (3/12/24)
Check out new poetry books published in the week of 3/12 from Belle Point Press, Bottlecap Press, Black Lawrence Press, Haymarket Books, Ecco, Milkweed Editions, Seagull Books, Hub City Press, Nightboat Books, Signature Books, Four Way Books, Curbstone Books, Kaya Press, Kith Books, Saturnalia Books, Ohio University Press, University of Wisconsin Press, Jackleg Press, Semiotext(e) and Brick Books.
Chapbook Poem of the Month: Collection
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for March 2024, “Collection” from Dreamsoak by Will Russo, along with a few words from the poet.
Meet Our Contributor: C.M. Crockford
Meet our contributor, C.M. Crockford, a writer and editor originally from New Hampshire, now living in Philadelphia with his cat, Wally.
New Poetry Titles (3/19/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 3/19 from Bottlecap Press, Autumn House Press, Knopf, Guernica Editions, Tin House Books, Milkweed Editions, University of Wisconsin Press and Book*Hug Press.
Meet Our Contributor: Mike Bagwell
Meet our contributor, Mike Bagwell, a writer, poet, and software engineer in Philly. He’s published two poetry chapbooks and has a full-length collection forthcoming in 2024.
New Poetry Titles (3/26/24)
Check out new poetry books for the week of 3/26 from Bottlecap Press, Nightwood Editions, Harbour Publishing, McClellan & Stewart, Carcanet Press, University of Regina Press, At Bay Press, Guernica Editions, Beltway Editions, University of Georgia Press, Lost Horse Press, University of New Mexico Press, University of Massachusetts Press, Book*Hug Books, Haymarket Books, Archipelago, Autumn House Press, Hat & Beard Press, Tigerlily Press, and GASHER Press.
Meet Our Contributor: Francesca Leader
Meet our contributor, Francesca Leader, a Montanan living elsewhere who writes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Read about her writing life in her Contributor Q&A.
April ‘24: Of SPD, Genocide, and Book Reviews
Editor Aiden Hunt writes about distribution woes, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and what we have coming during April in the Editor’s Note.
New Poetry Titles (4/2/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/2 from Bottlecap Press, Green Linden Press, Stanchion Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Small Harbor Publishing, Milkweed Editions, Graywolf Press, Wave Books, Arsenal Pulp Press, New Directions, Invisible Publishing, Brick Books, Sixteen Rivers Press, Penguin Books, City Lights Publishers, And Other Stories, BOA Editions Ltd, OR Books, Not a Cult, Copper Canyon Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Beacon Press, Biblioasis, Nightboat Books, Amistad, House of Anansi Press, Hub City Press, Seagull Books, Fordham University Press, Iron Pen, Persea Books, Central Avenue Publishing, CavanKerry Press, W. W. Norton & Company, University of Akron Press and Red Hen Press.
Contributor Poem of the Month: Self Portrait
Read the Contributor Poem of the Month for April 2024, “Self Portrait” by Mike Bagwell, along with a few words from the poet.
On Cindy Juyoung Ok’s ‘House Work’: A Review Essay
Editor Aiden Hunt’s essay reviews Cindy Juyoung Ok’s poetry chapbook, ‘House Work’, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in March 2023.
New Poetry Titles (4/9/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/9 from Faber & Faber, Small Harbor Publishing, Bottlecap Press, University of Pittsburgh Press, Green Writers Press, Loom Press, Paraclete Press, Able Muse Press, Caitlin Press Inc., Stephen F. Austin University Press, University of North Texas Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, University of New Mexico Press, Curbstone Books, Milkweed Editions, Red Hen Press, Wave Books, Alice James Books, Paul Dry Books, Copper Canyon Press, Coffee House Press, powerHouse Books, Dial Press, Knopf, Nightboat Books, SUNY Press, Belle Point Press, White Stag Publishing, and Anhinga Press.
New Poetry Titles (4/16/24)
Check out new poetry books published the week of 4/16 from Bottlecap Press, Knopf, HarperOne, Small Harbor Publishing, Red Hen Press, Copper Canyon Press, Nightwood Editions, Southern Illinois University Press, Seren, Sarabande Books, Phoneme Media, BOA Editions Ltd., W. W. Norton & Company, JBE Books, White Stag Publishing, ECW Press, knife | fork | book and McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Chapbook Poem of the Month: Study of Daylight
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for April 2024, “Study of Daylight” from Love Letters from a Burning Planet by MJ Gomez, along with a few words from the poet.
Review: And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes
As if an exploding star: T. De Los Reyes’s love-poems of self-discovery in the ordinary magic of the everyday. Read the review by new PCR contributor, Drishya.
New Poetry Titles (4/23/24)
Check out new poetry books for the week of 4/23 from Bottlecap Press, Biblioasis, Copper Canyon Press, Red Hen Press, Milkweed Editions, University of Arkansas Press, Seren, Carcanet Press Ltd., Talonbooks, Unbound Edition Press and BOA Editions Ltd.
On ‘A Throat Full of Forest-Dirt’ by Bri Stokes
C.M. Crockford reviews “A Throat Full of Forest-Dirt” by Bri Stokes, a poetry chapbook published by Bottlecap Press in November, 2023, in this essay.
New Poetry Titles (4/30/24)
Check out new poetry books for the week of 4/30 from Bottlecap Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, University of Iowa Press, Copper Canyon Press, David R. Godine, Caitlin Press Inc, Seagull Books, Tupelo Press, Guernica Editions, Southern Illinois University Press, University of Nevada Press, University of Utah Press, University of Calgary Press, Salmon Poetry, Deep Vellum Publishing and Bauhan Publishing.