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

Oh No, Anyways!, Julia Hills

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Oh No, Anyways! is a collection of poems that weave in and out of memories and the present. From poems written in the manic sun of late spring to ones from the cold dead of winter, Oh No, Anyways! takes writers through themes of appreciation for the world around us, finding one’s voice, and paralyzing anxiety. Oh No, Anyways! takes inspiration from the greats (Whitman to Graham and Bukowski to Melissa Broder) and attempts to communicate its themes to the world.

Much like their author Oh No, Anyways! is a collection of poems trying to find their way in the world. They are falsely confident and dripping with the desire to be approved and validated. Read this collection when the peepers start calling and the air starts to get balmy. This collection feels like a spring thunderstorm with a double rainbow at the end.

Julia Hills graduated from the University of Maine, receiving her BA in English Literature. Julia wishes to continue her education to achieve her Ph.D. in English, paying particular attention to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Julia was a panelist at the 2023 International Milton Symposium where she presented her paper, Eve Interpreter of Dreams. She is also the author of Carnal-Val, published in 2023 through Bottlecap Press. When Julia is not writing she is sitting and staring blankly at a wall or cornering people at parties to shove useless information down their throats.

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A Woman in Four Parts, Kelly Miller

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

A Woman in Four Parts is a poetry chapbook that explores the deepest parts of a woman’s identity, categorized by vital organs of the body: The Gut, The Lungs, The Heart, and The Mind. Each section details the wide array of conflicting emotions attached to human experience as a child is thrust into womanhood. Within those segments, poems reflect on individual experiences while working with the others to create a mosaic of truth intent to arrive at the destination of acceptance and self-love. A Woman in Four Parts means, above all else, to allow the release of emotions we carry within us and deeply move the soul while recognizing our connections to nature, each other, and our past.

Kelly Miller writes poetry that feeds the soul. You can find her work published in The Magic of Us, a Moms Who Write poetry anthology, and her essay “In Another Place and Time” made the short list for Women on Writing’s Worldwide Q2 NF Essay Contest in 2023. She lives with her fiancée and children in upstate New York, but her heart will always belong to the dirt roads in Texas that raised her.

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The Moon is Round, Daniel Barry

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The Moon is Round is a series of appreciations. It finds beauty in tattoos, Lakota grandmothers, middle fingers, Hawaiian shirts, dog walkers, old family photos, the ocean, Brooklyn, avocados, hunched backs and Play-Doh, among other things. It’s a chapbook that draws from modern master poets of watching the mundane. I’m thinking of Billy Collins, Ross Gay, and Mary Oliver. This chapbook follows that tradition, it seeks to make you wonder at the feeling of wonder. For example, a piece of clay is put in your hand. You’re asked to mold it into a dinosaur bone. But, with the poet, you shape it into a Buddha statue instead, ringlets of hair, third eye, and all.

Daniel Barry worked as a math teacher on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Children tend to gravitate towards him, probably because he knows how to play like one. He’s applying to medical school and plans on being a barista. He graduated from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia in 2023. He’s served as an editor for The Crimson & Grey and has had poetry accepted by Defunkt Magazine, Corpus Callosum Press, Cordite Poetry Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Ignatian Literary Journal, and Teach. Write.

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Full-length

Black Bell, Alison C. Rollins

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison C. Rollins’s Black Bell continues an exploration of cataloging individual experience and collective memory. As Rollins sets out to resuscitate and embody the archive, we see a chorus of historical figures like Eliza Harris, Henry “Box” Brown, and Lear Green; readers can listen in as Phillis Wheatley takes a Turing test or venture through Dante’s Inferno remixed with Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers. Poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-wracking notes tuned toward love and liberation. Black Bell navigates what it means to be both invisible and spectacle, hidden and on display, allowing lyric language to become the material for fashioning wearable sculptures akin to Nick Cave’s “soundsuits.” Integrating performance art practices, metalwork, and sonic, Black Bell becomes multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of both the page and the canvas of the poet’s body.

Alison C. Rollins (she/her) is the author of Black Bell and Library of Small Catastrophes, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. Born and raised in St. Louis city, she holds degrees from Brown University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Howard University. A recipient of fellowships with Cave Canem, Callaloo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Poetry Foundation, Rollins was awarded support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Brown University’s Artist Grant. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has held faculty and librarian appointments at institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

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One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis

Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the potential loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son.

Geffrey Davis is the author of three poetry books, most recently One Wild Word Away (BOA Editions, 2024). Davis’s second book, Night Angler, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and his debut, Revising the Storm, received the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His poems have been published by The Atlantic, New England Review, ​​The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine​, Oxford American, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Davis currently lives in the Ozarks, where he teaches full-time with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas.

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The Bearable Slant of Light, Lynnell Edwards

Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

What can we bear and what can we lift when a beloved, when our world, is light-struck and mad? The Bearable Slant of Light documents a web of clinical assessments, medications, the terrible beauties of delusion, and the fragile gifts of darkness. Poems that reach across the history of writers and artists who fought and sometimes lost their own battles against mental illness are set against the urgencies of our anxious world and the intimate struggle of one family.

Lynnell Edwards is a poet, writer, teacher, and author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2023) and This Great Green Valley (Broadstone Books, 2020). She serves as associate programs director for the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, where she is faculty in poetry and also book reviews editor for Good River Review. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Cloud Path, Melissa Kwasny

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.”

What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters?

Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. A portion of Pictograph received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 and, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights. Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

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Architect, Alison Thumel

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

“When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,” writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms—the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright’s Prairie Style buildings—shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: “For years after my brother’s death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths—boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn’t know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.”

Alison Thumel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA.

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Wager, Adele Elise Williams

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

Wager, Adele Elise Williams’s raucous debut, celebrates the fearlessness and determination that can be wrested from strife. Early on, Williams confronts multiple challenges, both personal and communal, including persistent childhood anxieties and stunning neighborhood tragedies (“Ray down the street hung / himself like just-bought bananas needing time”). In the working-class communities she moves among, the poet tangles with her perceived failures as a wayward daughter, recovering addict, and skeptical scholar as she buries friends and lovers along the way. Self-possession is so hard-won in the southern gothic world of Williams’s poems, no wonder the speaker here is so roaringly audacious while often taking relish in getting close to the edge: “Sometimes God says YAHTZEE and I know this means / someone has won but someone has lost too — a holy man / is a gambling man, and that God of ours, / he takes bets after all.” Through it all, Williams pays homage to her lineage of resilient “beast women” and defiantly resists any constraint as she prods her own limits.

Adele Elise Williams is a PhD student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston and a former executive pastry chef. She is co-editor (with Dana Levin) of Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications and received multiple honors, including the 2023 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing.

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The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

In The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. “Like you,” he writes, “I have . . . [a] history of / hardly caring for my body, of letting / whoever drink their share of me, / thinking it could cure / my fear of dirt.” Whether ruminating on intimacy, lineage, identity, faith, or addiction, Clark’s poems embody a restless, rigorous curiosity. Largely set in the poet’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, his portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection. In one of the most affectionate—and characteristically ambivalent—poems in the collection, Clark recalls, “For days, doubt struck as does lightning / across the span of night. . . . Love? If it exists, / it’s the uncertainty one feels before a thunderclap, / after the sky’s gone dark again.” A vulnerable and transporting debut, The Trouble with Light is a vital record of how grief can endure, and how we can yet endure ourselves.

Jeremy Michael Clark earned his MFA from Rutgers University–Newark and his MSW from the University of Pennsylvania after working as an editorial assistant at Callaloo. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Common, Poem-a-Day, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized with support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Cave Canem, the Community of Writers, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

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Self-Mythology, Saba Keramati

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

Saba Keramati is a writer, editor, and educator from the Bay Area. A winner of the 2023 92NY Discovery Poetry Contest, she received her MFA from UC Davis. Her writings have appeared in Adroit Journal, AGNI, The Margins, Poet Lore, and other publications. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Keramati currently lives in Dearborn, Michigan, with her partner and cats.

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A Darker Way, Grahame Davies

Publisher: Seren
Publication Date: April 29, 2024
Format: Paperback

Grahame Davies’ s A Darker Way is a collection of poems and songs which traces a hard-won but redemptive path between idealism and irony, failure and faith. Including ‘ Sacred Fire’ , set to music for King Charles’ coronation, these poems are steeped in curiosity, self-questioning and compassion.

Grahame Davies is a poet, novelist, editor and literary critic, who has won numerous prizes, including the Wales Book of the Year Award. He is the author of 17 books in Welsh and English, including: The Chosen People, a study of the relationship of the Welsh and Jewish peoples; The Dragon and the Crescent, a study of Wales and Islam; a novel, Everything Must Change, based on the life of the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the popular work of psychogeography, Real Wrexham. His is a native of Coedpoeth near Wrexham but is now based in Cardiff and London. He travels internationally as a reader and lecturer, carries out many high-profile poetry commissions, and is a much sought-after lyricist for classical composers. His poetry has been translated into many languages and is widely anthologised. His latest non-fiction book Real Cambridge was published in 2021.

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Egg/Shell, Victoria Kennefick

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: April 25, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2024. ‘ It is hard to hurt and then explain the hurt away / so as not to hurt anyone. But have you seen / my life?’ (‘Child of Lir’) The lives depicted by Victoria Kennefick alter, shatter and recombine in stunning monologues, innovative hybrid forms and piercing lyrics: her second book Egg/Shell is a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse’s gender transition and the dissolution of a marriage. Acclaimed as one of the boldest poetic voices to emerge in recent years, Kennefick, in the follow-up to her best-selling Eat or We Both Starve, breaks new ground with generosity, emotional complexity, formal ingenuity and wit.

Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer in Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, and elsewhere.

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Jump Scare, Daniel Zomparelli

Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

At once raw and skillful, painful and funny, personal and pervasive, the poems in Jump Scare dig deep into mental health, neurodivergence, grief, dreams, monstrosity, sexuality, pop culture, queer consumer culture, and the commodification of identity. This is a book that tackles isolation and loss head-on and thinks hard and with wry humour about how to position ourselves in this lonely, scary, compelling world.

Daniel Zomparelli is the founder of Poetry Is Dead magazine. His first book of poems, Davie Street Translations, was published by Talonbooks in 2012. He is a former co-podcaster at Can’t Lit with Dina Del Bucchia, with whom he co-wrote Rom Com. His collection of short stories, Everything Is Awful and You’re a Terrible Person, was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, won the ReLit Short Fiction Award, and has been translated into German, French, and Spanish. Daniel’s podcast I’m Afraid That was listed as one of the best podcasts of 2018 by Esquire and featured as a podcast to listen to on the A.V. Club and BBC America. He recently edited Queer Little Nightmares with David Ly. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

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Wet, Leanne Dunic

Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 24, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. In photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, Wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.

Leanne Dunic transgresses genres and form to produce projects such as One and Half of You (Talonbooks, 2021) To Love the Coming End (Book*hug / Chin Music Press 2017) and The Gift (Book*hug 2019). She is the leader of the band The Deep Cove and lives on the unceded and occupied Traditional Territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ peoples.

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lettuce lettuce please go bad, Tiziana La Melia

Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

lettuce lettuce please go bad is an incantation and a plea for transformation. Using the idea of compost as composition – since the organic process of recycling leaves, words, or food scraps into valuable fertilizer enriches both soil and human life – the book draws on divination systems, herbal healing rituals, the cycles of the moon, experiences of stress and grief, and inherited and invented agricultural practices to tease out the poetics of rural embodied language. Situated at the moment when thought become image, lettuce lettuce please go bad expands on the author’s personal history of familial migration and agricultural labour – picking, pruning, grafting, tending, planting – entangled in issues of colonization, land manipulation, ownership, extraction, and food production. In an effort to think through the ways vegetables, fruits, and other foods can stand in for complex situations and emotions, La Melia reconsiders how value is allotted and advocates a return to love to mitigate both personal and collective crisis.

Born in Italy and currently living on unceded Coast Salish territories, Tiziana La Melia is the author of Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writing (Publication Studio, 2015) and the chapbook Broom Emotion (2012). Recent solo and collaborative presentations of her work include The pigeon looks for death in the space between the needle and the haystack, LECLERE Centfare d’art (Marseille, 2017); Broom Emotion, galerie anne baurrault (Paris, 2017); Innocence at Home, CSA (Vancouver, 2015); and Johnny Suede, Damien and the Love Guru (Brussels, 2017). In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW (Toronto) and winner of the 2014 RBC Painting Competition Prize.

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You’re Gonna Love This, Dina Del Bucchia

Publisher: Talonbooks
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback

You’re Gonna Love This tells the story of three entwined relationships: those between the narrator of the poem and her spouse, her television, and herself. A distinctly working-class long poem with a sharply nuanced media literacy, You’re Gonna Love This explores how television and media culture’s around-the-clock presence impacts our views of the world and our connection to it. At the same time, these poems consider caretaking and the narrator’s journey as a caregiver, addressing the steps in her own mental-health journey with dark humour, wry cultural references, and deeply personal stories. You’re gonna love You’re Gonna Love This.

Dina Del Bucchia is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Tell Me What to Do and of three collections of poetry: Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, and Rom Com, the latter written with Daniel Zomparelli. She is an editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine, the artistic director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, and a co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit with Jen Sookfong Lee. An otter and dress enthusiast, she lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations (Vancouver, British Columbia).

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Sorry About the Fire, Colleen Coco Collins

Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: April 2, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

With a voice as ungovernable and determined as Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus only to face dire consequences—Colleen Coco Collins’ debut poems are daring dispatches from beyond the margins: light-filled flares sent up from the edge of language, sentience, land, and story. Drawing on all of her multidisciplinary enamorations and rendered through the triple vision of her Irish, French, and Odawa heritage, Sorry About the Fire introduces not just a poet, but a stunningly original sensibility.

Colleen Coco Collins [she/they] is an interdisciplinary artist of Irish, French, and Odawa descent, working in songwriting, performance, poetry and visual arts. She’s worked as a gallery director, in forestry, fossil preparation, and renovation; as an autism support worker, teacher, and women’s shelter counsellor. Her writing, music, and art practice centers on temporality, presumptions of sentience, subversion, rhythm, gesture, geographies, biophonies, frequencies, the ouroboric, the peripatetic, love and the polyglottic. Hailing from Antler River/Deshkan Ziibiing/London, Ontario, Coco has studied at universities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Zealand, and Ireland. She lives litorally in rural Port Greville, Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia amidst crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpback, lichen and fox.

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Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw

Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Publication Date: April 23, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In the poems of Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw explores the interactions, sometimes dark and sometimes joyful, between humans and the non-human natural world. Resisting the human exceptionalism that in its many forms blocks our imaginative access to the world, Shoptaw entertains the perspectives of a host of others: a cricket, a bat, a nuthatch, a carnival bear, a tree’s shade, cherubim, an asteroid, and – in the long poem “Whoa!” (an allegory of climate change based on the myth of Phaethon) – Earth herself. His descriptions bring to bear knowledge drawn from many sources (life and physical sciences, poetry, philosophy, conversations) as well as his own attentive experience of the world (birds at the feeder, creek-side fox squirrels, Pacific harbor seals). Along with these shifting viewpoints and scales, the poems assume various forms: anaphoric verse, poulter’s measure, a seasonal “quartina,” a shaped poem. Everywhere Shoptaw attends to the musical contours and momentums of his phrases, lines, sentences and stanzas.

Across the collection, Shoptaw takes up difficult and painful topics (global meltdown, animal abuse) without ever giving up either pleasure or hope. Throughout, he practices what he calls a poetics of impurity. Wary of absolutes (apocalyptic finality, unshakable optimism, utter despair), he makes the best of things in the messy world of the relative, the partial, the gradual, and the mixed.

John Shoptaw grew up in the drained Mississippi River floodplain of “Swampeast” Missouri. He was educated at Southeast Missouri State College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and Harvard University. After some years teaching on the east coast, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently teaches in the UC Berkeley English Department. He is the author of On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, the libretto for Eric Sawyer’s opera Our American Cousin (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and a number of essays on poetry and poetics, including “Why Ecopoetry?” (Poetry). His poems have appeared in varous venues, including Arion, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and Poetry. His first poetry collection, Times Beach (2015), won the Notre Dame Review Book Prize and the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. His second collection, Near-Earth Object, will be published by Unbound Edition Press in the spring of 2024.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 4/23 and 4/29 here? Contact us to let us know!