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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Chapbooks

Elegies for the Undead, Zedkiah Gonsalves Schild

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

Elegies for the Undead is a collection of elegies centered around labor, family histories, and loss. These poems meditate on the relationship between permeance and place, while simultaneously mirroring a coming-to-age tale of a writer’s awakening to aging and disappearance.

Zedkiah Gonsalves Schild is a multidisciplinary artists who lives and practices in Oakland, California. His work has or will appear in Academy of American Poets, West Trade Review, Heavy Feather, The Seattle Review, The Burnside Review, and elsewhere. Zedekiah Schild was a 2022 Carlos Villa fellow and is currently pursuing an MFA in studio arts at Californian College of the Arts.

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Warp and Weft, Carla Stein

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

Warp and Weft, by Nanaimo poet Carla Stein, is a handmade chapbook of poetry about climate injustice and environmental concern. It contains nine individual poems interspersed with full-colour artwork also made by the poet.

Carla Stein enjoys cooking up stuff like veggies, poems, paintings, and illustrations. She shares her poems and paintings in public, but the veggies are shy and prefer to stay at home. Her work has been published in anthologies and magazines such as Sustenance, The Starlight SciFaiku Review, Reedy Branch Review, Stonecoast Review, Pocket Lint, Please Hear What I’m Not Saying, Sea and Cedar Magazine, NonBinary Review, The Belladonna, Centipede-Cha-Cha, Penumbric, and Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine among others. Her work is forthcoming in Watch Your Head.

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SAINT IBS, Annie Lou Martin

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback

SAINT IBS is a gagged-up girlhood. A hot pink sampling of poems about sex, gender, illness, compulsion, kink, labor, and trauma, mostly played out in one of life’s most ritualistic and porous spaces: the bathroom.

SAINT IBS is an exploration of the relationship between the abject and divine. Like bathrooms, these poems are places to get dirty and to get clean, to find both respite and discomfort. They are places where the borders of the body break down, where symbolic categories such as self/other, alive/dead and public/private are violently disrupted. “The abject,” writes Julia Kristeva, is “edged with the sublime…for the sublime has no object either.”

SAINT IBS draws from a cross-genre, interdisciplinary practice with little use for concepts of mastery. These are “love poems for the weak / who serve a weak god.”

Annie Lou Martin reads and writes in Brooklyn. They have hope in a future where scarcity is archaic. They believe that they will see a free Palestine in their lifetime.

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New Age Self Help, Sam Robinson

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback

Do we wear the husks of so many dead dreams as to become immobilized? From where do we receive the values by which we evaluate the world? In short, is it possible to have a new thought, and where would it come from?

Whether from the animal within or the stars without, Sam Robinson seeks the answer in his debut chapbook, New Age Self Help. Depicting a weekend sojourn of dissolution and eventual solution, the author considers how we came to our place in the world, and answers his ultimate questions in the affirmative by attempting a revaluation of all values on his own terms.

Sam Robinson is a writer from Massachusetts whose poetry has appeared previously in Blue Arrangements, No More Prostitutes, Spectra Poets, SWAMP, and Reap Thrill. He is also the singer and lyricist of the band Be Released.

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Full-length

Ghost Man on Second, Erica Reid

Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: March 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Erica Reid’s debut collection, Ghost Man on Second, traces a daughter’s search for her place in the world after estrangement from her parents. Reid writes, “It’s hard to feel at home unless I’m aching.” Growing from this sense of isolation, Reid’s poems create new homes in nature, in mythology, and in poetic forms—including sestinas, sonnets, and golden shovels—containers that create and hold new realizations and vantage points. Reid stands up to members of her family, asking for healing amid dissolving bonds. These poems move through emotional registers, embodying nostalgia, hurt, and hope. Throughout Ghost Man on Second, the poems portray Reid’s active grappling with home and confrontation with the ghosts she finds there.
 
Ghost Man on Second is the winner of the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Mark Jarman.

Erica Reid grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she works in arts marketing and serves as assistant editor at THINK Journal. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, the Inflectionist Review, the MacGuffin, Santa Fe Literary Review, Broadsided Press, Foothill, Able Muse, the Lyric, Yalobusha Review, Tiny Seed, and others.

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Oh Witness Dey!, Shani Mootoo

Publisher: Book*Hug Books
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.

In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements, and the legacies of our inheritance.

Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad. Mootoo’s highly acclaimed writing includes the novels Cereus Blooms at Night and Polar Vortex, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as well as the poetry collections Cane  Fire and Oh Witness Dey!. Her poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Poetry Magazine, and Room Magazine. She has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. She lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

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Winter Here, Jessica Tanck

Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In Jessica Tanck’s debut collection, narrative and lyric converge to confront the marks left by violence, loss, and longing. Winter Here troubles the boundaries between home and the outside world, between reverence and terror, asking whether and where safety can be found in the wake of a mother’s suicide. Both intimate and expansive, this collection revels in pleasure as much as it contends with pain. Whether studying the way a violinist is bruised in the act of playing, invoking the crush of ice around a ship’s hull during a silence, or conjuring a crown of light surrounding strangers speaking in tongues, these poems are unflinching, imaginative, and relentless in their searching. By moving between the explicit and the oblique, pairing scorching imagery with razor-edged thought, Tanck evokes a history that haunts every word and place.

Jessica Tanck is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, Meridian, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and others. Jess lives and writes in Salt Lake City, where she is a Vice Presidential Fellow and Ph.D. student in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She serves as the Editor of Quarterly West.

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Florida Water, aja monet

Publisher: Haymarket Books
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: eBook (Hardcover-Dec. 2024)

An honest meditation on migrating to South Florida for love, connection, and community, these poems lay bare the challenging dance between the role of the artist, lover, and organizer. aja monet confronts the interpersonal truths of community organizing while also uncovering the state’s fraught history with racial prejudice, maroon communities, and natural disasters. This intimate collection of lyrical poems are the artifacts of her search for belonging and healing as she wades through the rising tides of climate change, heartbreak, and systemic violence.

aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, storyteller, and organizer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She won the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam poetry award title in 2007 and aja monet follows in the long legacy and tradition of poets participating and assembling in social movements. Her first full collection of poems is titled My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, from Haymarket Books. Her poems explore gender, race, migration, and spirituality. In 2018, she was nominated for a NAACP Literary Award for Poetry and in 2019 was awarded the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award for Poetry for her cultural organizing work in South Florida. aja monet co-founded a political home for artists and organizers called Smoke Signals Studio. She facilitates “Voices: Poetry for the People,” a workshop and collective in collaboration with Community Justice Project and Dream Defenders. aja Monet also serves as the new Artistic Creative Director for V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls.

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The Seventh Town of Ghosts, Faith Arkorful

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Hauntings form the canopy of The Seventh Town of Ghosts. These titular towns, centred in yesterdays, tomorrows, and the ongoing, lead to a special kind of singing: songs to the reader who wrestles with existence, the unsure peace within family, and the often-tense interdependence of life.

Here, discernment is ever-present, guided by Faith Arkorful’s insights on not only the ravages of the state and the police upon the Black family and life at large, but also on a kaleidoscope of connections—sisterhood, daughterhood, kinship, solitude, death, romance—and how tenderness, chosen and repeated, can shield against life’s blows. 

These towns also enchant, shape-lifting through humour, irony, and the small refractions of language where Arkorful guides us through the fault lines and the undertow, in the form of fruit, island volcanoes, Formula 1, and the expansive hum of life.

This poet-as-sojourner bears careful, caring witness, her attention reserved not only for her living and her dead but hyphenated two-fold by the fragile things and the lasting things. These poems remind us of what contours our mysterious and fleeting presence on Earth.

Faith Arkorful’s work has appeared in GUTS Magazine, Peach Magazine, PRISM International, Hobart Pulp, and Canthius Magazine, among other places. In 2022 she was a semi-finalist in the 92NY’s Discovery Poetry Contest. She received an honourable mention at the 2020 National Magazine Awards and in 2019 was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Faith was born in Toronto, where she still resides.

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The Brush, Eliana Hernández-Pachón, Robin Myers, Hector Abad

Publisher: Archipelago
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback

The Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma – and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández-Pachón’s poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian history: the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square.

Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its contents: a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling “like a cat in his throat.” Meanwhile, his wife Ester – a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets – slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s vivid and prophetic triptych.

The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.

Eliana Hernández-Pachón received her BA in Anthropology from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research interests include contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. The Brush, her polyphonic account of the El Salado massacre in Colombia, received the Colombia National Poetry Prize in 2020.

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Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, Jennifer Tseng

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Crafted with lines from her late father’s letters, Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss—that of his native geography, family, traditions, language—underlies every word. Though her father’s first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, so that she could understand them. Some are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously—the paradox of grief and all it gives us.

Jennifer Tseng is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections: The Man With My Face and Red Flower, White Flower. Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde, was a Firecracker Award finalist and winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award; and her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award.

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Chamber after Chamber, Saara Myrene Raappana

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Chamber after Chamber is about what fractures, fixes, and refills the hearts of two girls as they grow into women. A loose narrative in three sections, the poems follow a speaker and her cousin through their hardscrabble, backwoods childhood to their separation—both physical and emotional—as adults. From the make-believe apocalypses and cut-and-paste valentines of elementary school to the stadium-seating classrooms and multiplexes of southern China, our speaker tries to leave the shame and dysfunction of her family behind. In China, she begins to see America—and herself—clearly for the first time, and in doing so discovers that both her cousin and her country are inextricably woven into

[her body] part             that never sleeps            the blood
and chambered meat      that’s like a rock squeezed
in a fist             rapping its knuckles
on the sweet door             of the body.

Born and raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Saara Myrene Raappana served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Southern China before moving to southwest Minnesota. Author of two chapbooks, she has published poems in journals and anthologies. She has received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

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Dream House, Cathy Stonehouse

Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

A long poem in six sections, Dream House takes its cue from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space in its investigation of female embodiment by calling up such feral, liminal spaces as the pregnant body, the aging mind, snail shells, broom closets, low-ceilinged pubs and abandoned pizza boxes. Part Tardis, part townhouse, part Howl’s moving castle, this wry, surreal and many-peopled narrative interrogates what metaphor might hold of history, both personal and social, in the wake of a mother’s passing. Its migrant speaker trawls through hedgerows and recipe books to unearth stained birdsong and undead civil wars, intent on tracing a matrilineal path across four generations while traversing the haunted margins between existence and belonging.

Cathy Stonehouse (she/they) is a poet, writer, teacher and visual artist. As a young adult, Cathy migrated from Northern England, where she was born, to Vancouver, BC-the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, where she still lives. She is the author of a novel, The Causes (Pedlar Press, 2019), a collection of short fiction, Something About the Animal (Biblioasis, 2011) and two previous collections of poetry, Grace Shiver (Inanna Publications, 2011) and The Words I Know (Press Gang, 1994). She also co-edited the anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), with Fiona Tinwei Lam and Shannon Cowan. She is a previous editor of EVENT magazine and currently teaches creative writing and interdisciplinary expressive arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. Find her online at www.cathystonehouse.com

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Sidewalk Cruiseship, Mary Oishi

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Written by the “pandemic poet laureate” of Albuquerque, Sidewalk Cruiseship draws on Oishi’s remarkable ability to illustrate the world around her and the people in it. Separated into eleven short sections by traditional Japanese tankas, the poems in Oishi’s newest collection take on the macro and the micro. They respond to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the contentious political climate as they draw readers in to witness intimate moments of people and scenes within Oishi’s beloved city of Albuquerque. The poems explore such themes as mental illness, the joys and sorrows of motherhood, what it is to be a woman in the world, and aging and death. Readers will come away with a better sense of Albuquerque and its inhabitants and will get an intimate look at one of its most passionate citizens–a Japanese American longtime justice activist and mentor for queer youth who embraces the best and worst Albuquerque has to offer. Throughout it all, she reminds us that the best response we can offer is love, even in the face of adversity.

Mary Oishi is the author of Spirit Birds They Told Me, the coauthor of Rock Paper Scissors, and the editor of One Albuquerque, One Hundred Poets. She served as Albuquerque Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2022.

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In the Country of Hard Life and Rosebuds, Anna Leigh Knowles

Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Using family myth as navigation, the poems within In The Country of Hard Life and Rosebuds rotate between lyric pastorals and narrative forms. The speaker attempts to trace her identity along a timeline and family who remain geographically separate. In doing so, the poems echo toward the past for answers that stand indefinable in the present. The collection weaves a story of family, love, and the inevitability of the kind of loss experienced by rootlessness.

Anna Leigh Knowles is the author of Conditions of The Wounded. Her work appears in Blackbird, The Missouri Review Online, Tin House, and others. She has received honors from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

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Lost in Living, Halyna Kruk

Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Lost in Living presents Halyna Kruk’s unpublished work from the immediate “pre-invasion” years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized. In these “dear poems that don’t pain [her] like those about the war do,” Kruk uses imagery and tone to underscore poetic agency, at times juxtaposing figurative language with a calm, direct voice to bring her poems to life. Nature cannot be relied on to sustain nor renew, and life is shown to be fundamentally vulnerable. “Calm” is a seductive state of mind capable of cunning, and the speaker is unable to find a place where she can thrive or grow. Still, daily tasks emerge as life-affirming and a welcome constant. It is ultimately a movement toward survival that drives the immediacy and urgency of Kruk’s poetry. Lost in Living is the sixteenth volume in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Poetry Series.

Halyna Kruk is an award-winning Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, and scholar. The author of five poetry books and four children’s books, her short story collection, Anyone but Me, won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Prize. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails was her first poetry volume published in English. Her numerous literary awards include the Sundara Ramaswamy Prize, the 2023 Women in Arts Award, the 2021 BookForum Best Book Award, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize, and the Hranoslov Award. She holds a PhD in Ukrainian baroque literature and is a member of Ukrainian PEN. She lives and teaches in Lviv.

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Crow Genesis, Thomas Mitchell

Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Thomas Mitchell’s new collection, paper boats drift in and out of childhood, a red bicycle negotiates the dangerous edges of a neighborhood, voices travel on the wings of swallows. Crows transform in a strange metamorphosis, assume human characteristics and emotions, create their own litany, succeed and fail in love, bemoan the onset of old age. Through an ever-widening range of vision, Mitchell chooses not to withdraw from the world, but to engage with it. Again and again, he reels us in, grounds us in reality, the authentic, as in “Measuring Absence” when he acknowledges the misconception that I can recreate the night by using words. These poems emerge with a musicality, a precision, that offers a persuasive affirmation of what it means to know ourselves, and to recognize the magic that appears all around us.

Thomas Mitchell received his Masters from California State University, Sacramento, where he studied with the poet, Dennis Schmitz. He received an MFA from the University of Montana, where he worked with Richard Hugo and Madeline De Frees. Lost Horse Press also published his first poetry collection, The Way Summer Ends, and his work has been in many journals, including The New England Review and New Letters.

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Fresh Failure, John Tottenham

Publisher: Hat & Beard Press
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback

Tottenham’s previous collections—The Hate Poems; Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment; The Inertia Variations (a multi-media interpretation of which was released by Matt Johnson, otherwise known as The The, in 2017)—established him as this day’s leading contemporary poet maudit.

Fresh Failure features a deepening and broadening of Tottenham’s trademark Magical Cynicism and Magnanimous Misanthropy. With hilariously ruthless ruminations on the artistic ego and the romantic id, Tottenham gives voice to the kind of thoughts most people prefer not to express but will automatically relate to and be entertained by.  It’s the kind of poetry that is accessible to people who don’t read poetry (i.e., everybody). Fresh Failure is ultimately a Triumph of Failure, and proves, as Jean-Luc Godard said, that poetry really is “a game of loser take all.”

After many years of resistance, John Tottenham finally sold out to the lucrative, fast-paced world of poetry. He is the author of The Inertia Variations, an epic cycle on the subject of work-avoidance, indolence, and failure. Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, a sequence of mean-spirited love poems with respect paid to the institution of marriage, was published by Penny-Ante Press in October 2012.
Tottenham’s last collection of poetry, The Hate Poems, representing the dregs of his output between the years 2012 and 2015, was published by Amok Press in late 2018. His essays and criticism often appear in Artillery, the LA Review of Books, and other periodicals. He lives in California.

Robin Myers is a Mexico City–based poet and translator. Her latest book-length translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (2023), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (2022), and Copy by Dolores Dorantes (2022). A 2023 NEA Translation Fellow, Robin’s collections of poetry have been published bilingually in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Spain.

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Temporary Beast, Solfrian Joanna

Publisher: Beltway Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Interrogations, self-interrogations, examinations, cross-examinations, evocations—all these modes participate in these poems that actively refuse definition, since the poet, Joanna Solfrian, is in pursuit of her conscience, the one that asks about being alive, being dead, being a mother, being a tree. I could say, “You name it,” but she does in her distinctly marvelous, nodding-to-Lorca fashion, truly keeping the reader on metaphorical yet actual toes, reveling (perhaps the most crucial word) in the powers of imagination that adhere to genuine poetry. —Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel

Joanna Solfrian’s first book, Visible Heavens, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2009 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, a national first book award. Her second collection, The Mud Room, was published by MadHat Press, followed by the chap book The Second Perfect Number, published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Harvard Review, Boulevard, Rattle, Margie, The Southern Review, Salamander, Pleiades, Image, and also in the internationally-touring art exhibit Speak Peace: American Voices Respond to Vietnamese Children’s Paintings. She is a MacDowell Fellow and a five-time Pushcart nominee. Joanna lives and works in New York City.

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Cities Within Us, Peter Taylor

Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: April 1, 2024
Format: Paperback

Cities Within Us offers poems that are dense and deep with language that resonates at multiple levels and often startles with its juxtapositions and verbal explosions. From the intimately personal to the dramatically confessional, Peter Taylor’s poems capture a purse seine of discordant voices, including a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, the delusional and the abused in a universe that seems both unlimited and inevitable. Images and emotions move the reader from the disappearance of arctic explorers to the razing and rebirth of the Dresden Frauenkirche to the comic innocence of a child’s visit to Mars in poems that explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the intimate capacity for joy and loss.

Peter Taylor received my MA in English from the University of Waterloo after receiving three awards for scholarship as an undergraduate at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Trainer, visualizing flight training during WWII (Paget Press); The Masons, four meditations on English cathedrals; First Epistle to Dr. Torr, a mock heroic satire (Gryphon Press); and Aphorisms (Adela Press). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada and Australia. He lives in Aurora, Ontario.

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Acutely Life, Sue Sorensen

Publisher: At Bay Press
Publication Date: March 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

There’s a woman somehow veiled in marble who is only for
me so I take her out of the Art Institute through a back way
and no one notices: she lives with me now, happier than in
the gallery with the cold white lights, in my home she is seen
for who she is, though the veil cannot be removed, its
hardness impenetrable, but now she can be touched.

Acutely Life playfully or sorrowfully interrogates works of art, asking fictional characters their views on grief and generosity. Sue Sorensen’s poems try out poses learned from other poems or wander off with dead artists who insist on entering places they don’t belong.

These quicksilver poems are life studies, or conversations held with all sorts of unsuitable and suitable companions, written in a style full of echoes and dark humor.

Sue Sorensen was born in Saskatchewan, the youngest of seven children, and moved to Winnipeg in 2000. She is the author of a novel, A Large Harmonium (2011), winner of Best First book at the Manitoba Book Awards, and the editor of West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature (2008). In 2014 Sue published the non-fiction study The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film. Her poetry has been published in The New Quarterly, Exile, CV2, Grain, Room, and Prairie Fire. “Blue: Three Sonnets to Mary” won Best Poem in Exile’s 2017 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition.

Sue has a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Academic publications range from studies of the novels of A. S. Byatt, Henry James, Ian McEwan, and Guy Vanderhaeghe to biblical illustration, detective fiction, children’s books, rock lyricists, and the filmmaking of Neil Young. She teaches English at Canadian Mennonite University and also serves as the Director of CMU Press.

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Into the Continent, Emily McGiffin

Publisher: University of Regina Press
Publication Date: March 30, 2024
Format: Paperback

Multifaceted and multi-voiced, Emily McGiffin’s poems explore the ongoing violence, destruction, and loss wrought by colonialism and capitalist extraction across time and geographic space, from Turtle Island to South Africa. McGiffin animates the spectres that haunt our private and public pasts. Her words remind us that we live in a world shaped by the events and people of the past, by suffering, and seizure, yet at times in the shadow of great acts of generosity. This world, largely built by iterations of violence, still concentrates wealth into the hands of a few, and McGiffin reminds us that power wants to hold its grip, to reproduce itself.

my body an ark
carrying successors like a chambered nautilus

what i was placed here to do
ferry the unborn
across the inhospitable land
make a bed amid the thornbush
make a tea table, forge the domestic
bliss of my country
raise them as heirs
draw our lineage in the sand

Emily McGiffin was born on Tla-o-qui-aht territory (in Tofino, British Columbia) and raised on the lands of the Ts’uubaa-asatx and Quw’utsun Nations (in Vancouver Island’s Cowichan Valley). She is currently a Research Fellow at University College London. McGiffin is the author of Between Dusk and Night and Of Land, Bones, and Money: Toward a South African Ecopoetics.

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Elder Among the Saints, Rachel Mann

Publisher: Carcanet Press
Publication Date: March 28, 2024
Format: Paperback

A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024. In her second collection, Mann wrestles with the questions and possibilities raised when trans identity, faith and the limits of myth and language intersect and are tested. Eleanor Among the Saints is a study in the queer joy found in counter-factuals and fantasy, shaped through the prism of the disputed story of Eleanor Rykener, a medieval trans woman, seamstress and sex worker.

Rachel Mann is a priest, writer, theologian, and broadcaster. She has written fourteen books of prose, criticism, poetry, and theology. Her poetry has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem and is widely anthologised. She is a well-established radio broadcaster and regularly contributes to BBC Radio 4’s Thought For The Day. Currently she is Archdeacon of Salford and Bolton in the Diocese of Manchester, UK.

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Empires of the Everyday, Anna Lee-Popham

Publisher: McClellan & Stewart
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The poems in Empires of the Everyday give voice to the many “you” who move through a city—one that resembles many modern cities—where plywood shelters are demolished in pandemic winters. Where everyday violence is palpable, but the related media reporting is offhand, cool, distanced, piecemeal, uncontextualized.

In an attempt to access a more revelatory language, the poems spar with an AI translator, disturbing the disease of twenty-first century life that the city makes solid and covers up. Slavery, permanent war, and Empire titter in the resulting language, in its bending of what is possible, as only poetry can do. The poems trace the relationship between the human “you” and the machine “I” through five powerful, nuanced, and thought-provoking episodes. Anna Lee-Popham’s impressive debut collection is immersed in the current ruptures of the world, rendering a translation of Empire and beyond-Empire to a possible convergence for “you” and “I.”

Anna Lee-Popham is a writer and editor whose poetry and non-fiction has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Brick, Canthius, Riddle Fence, Autostraddle, Lingue e Linguaggi, and others. Anna holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto.

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The Knot of My Tongue, Zehra Naqvi

Publisher: McClellan & Stewart
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

I knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point / to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me

At the heart of The Knot of My Tongue is Zehra Naqvi’s storying of language itself and the self-re-visioning that follows devastating personal rupture. Employing a variety of poetic forms, these intimate, searching poems address generations, continents, and dominions to examine loss of expression in the aftermath of collisions with powerful forces, ranging from histories to intimacies.

Naqvi follows a cast of characters at instances where they have either been rendered silent or found ways to attempt the inexpressible—a father struggling to speak as an immigrant in Canada; a grandmother as she loses her children and her home after the 1947 Partition; the Islamic story of Hajar, abandoned in the desert without water; the myth of Philomela who finds language even after her husband cuts off her tongue.

Brilliantly blending the personal and the communal, memory and myth, theology and tradition, the poems in this collection train our attention—slow and immediate, public and private—on our primal ability to communicate, recover, and survive. This example is striking for the power of its speaking through loss and a singular, radiant vision.

Zehra Naqvi is a Karachi-born writer raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers awarded by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her poem “forgetting urdu” was the winner of Room’s 2016 Poetry Contest. Zehra has written and edited for various publications internationally. She holds two MSc degrees in migration studies and social anthropology from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. The Knot of My Tongue is her debut poetry collection.

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shima, Sho Yamagushiku

Publisher: McClellan & Stewart
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The village is tilting on its axis. It is turning. All its organs are spilling into the bay.

shima is a mosaic of the emotional, psychic, and generational toll that exile from a pillaged culture impresses on a poet and his community. Come to haunt Yamagushiku’s practice of ancestor veneration are photographs and a narrative that spans his own life and a mythic parallel filled with a voice as spare as it is present, yearning as it is precise. The poet says, I am taking the sharpest stick and poking the root ancestor. I am insisting that if he awakens I will have something useful to say.

Speaking through a cultural amnesia collected between a sunken past and a sensed, ghostly-dreamed future, shima anchors this interrogation of the relationship between father and son in the fragile connective tissue of memory where the poet’s homeland is an impossible destination.

Shō Yamagushiku is an independent writer and researcher. He writes from the homelands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples (Victoria, BC). shima is his first poetry collection.

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The White Light of Tomorrow, Russell Thornton

Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Publication Date: March 26, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

With intense lyricism, Thornton records his imaginative movement between the element of water, waking to “the aloneness of water,” and the phenomenon of light, comprehending “light” as “fate” and “love” as “memory of light.” In the process, Thornton highlights how hard lives can manifest beauty and affirmation. A mother transcends degrading circumstances through laughter. A long-lost father’s drafting set case is a “coffin,” its tools a “skeleton;” his “ashes are buried” in the poet’s “arm.”

Revelations of nature abound. Thornton’s rainy locale lifts onto the mythical level, water “wrapping around” him, “holding” him “complete / as within womb water about to break.” Herons’ wings “span the countless characters” of a creek.” A description of an ancient BC site is a rapt engagement with Indigenous petroglyphs. An exploration of a Song of Songs passage details “light … one with turns of the yarn” of a shawl, “a touch within a touch.” Classical myth informs a poem about a power outage; the speaker enters “the elsewhere of the night” to build a fire.

Passionate and moving, this collection marks a fine advance in Thornton’s expanding poetic output.

Russell Thornton‘s collection The Hundred Lives (Quattro Books, 2014) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (2013) was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His other titles include The Fifth Window (2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim Editions, 2002), House Built of Rain (2003; shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore (2006) and The Broken Face (2018). His most recent collection is Answer to Blue (2021). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.

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