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
FELO DE SE, Oliver Dybing
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
A chapbook that seeks to explore the emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent something or someone. Often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again.
Oliver Dybing is a poet and conceptual artist residing in the Pacific Northwest. He thinks very deeply and not at all. His work has been featured in Upshod Quills, Spare Change, Second Factory, and Zaum Press.
PUNT, Anada Werner
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
PUNT holds an elsewhere’s gently exorcized quotidian. Pieces of a parallel day full of promise, disassembled for the ecstasy of reinvention. The lights dim, your shift never ends, and one box waits within another “Where the waterslides bow / in pursuit of summer.”
PUNT is the debut chapbook by Wisconsin-based poet Anada Werner.
Anada Werner is a freelance conduit to the spirit of the Midwest. Punt marks her second occasion in print, the first having belonged to a single blue ribbon poem in the third grade.
Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams, Armen Davoudian (tr.)
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Hopscotch, Fatemeh Shams crafts a vivid liminal world of Berlin-based poems, a canvas where home and exile blur into an intimate middle ground. Her work, geographically and metaphorically situated between her birthplace in Iran and her current life in exile, evokes a “third space”—a realm of creative liberation and a sanctuary for the play of memories, language, and space. Shams frames this space with tangible metaphors—airports, suitcases, the thresholds of nightclubs—and her poems, like the game of hopscotch itself, leap over borders with a childlike agility, contrasting against the harsh reality of exile. Shams’s poetry invites us to consider our own places of belonging and the potential spaces we inhabit—those rich intersections of language and lived experience.
Fatemeh Shams is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and a critical monograph in English on poetry and politics, A Revolution in Rhyme (Oxford University Press). When They Broke Down the Door (Mage, 2016), a collection of her poems translated by Dick Davis, won the 2016 Latifeh Yarshater Award from the Association for Iranian Studies. Her poetry has been featured in Poetry, PBS NewsHour, World Literature Today, and The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, among other venues. She is Associate Professor of Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the 2020 Frost Place Competition. He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
the skin song, devon fulford
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
coming of age is not an endeavor that most of us would choose, given any other option. it’s messy, raw, maddening, and ultimately, an inevitable part of growing up. when you’re a girl growing up in the south, societal pressures and expectations can feel positively oppressive at times. what is a body? why does skin have so much power? and what of the comingling frustrations and joys of sex versus love?
the skin song delves into instances of sex and intimacy that shaped the author as a young person learning about herself and the world in which we live. each free verse, stream-of-consciousness poem explores one of devon fulford’s core memories: some are funny, many are painful, but all are fraught with the perfect 20/20 vision only hindsight can offer.
devon fulford is a poet and educator. she has a doctor of education and masters degrees in both creative writing and education. her poetry book, southern atheist: oh, honey (2021), is available from cathexis northwest press. her second book of poetry, gulp (2024), is forthcoming from red ogre review. other poems can be found in body literature, dead mule school of southern literature, longridge review, blood pudding press, indolent books, crosswinds poetry journal, and many more. devon resides on the front range of the rocky mountains with her partner levi and chocolate labrador, the walrus. she loves riding her triumph street twin motorbike, attending live music shows, and advocating for conversations about topics that make us squirm. visit her website: https://www.definwords.com/
Colossus in the Middle of Nowhere, Lachlan Chu
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Colossus in the Middle of Nowhere is a dedication to the thing and its complement—what the Earth is now, and what it will be when we are cut from it. Something like a blank road runs through these ten poems, breaching the mortal and the celestial, stitching over and over the body, winding towards the nearest exit.
At the end, there is dust and there is an army, a god and the smallest devil, the thing and its complement. This collection, in its brevity, explores with graceful verse the fact of humanity and how we live with it.
Lachlan Chu is a rising freshman at Columbia University. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Diode, and the Harvard Advocate. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Acedia Journal.
Mooncalf Almanac, Matt Schumacher
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
This surrealistic almanac means to breeze in like unpredictable weather and surprise readers’ poetic lives of the mind with speakers who audaciously challenge the impending doom and cataclysms of climate change: here is the boasting poem of a surfer who boldly rides lava floes; here are the forewarnings of fortunetellers whose crystal balls and tarot deck are truly the paintings of Dali, Ernst, and De Chirico; here are green weathermen who remain wise bellwethers despite dizzying severe weather, staying brave even when plagued by the ghosts of past hurricanes; and here is a stormchaser, transformed by moving rainbows.
Here, too, is the mooncalf, mooing and galloping in with mythic heartbeat and hoofbeat, part cryptid familiar, perhaps part tree or water sprite, whose ghostly lunar undulations glide like the silver of the nightly tides. The mooncalf’s many thinginess includes the indomitable spirit and inestimable mystery of the wild. Aspiring to be the only almanac for animals, an ally for animals of all kinds, with lines that prize wolf spiders, and recover from wildfires, Mooncalf Almanac is content to nest with tree vole. It is a primer to inspire the child in us to admire the ephemeral brilliance and suddenness of weather in all seasons. Mooncalf Almanac aims to rain down and snow us in with poems that urge us to be protectors of the earth, hoping that show us a little of how to defy imaginative drought, to help us harvest that most elusive crop: our dreams.
Matt Schumacher, author of the poetry collections A Missing Suspiria de Profundis, favorite maritime drinking songs of the miraculous alcoholics, Spilling the Moon, Fire Diary, the Fire Diaries, and Ghost Town Odes, serves as editor of the New Fabulist journal Phantom Drift and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Vanity Twist, Iain Grinbergs
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Vanity Twist is an existential exploration of non-normative love, loss, and desire. It has more questions than answers. It revels in “low” and “high” culture. It is a success and a failure, a celebration and a mourning.
The collection toys with traditional forms and free verse to create a unique collection full of tension, which is articulated by a playful poetic voice. Self-acceptance is the main concern throughout. Ultimately, Vanity Twist is a reminder that you can find a path through trauma in poetry.
Iain Grinbergs is an assistant professor of English at the College of Central Florida. He received his PhD in English from Florida State University. He was a runner-up in the 2023 Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival’s Saints and Sinners Poetry Contest, a semifinalist in Conduit Magazine’s 2022 Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize, and a finalist in Black Lawrence Press’s Fall 2021 Black River Chapbook Competition. Vanity Twist is his first published poetry collection.
solacement: of finding joy in misery, Madalyn R. Lovejoy
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
solacement: of finding joy in misery is a dichotomous work, moving back and forth between elation and despair to portray love, illness, and embodiment.
solacement is a piece that focuses on the positives and negatives of life, situating one perspective next to the other. It also utilizes nature and the seasons to clarify various mental states and moods.
solacement: of finding joy in misery reveals that while things aren’t perfect, peace can still be found when navigating life’s ups and downs.
Madalyn R. Lovejoy (she/they) is a soon-to-be graduate studying Psychology and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Her poetry can be found at Querencia Press, Delicate Friend, sage cigarettes, and Wishbone Words, among others. Her short stories can be read at Cave Writing Magazine. Their debut poetry chapbook, amelioration, is published by Bottlecap Press. They can be found anywhere @mad_lovejoy.
Hummingbirds and Cigarettes, Nancy Byrne Iannucci
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Our world is full of contrasts. Something as small as a hummingbird or butterfly can bring hope, beauty, and mystery, whereas something as small as a cigarette can destroy you and those around you. Love and hate, peace and chaos, nature and the artificial find their way into Hummingbirds and Cigarettes. Nature plays a big role overall in this collection of poetry. The natural world’s hidden messages and deciphering its meaning tend to be a common theme.
At the same time, these poems address the insecurities and complexities of human relationships. Love and desire and the hope that these blissful parts of a bond will endure, which are often explained or shrouded in images of the natural world: the seasons, hummingbirds, butterflies, etc.
So, come take a walk with me through my world, my poems, perhaps one or more will shake your soul.
Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a Long Island, N.Y. native who currently lives in Troy, NY with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson. She is a school librarian and historian at Albany Academies. San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Defenestration, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Bending Genres, The Mantle, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Glass: a Poetry Journal are some of the places you will find her. She is the author of three chapbooks, Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), and Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022). Visit her at www.nancybyrneiannucci.com Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci
The Home of Milk, Chelsea Wills
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Home of Milk is a debut collection of poems born out of deep connection with becoming in here and now. This collection is about the liminal sweetness and revulsion of early parenting. In these pages we find glimpses of presence and clear-eyed aliveness. All the while, it is in conversation with the lineage of those influenced by leftover breakfast cereal, politics of awe, a nagging pandemic, patti smith, lullabies from Leonard Cohen, the possibility of next seasons seeds.
She weaves her longtime work as a visual artist into this work with her exacting descriptions of ordinary moments which are precise and unflinching. Her work troubles the notion of where poetry lies and who it is for by placing it in the everyday.
Chelsea Wills is an artist and writer based in Northern California. Her work exists at the nexus of place, change, and stories. This takes her to faraway places, like Mayan kitchens, crumbling haciendas, and megacity markets of Mexico, and also close to home, from the shoreline of Northern California and the last tenacious farms in the Silicon Valley to her own home garden. Her writing and art have been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Jose Museum of Art, Kala Art Institute, and more. She is the 2024 Anne Marie Oomen Fellow at Poetry Forge. You can find her @chelseawillsstudio and chelseawills.substack.com
Scorpio Mooned, Heather May
Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Scorpio Mooned is an immersive journey into the realms of feelings, depth, and contemplation, woven throughout time. While deeply personal, the poems resonate universally, offering readers an exploration into their own emotional landscapes.
Inspired by the author’s discovery of her moon sign, these verses uncover a new layer of self-understanding, Each poem in Scorpio Mooned is a raw and unfiltered expression of deep-watered feelings, devoid of sugar-coating or pretense.
Heather May, originating from Louisville, Kentucky, blends her rich heritage with California’s laid-back allure, embodying an artistic ethos with no bounds. A poet delving into human emotion, she explores mediums like expressionism and watercolor, alongside a passion for modern design and retro aesthetics. With a diverse educational background spanning journalism, business, PR, and beauty, Heather’s experiences include connections with musicians and celebrities, enriching her multifaceted perspective. Grounded in faith and authenticity, she navigates life’s paths with realism, cherishing imperfections and uncovering beauty in truth. Finding inspiration in spontaneity, nature, philosophy, and adventure, Heather extends an invitation through her writings for readers to embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery.
Full-length
What Comes Back, Javier Peñalosa, Robin Myers
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Javier Peñalosa M.’s What Comes Back is a procession, a journey, a search for a body of water that has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Featured in separate sections, original Spanish poems and Robin Myers’ English translations highlight tender ruminations on loss, memory, and communion. Just as landscapes witness and “preserve what happens along the length of them,” so do people. We watch as travelers navigate realms between the living and the dead, past mountains and dried up rivers to map, trace, and remember the past and future. Several sections, each bearing the title “What Comes Back,” guide readers on a looping voyage where they are “orbited around the gravity of what had come to be”—the absence of Mexico City’s rivers, and other absences wrought by war, climate change, and forced migration. Rattled between ecological destruction and human violence, What Comes Back, what remains, is a desire to name the missing, to render belonging out of dispossession, endurance out of erasure—the spiritual urge toward connection and community.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Javier Peñalosa (he/him) is an award-winning poet, children’s book author, and screenwriter. He holds a BA in education and an MFA in creative writing in Spanish from NYU. His poetry collections include Los que regresan, which won the 2017 Xirau Icaza Poetry Prize, and Los trenes que partían de mí, which won the 2009 Enriqueta Ochoa National Poetry Award. Additionally, he has earned fellowships from the fundación para las letras mexicanas, Mexico’s Young Artists Program (FONCA), and the Immigrant Artist Program from the New York Fund for the Arts. As a screenwriter, he has contributed to many acclaimed films and TV series including Juana Inés, The Eternal Feminine, and Malinche. Currently, he is a member of the Writers Guild of America West and is at work on several collaborative, multidisciplinary projects.
Robin Myers (she/her) is a prolific Spanish-to-English translator and poet based in Mexico City. In 2019, she won the Academy of American Poets’ Words in Translation Contest, and she was longlisted twice for the 2022 National Translation Award. Her own poetry was selected by Matthew Zapruder for the Best American Poetry Anthology in 2022 and has appeared widely in journals such as Kenyon Review, Granta, and Harvard Review. Her books have received international attention, with bilingual English-Spanish editions published in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Her recent book-length translations include Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, Copy by Dolores Dorantes, and The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero. She received a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for her in-progress translation of Like the Night Inside the Eyes by David Lipara.
The Lengest Neoi, Stephanie Choi
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication Date: May 6, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Lengest Neoi embraces and complicates what it means to err—to wander or go astray; a deviation from a code of behavior or truth; a mistake, flaw, or defect. Beginning with the collection’s title, which combines a colloquial Cantonese phrase (Leng Neoi / “Pretty Girl”) and the English suffix for the superlative degree (—est), these poems wander, deviate, and flow across bodies, geographies, and languages. In this collection from Stephanie Choi, you’ll find the poet’s “tongue writing herself, learning to speak.”
Stephanie Choi’s poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, PANK, Blackbird, and Electric Literature. She is currently the poet-in-residence at Sewanee: The University of the South, and lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Children in Tactical Gear, Peter Mishler
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Children in Tactical Gear offers a brilliant feed of stark incantations and unsparing satire. Set in distinctly American landscapes, including toy weapon assembly lines and the compounds of the super rich, and voiced by imperiled children, failed adults, and even a smart home speaker, this collection demonstrates the unsettling force of a surreal imagination under duress.
Peter Mishler’s collection Fludde won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books. He lives in Kansas.
Return of the Chinese Femme, Dorothy Chan
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy.
Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of multiple poetry collections, including BABE (Diode Editions, 2021), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2023 finalist for the Roethke Poetry Award for Revenge of the Asian Woman, 2022 finalist for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club for BABE, a 2020 and 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.
Reps, Kendra Sullivan
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In her first full-length poetry collection, Reps, Kendra Sullivan cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds through the un/disciplined integration of discrete epistemes; and the cultivation of a few anti-catastrophic [writing] strategies to locate and live by the compass in compassion in an age of climate chaos.
Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. Kendra makes public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, ecology, and engagement widely. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).
Common Amnesias, Alex Cuff
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Alex Cuff’s first full-length collection, Common Amnesias, moves through the dissolution of adolescent selfhood in the midst of capitalist excess and nuclear family norms, via the territory of dreams, and fallibilities of memory that tether the individual to the common amnesias of our institutions. Weaving through familial chasms, humiliation, and inheritance, the book interrogates the violence a subject endures when daring to disrupt the family bond for a new way of relating to community.
Alex Cuff is an educator, writer, and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. Her chapbooks include I Try Out A Sentence to See Whether I Believe (Ghost Proposal) and Family, A Natural Wonder(Reality Beach). Writing has been published in Apogee Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Teachers and Writers Magazine, Poetry Project Newsletter, 6X6, and elsewhere. Cuff is a co-founding editor of the Brooklyn-based poetry journal No, Dear, a public high school teacher at the Academy for Young Writers, and a graduate of the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College.
The Naif, Valerie Hsiung
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
The Naif lives in a practiced state of naivety—a language-fasted, resource-starved loop—and it lives as a test: of what awareness, what becoming, what imagination is possible under the scarcest of conditions, conditions that can make it impossible to deceive or beguile (others or oneself). It is a book as glass house reversed, where the person walking by can see all the way in, but the person inside can’t see halfway out—and yet the person inside has made this house. Perhaps because of the danger to the writer’s life that would result from any direct address to the Apparatus, the writer will have to commandeer the Apparatus’s own terms of “neutrality” to forge a secret path and get word (past the Apparatus) into the right hands. As though she, a language worker, under the watchful eye of the Apparatus, has been forced to create these daily logs, to send news to the other world that all is ok. So she must be careful what she says and what she doesn’t; so she does her job, and yet leaves clues throughout: all is not ok.
Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of multiple poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), selected by Renee Gladman for the Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the CSU Open Book Prize, YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Believer, Chicago Review, digital vestiges, Gulf Coast, The Nation, New Delta Review), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, and Lighthouse Works. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa.
LEX ICON, Salette Tavares, Isabel Sobral Campos (tr.), Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton (tr.)
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
For the first time appearing in English translation, the poems in LEX ICON present everyday objects through the lens of modern art and abstraction. The habitual uses of objects that these poems study point to the inherent philosophical content of the human capacity to produce, or poiesis. Much as abstraction in its representation of things as pictorial patterns at times distills the geometrical shape of an object by shedding its function, Tavares’s poems accomplish this distillation through language. In this way, LEX ICON connects this writer’s earlier poetry with her graphic sculptural poems. It foregrounds insights about human sociality, labor, and domesticity that dwell in household objects linked to the most bare necessities; and yet, it also presents them as almost mystical artifacts that partake of some unnamed ritual.
Salette Tavares (1922–94) was a Portuguese writer, theorist, and visual artist. She was a member of the experimental poetry group PO.EX and was involved in the publication of the first issues of Poesia Experimental. Her books include Quadrada (Moraes Editores), LEX ICON (Moraes Editores), Obra Poética 1957–1971 (Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda), and Poesia Gráfica (Casa Fernando Pessoa). Her spatial poems were exhibited at the 2014 retrospective, Salette Tavares: Spatial Poetry, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
Galáxias, Haroldo de Campos, Odile Cisneros (tr.)
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Begun in 1963 and only published in its final form in 1984, Galáxias is a sui generis work. As Haroldo de Campos himself wrote: “An audiovideotext, a videotextgame, the Galáxias situate themselves on the border between prose and poetry. In this kaleidoscopic book, there’s an epic, narrative gesture—mini-stories that come together and dissolve like the ‘suspense’ of a detective novel…but the image remains, the vision or calling of the epiphanic.” A series of 50 “galactic cantos”—in homage to both Dante and Pound—de Campos likewise follows James Joyce’s cue in conceiving of Galáxias as a “defense and illustration” of the Portuguese language and its poetic possibilities. The text incorporates literary allusion, citation, and words and phrases in at least a dozen languages, making Galáxias a formidable experiment in polyglot poetry. Galáxias charts the literal and literary journeys de Campos undertook from the early 1950s on. Arguably his chief poetic accomplishment, Galáxias is also a landmark in world avant-garde poetics.
Haroldo de Campos (1929–2003) played a pivotal role not only in Brazilian and Latin American culture, but also in the avant-garde at large. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Campos was barely in his twenties when he founded the concrete poetry movement alongside his brother Augusto de Campos and their friend Décio Pignatari, thus revolutionizing poetry and placing Brazil on the map of literary experimentalism for the first time. Over the years, his writing evolved in different directions, including the experimental prose of Galáxias. Parallel to his creative efforts, Campos republished long-forgotten poets, such as the Romantic Joaquim de Sousândrade and the modernist Oswald de Andrade. With Augusto and Décio, he translated modernist and world literature including Joyce, Mayakovski, Pound, medieval troubadours, Dante, Chinese classical poetry, Japanese Noh plays, Goethe, Mallarmé, Biblical texts, and Homer, among others. Campos produced a complex oeuvre of extreme global and temporal breadth gathered in more than thirty single-authored and collaborative volumes. He was admired by international figures such as Octavio Paz, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Roman Jakobson, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida. Campos received numerous prestigious distinctions, including the Jabuti Prize (Brazil), the Octavio Paz Prize (México), the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (France), the Prix Roger Caillois (France), and an honorary doctorate from Université de Montréal (Canada).
UPSTAGE, Bruce Andrews, Sally Silvers
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
UPSTAGE — a words + visuals combine, juxtaposing Bruce’s disjunctive mosaics of language collaged out of signage from Asbury Park, NJ & Sally’s photographs capturing that town’s distinctive looks & textures & pandemic-era atmosphere.
Poet, performance writer, poetics theorist, sound designer, Bruce Andrews moved to New York City in 1975, teaching Political Science at Fordham in the Bronx (specialties: U.S. imperialism, global capitalism, covert activity, cultural studies & the JFK assassination) for the next 37 years — (for 5 minutes of entertainment, google his stand-off with Bill O’Reilly as ‘Outrage of the Week’). Closely associated with the post-1970s experimental literary movement, so-called ‘Language Poetry’, he coedited the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Charles Bernstein. He has published 30+ books including Film Noir, Wobbling, R + B, Love Songs, Give Em Enough Rope, Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened, I Don’t Have any Paper so Shut up, or Social Romanticism, Tizzy Boost, EX WHY ZEE, Lip Service, Designated Heartbeat, Swoon Noir, You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, A Change Is Gonna Come, and The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters. His essays on literary theory & poetics are collected in Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Long involved in multi-media collaborations — including the performance project BARKING (started with Sally Silvers & Tom Cora), staging large-cast theater spectacles— for decades he has been Sally Silvers & Dancers’ main music/text collaborator — composer, sound designer, & improvising live mixer.
Sally Silvers is an award winning choreographer who also has published articles, essays, and poems in magazines, chapbooks, journals and anthologies. She continues to have an on-going fascination with the poetic as well as the social meanings of movement, offering a no-holds- barred exploration of movement possibilities — often tilted toward the eccentric, awkward, and unexpected. Silvers has performed in South Korea, London, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico, Berlin, Sweden, and Denmark, at the Joyce Theater, and many other national and international venues. She was a core member of the faculty at Bennington College Summer Choreography Project for 5 years and a guest teacher at the European Dance Development Center in Holland for a decade. She is the co-director of 2 award-winning dance films & is known for several community curatorial projects including TalkTalkWalkWalk(combining dance artists and poets) and Surprise Every Time (a festival of “live choreography’ – starting a new dance live in front of the audience on the spot).. From 2005 to 2011 she danced in the new and historical works of Yvonne Rainer. She has been collaborating with Bruce Andrews since the early 1980s. Last major piece from late 2022, Pandora’s Cake Stain, sublimely mashes up the radical artist Tina Modotti with Alban Berg’s Lulu —performances archived online at Roulette.org (& a film version likely soon to come).
When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance, Joan Baez
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Joan Baez shares poems for or about her contemporaries (such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Jimi Hendrix), reflections from her childhood, personal thoughts, and cherished memories of her family, including pieces about her younger sister, singer-songwriter Mimi Fariña. Speaking to the people, places, and moments that have had the greatest impact on her art, this collection is an inspiring personal diary in the form of poetry.
While Baez has been writing poetry for decades, she’s never shared it publicly. Poems about her life, her family, about her passions for nature and art, have piled up in notebooks and on scraps of paper. Now, for the first time ever, her life is shared revealing pivotal life experiences that shaped an icon, offering a never-before-seen look into the reminiscences and musings of a great artist.
Like a late-night chat with someone you love, this collection connects fans to the real heart of who Joan Baez is as a person, as a daughter and sister, and as an artist who has inspired millions.
Joan Baez is a dynamic force of nature. Her commitment to music and social activism has earned global recognition, ranging from induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, to the Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International’s highest honor. Retired from active performing since 2019, she has devoted much of her time to the “Mischief Makers” series of paintings, portraits that immortalize risk-taking visionaries she has known, who have brought about social change through history, from Dr. Martin Luther King and Bob Dylan to the Dalai Lama and Patti Smith. Ms. Baez’s acclaimed book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly? was also published by Godine.
The Weight of Survival, Tina Biello
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc
Publication Date: May 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
Nestled in a small logging town near Lake Cowichan is an old elementary school. The child of immigrants from post-war Italy attends this school among the population of mostly white, anglo-saxon families. She does not speak English. Her family is one of four who emigrated from southern Italy, to this small forested community. There are other families, from India, who share a kinship of ‘ other’ with the Italian families. What happens when your voice, your food, your home is different? How do you know how to be queer when there is no language or place for it? How do you remember a time not spoken of, but passed on through the smell of walnut blossoms in the spring, grapes in the fall? In Portrait of an Immigrant, Tina Biello chronicles this upbringing of otherness, of being shaped by two very different communities, of blending identities into one, and what is left behind in the process.
Tina Biello is Italian by way of Lake Cowichan, BC. She is born to immigrant parents from Southern Italy. She lives on the traditional territory of the Snaw-naw-as people. She is an actor, a poet and playwright. Her first full-length book of poetry, In the Bone Cracks of the Walls, published by Leaf Press, was part of a multi-disciplinary art exhibition of poetry, watercolour and music in Montreal, Vancouver and Italy. A Housecoat Remains is her second collection with Guernica Editions, 2015. Playing into Silence is her third collection with Caitlin Press, 2018.
Psyche Running, Durs Grünbein, Karen Leeder
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2024
Format: Hardcover
Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet of his generation in Germany. Since 1988, when the then-twenty-five-year-old burst onto the scene with his poetry collection Grauzone morgens—a mordant reckoning with the East Germany he grew up in—Grünbein has published more than thirty books of poetry and prose, which have been translated into dozens of languages.
In 2005 the volume Ashes for Breakfast introduced Grünbein to English-language readers for the first time by sampling poetry from his first four collections. Psyche Running picks up where that volume left off and offers a selection of poems from his nine subsequent collections, which shows how Grünbein has developed from his ironic take on the classical into an elegiac exploration of history through dream fragments and poems with a haunting existential unease.
Durs Grünbein was born in Dresden in 1962, and he now lives in Berlin and Rome. He is professor of poetics and aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has written more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, Porcelain, also published by Seagull Books.
Karen Leeder is a writer, translator, and academic, and teaches German at New College, Oxford, where she works on modern poetry. For Seagull Books, she has translated works by Durs Grünbein, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Michael Krüger.
Hazard Home, Christine Lowther
Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc
Publication Date: May 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
Hazard, Home is a tribute to both wonder and grief for Earth’ s inhabitants and systems. With admiration for the land holders (trees) and inhabitants of the rainforest, wetlands and oceans of her home, former Tofino Poet Laureate Christine Lowther delves into the pressing issues of urbanization, climate change, and loss of biodiversity while expressing her deep concern for those feathered, furred, webbed, and rooted. Hazard, Home is set apart from traditional nature poetry by its decolonial lens which pays tribute to stolen lands as well as displaced people and cultures. Lowther’ s words are both startling and reflective as she bears witness to the devastating impact of our presence on the natural world. Through her evocative writing, Lowther inspires us to celebrate the beauty of nature while recognizing the urgent need for change.
Christine Lowther edited two anthologies, co-edited two more, and authored three previous poetry collections. Her memoir, Born Out of This, was shortlisted for a BC Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and literary presses. She was Tofino’ s Poet Laureate for the 2020-22 tenure. For more than thirty years, she has lived in unceded ?a?uukwii?at? territory (Clayoquot Sound), where in 2014 the Pacific Rim Arts Society presented her with the inaugural Rainy Coast Arts Award for Significant Accomplishment.
The Beautiful Immunity, Karen An-hwei Lee
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: May 2, 2024
Format: Paperback
The Beautiful Immunity asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Spare and formally daring, these poems were refined through the catastrophes of wildfires, recession, and a major public health crisis through the hope of a beautiful immunity—an everlasting salve for the lost. This slender volume reads as the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of labor, documenting large-scale social, cultural, and political upheavals, as well as the moment when the word “anthropause” floated indelibly into the world’s vocabulary.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Duress, Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics, In Medias Res (winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award), and Phyla of Joy and Ardor, both also published by Tupelo Press. She authored two novels, Sonata in K and The Maze of Transparencies. Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, comprise the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations, was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Lee currently lives in greater Chicago.
I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought, Allie Duff
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
A sometimes satirical reflection on hope in a time of hopelessness, the poems in I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought use stubborn humour to grapple with the anxiety of moving forward during late capitalism. While many of the poems are set in Newfoundland, the book also echoes the universal experience of loss, leaving, returns, and never being able to return. The first section of the manuscript, titled “Some Disasters,” introduces real and imagined catastrophes. The St. Lawrence tidal wave, the history of resettlement, and the Muskrat Falls debacle stand next to poems that live in an imagined future where the capelin refuse to roll and snow refuses to fall. The second section is titled “I dreamed I was an afterthought.” Here, the eclectic poems turn to a more personal perspective of place, my struggles with mental illness, and a feminist exploration of familial relationships. In “Of No Returns,” movement through time and space is tinged with the same lurking fear of irreversibility, a fear which has been amplified during the pandemic. There is a yearning for the “before times,” a time which may or may not exist.
Allie Duff is a writer and musician living in St. John’s, NL. Her poems have been published in Riddle Fence, Newfoundland Quarterly, newpoetry.ca, among others. Allie was an honourable mention in in the 2016 Gregory J. Power poetry competition and in CV2’s Young Buck poetry prize in 2020.
Civil Twilight, Cynthia Huntington
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Civil twilight is the astronomical term for the minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset. If one took a snapshot, it would be impossible to tell whether the light was increasing or diminishing. The poems in Civil Twilight arise in this liminal space. With luminous precision, Cynthia Huntington examines the civil twilight we live in now, unsure of whether the darkness is closing in or whether the light is about to break.
Here the poet is both skeptic and seeker, for any hope worth discovering needs to withstand the facts at hand. Is everything getting worse, or are things about to improve? Or is this the way things have always been, both hopeful and terrifying, and it is our questions that need to change? In part one, the speaker strives for balance by maintaining light and warmth in a cold season. In part two, American scenes of construction and destruction are set beside moments from history: Rome, the British Empire, and American immigration. Part three enfolds questions of history and power within winter scenes and the artist’s imagination. In part four, the speaker looks back and admits answers remain elusive, yet points to the new ways of thinking and feeling about survival that have resulted from the work. And here, the half-light shifts. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, Civil Twilight wrestles hard-won hope from disquiet, coming to rest in what is.
Cynthia Huntington is the author of several collections of poetry, including Terra Nova; Heavenly Bodies, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Levis Prize-winner The Radiant; We Have Gone to the Beach, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Jane Kenyon Award; and The Fish-Wife; and the nonfiction prose volume The Salt House. Huntington is an emeritus professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, a former Guggenheim Fellow, a former poet laureate of New Hampshire, and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry.
No Charity in the Wilderness, Shaun T. Griffin
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
No Charity in the Wilderness is a long journey into the new American West. From the southern border to the isolating two-lane highways in the desert, this collection is a prayer of reconciliation with so much that troubles us—those who live without resources or voices—and their possible future in this ever-changing landscape of desire.
Griffin has spent many decades in the high desert trying to find the way forward—when what he knows has been challenged and still there is breath on the horizon. One day an ancient Chinese poet comes to visit: “Snow deepens/ to quiet what I once believed, and Wang Wei stoops from the spine:/ this is how you become silence.” Even if you doubt the old poet’s counsel, like Griffin, you want to journey with him into the wilderness.
Shaun T. Griffin has dedicated his life to creating a caring community. He and his wife, Deborah, founded the Community Chest in 1991, a nonprofit organization that directs more than thirty programs for northern Nevada, including hunger relief, service learning, counseling, drug and alcohol counseling, early childhood education, and art and social justice projects. Griffin taught poetry workshops at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published a journal of the inmates’ work, Razor Wire. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet and Anthem for a Burnished Land. In 2014, Griffin was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler initiates her readers into a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling. From the wood floor of an art museum buckling with Lake Michigan moisture, to the mud-packed hooves of the horse of childhood, to an art student’s spit on a pane of mirrored glass, the poems’ images string together a necklace of exquisite longing. Pleasures and complexities of sensory experience lay the ground for a world where risk is rewarded and candor is sensual. The poet explores registers of desire and power, drawing upon her training as a visual artist to make a studio of language. Temperature and texture gain grammar as the poems reach toward awe via multivalent psychology, sex, and sculptural interventions. These poems invite readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one’s devotion to any creative practice.
Sara Ellen Fowler is a writer, artist, and educator living in California. Her writing has appeared in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Interim, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. Her work has been supported by The Frost Place, the Ashbery Home School, and Community of Writers. In 2023, she was awarded a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Sara holds a BFA in Sculpture from Art Center College of Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside.
Limited Verse, David Martin
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
At the close of the twenty-first century, a prison population awaits transport to a world where their memories will be Cleaned, and where they will be Harmonized into the language of New English, made up of only 850 words. One person, knowing of this inevitability, secretly translates poetry into this limited tongue, a gift to a self who will no longer be able to understand the literature they love.
In the years beyond this time, two scholars make a remarkable discovery: a book of poems, a work of translation, and a record of a desperate experiment. This manuscript becomes a window to an impossible realm, and they work diligently to understand the storied document and its tangled history.
Limited Verse is an uncanny collection of familiar poems made newly strange, wrapped in a fascinating speculative mystery. Inspired by the real-life restricted language Basic English, a project of linguist C.K. Ogden, and by the work of George Orwell, H.G. Wells, and Jorge Luis Borges, author David Martin invites you to a place where nothing-not our words, not the building blocks of worlds-is quite what it seems.
David Martin is the author of two previous poetry collections, Kink Bands and Tar Swan, which was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the W.O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize. David’s work has been awarded the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for prizes from FreeFall, Vallum, PRISM International, and the Alberta Magazine Awards. He works as a literacy instructor and organizer for the Single Onion Poetry Series in Calgary, Alberta.
Ago, Thomas Dillon Redshaw
Publisher: Salmon Poetry
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Ago is a richly detailed and elegantly crafted exploration of mutability fine tuned to the times and places where the men and women brought to life here have loved and lived. The luminous, wise, and moving poems—in form and language recalling Dickinson, Hopkins, Kinsella, among others—transport us to the heart of deep time and experience across the Midwest, New England, and Ireland.” – Eamonn Wall, author of Junction City (2015)
Thomas Dillon Redshaw (b. 1944) is the author of Heimaey, The Floating World, Mortal, and fugitive broadsides and chapbooks. Raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts, he first encountered living Irish poetry in the impromptu readings of Desmond O’Grady in Cronin’s, behind Harvard. He studied poetry with X.J. Kennedy, John Montague, and M.L. Rosenthal. He studied Irish writing with Roger McHugh and David H. Greene. His poems have appeared in American little magazines and, mainly, in such Irish publications as Cyphers, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, and the Irish Times. He edited Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (2004) and served as editor of Éire-Ireland (1974-1996) and New Hibernia Review (1996-2006), both of whose pages featured contemporary Irish poetry. From 2000 through 2008 he edited the series of fine press printings of Irish poetry from Traffic Street Press in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Auguries & Divinations, Heather Treseler
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Publication Date: April 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman’s coming-of-age, attuned to the unspoken rules (and liabilities) of women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. An older woman, Lucie, becomes the narrator’s Beatrice in love and survival, and she returns to New England seasoned and ready to claim a life of her own making, drawing on her study of the love lyric—from Catullus to Frank Bidart—and the classical practice of augury, or observing the birds to discern human fate.
Brad Crenshaw, in choosing the book for the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, notes: “Heather Treseler is compelling. We immediately want to listen to her the way we might listen to a lyric singer full of melody and rhythm… But make no mistake, running through all her lyricism is a staring, unblinking intelligence that informs us about what she sees. Her vision is inclusive, generous, wide-ranging, and enthralling.”
Heather Treseler is the 2023 winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her book Parturition (Southword, 2020) received the 2019 chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Her poems appear in The American Scholar, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Irish Times, JAMA, and The Iowa Review, among other journals. Her memoir essay “My Search for Elizabeth Bishop” was included in the list of Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. Recipient of the George I. Alden award for Excellence in Teaching, she is professor of English at Worcester State University.
Solio, Samira Negrouche, Nancy Naomi Carlson
Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: May 6, 2024
Format: Paperback
In these otherworldly poetry sequences, Samira Negrouche reminds us that “all life is movement,” where “time passes through me / beings pass through me / they are me / I am them.” The “I” is representative of one voice, three voices, all voices, all rooted in movement as their bodies brush past one another, brush against thresholds of time and space. Everything is in flux—including the dream-like landscapes at the borders of borders—as the poet seeks to recover parts of self and memory, on both a personal and universal level. In these poems, history-laden locales such as Algiers, Timbuktu, N’Djamena, Cotonou, Zanzibar, Cape Town, and Gorée are evoked. Even the language, expertly and sensitively translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, refuses to be pinned down, as it loops back on itself. At times contradictory, at times fractured in meaning, syntax, and diction, the playful language is riddled with “restless” verbs. In the end, the “I” takes on prophetic overtones, instilling hope for the future.
Samira Negrouche was born in Algiers where she continues to live and work. Her work has been shortlisted for the Dereck Walcott Prize for Poetry and the National Translation Award in Poetry.
Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and essayist. She is the author of An Infusion of Violets. Her translation of Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude, published by Seagull Books, won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 4/30 and 5/6 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.