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

The Orange and other poems, Wendy Cope

Publisher: Faber & Faber
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

The Orange provides the perfect introduction to Wendy Cope, one of Britain’s wittiest, best-selling and best-loved poets.

In poems that can turn from laugh-out-loud funny to deeply moving, Wendy Cope offers reflections on love and life. From the joy of falling – and being – in love to ways to help you deal with a painful break-up or the memories of people loved and lost, this is a book you will want to savor and share with all your friends.

Wendy Cope was born in Erith, Kent. After university she worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986 and her most recent, Anecdotal Evidence, in 2018. In 1987 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 the American Academy of Arts and Letters Michael Braude Award. Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 was published in 2008.

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melancholy arcadia, john compton

Publisher: Small Harbor Publishing
Publication Date: April 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

john compton writes to destroy and to create, and his work lives in the tension of that inescapable truth: that what is is because what was is not. compton turns this skill of blowing up the world and standing in the debris into a metacognitive tour of poetry as a concept: a physical one, a social one, a spiritual one.

john compton (b. 1987) is gay poet who lives in Kentucky with his husband Josh and their dogs and cats. His latest full length books are the castration of a minor god published with Ghost City Press (Dec 2022) and my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store published with Flowersong Press (Dec 2024); his latest chapbooks are “how we liberated what secrets we modified” published by Etched Press (Feb 2023) and blacked out borderland from an exponential crisis published with Ethel Zine & Micro Press (Aug 2023).

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Big Blue Hospital and Other Poems, Robert Allen

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Big Blue Hospital and Other Poems rides the intersections of illness, both psychiatric and medical. Also love, loss, and spiritual doubt, with a sense of hope holding it all together.

I consider myself a confessional poet and my poems illustrate the life of my mind and direct experience as they relate to the poems. Is the subject of the poem “me?” Yes, and if my poems resonate, I’m pleased, My goal is to express relatability in music, in poetry.

Robert Allen lives with his family in Oakland, CA, where he writes poems and coaches poets to be better in their craft. He has had poetry, flash fiction, reviews, and interviews published widely in online journals and print magazines. www.robertallenpoet.com, https://twitter.com/RobertAllenPoet

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Suitably Mangled, Lee Gill

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Suitably Mangled is an exercise in divine bleeding. Written in a dynamic variety of styles, this small compilation of poems will bring readers from the cold streets of New York City’s Lower East Side to stormy high seas to the edge of sanity itself.

With Suitably Mangled, Lee Gill conveys his effort to process and express his experiences with addiction, racism, mental illness, general societal ills and spiritual revelations. Through the trials that come with personal transformation, Gill has found poetry as the North Star to guide him through the dramatic transitions. It is his hope that this chapbook helps the reader navigate their own mazes and come out on the other side as whole and serene beings.

Lee Gill is a poet based in the New Jersey/New York area. Outside of poetry, he’s had the privilege of writing critical music and movie reviews, short stories, religious sermons and political speeches. When Lee is not writing, he’s engaging in social activism and studying the occult.

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Stained Glass Drive-Thru, Ainsley Meyer

Publisher: Bottlecap Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Stained Glass Drive-Thru is a psychedelic road trip, traversing through feeling with no set destination. Beautiful on the outside, peering through the stained glass exposes raw emotion barred behind vulnerability. Exploring gender, expectation, and American melancholy, this collection of poems finds meaning in the mundane and peace through uncertainty.

In this collection Ainsley Meyer draws inspiration from her travels across the United States, and the array of people she’s met along the way. Her work has been featured in Salty Newsletter, Real Change News, the LGBT Community Center National History Archive, and various zines. You can follow her @gone.hikes on Instagram to see what creative projects, or other antics she’s up to.

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Full-length

WATCHNIGHT, Cyree Jarelle Johnson

Publisher: Nightboat Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight—a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying—and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement—from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, NJ. He is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Apogee, Foglifter, WUSSY, and Atmos among other publications. WATCHNIGHT, his forthcoming book of poetry, considers ancestry as history in the context of the Great Black Migration of the 20th century, familial estrangement, and queer family.

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Rangikura, Tayi Tibble

Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Tayi Tibble returns on the heels of her incendiary debut with a bold new follow-up. Barbed and erotic, vulnerable and searching, Rangikura asks readers to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. Moving between hotel lobbies and all-night clubs, these poems chronicle life spent in spaces that are stalked by transaction and reward. “I grew up tacky and hungry and dazzling,” Tibble writes. “Mum you should have tied me/to the ground./Instead I was given/to this city freely.”   

Here is a poet staking out a sense of freedom on her own terms in times that very often feel like end times. Tibble’s range of forms and sounds are dazzling. Written with Māori moteatea, purakau, and karakia (chants, legends, and prayers) in mind, Rangikura explores the way the past comes back, even when she tries to turn her back on it. “I was forced to remember that,/wherever I go,/even if I go nowhere at all,/I am still a descendent of mountains.”   

At once a coming-of-age and an elegy to the traumas born from colonization, especially the violence enacted against indigenous women, Rangikura interrogates not only the poets’ pain, but also that of her ancestors. The intimacy of these poems will move readers to laughter and tears. Speaking to herself, sometimes to the reader, these poems arc away from and return to their ancestral roots to imagine the end of the world and a new day. They invite us into the swirl of nostalgia and exhaustion produced in the pursuit of an endless summer. (“My heart goes out like an abandoned swan boat/ghosting along a lake”). They are a new highpoint from a writer of endless talent. 

Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Te Whanganui a Tara, Aotearoa. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. She is the author of Poūkahangatus.

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Instructions for Traveling West, Joy Sullivan

Publisher: Dial Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

First you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.

So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West— a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention? 

A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.

Expansive and heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope—the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that “joy is not a trick.”

Joy Sullivan received an MA in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Art. She has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.

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Gay Heaven Is A Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax, charles theonia

Publisher: powerHouse Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Like meeting under a disco ball, or listening to Arthur Russell on the Staten Island Ferry, Gay Heaven Is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax proposes reading as a form of friendship. Conversational, inquisitive, and scrutinizing, this book goes out to anyone who has loved someone they’ll never get to meet.

charles theonia is a Brooklyn poet, enthusiast, and transsexual without direction. They are the author of chaplet If a Piece Falls off the Poem, Keep It and other writings on zits, piss, and disco.

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YOU, Rosa Alcalá

Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it “gathers itself over time to become whole,” recovering the speaker’s intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman’s survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body’s cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.

Rosa Alcalá has published three previous books of poetry, most recently MyOTHER TONGUE. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Yaddo, MacDowell, Fundación Valparaíso, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation and editorial work include New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña and Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, runner-up for the 2012 PEN Translation Award. Her poems and translations have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Poetry, and Best American Poetry, among other publications. She is the De Wetter Endowed Chair in Poetry at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual MFA in Creative Writing Program.

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Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Fugitive/Refuge, Philip Metres follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and cut-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—in order to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism. 

Fugitive/Refuge pronounces the urge both to remember the past and to forge new poetic forms and ways of being in language. In one section, Metres meditates on the Arabic greeting—ahlan wa sahlan—and asks how older forms of welcome might offer generous and embodied ways of responding to the challenges of mass migration and digital alienation in postmodern societies. In another, he dialogues with Dante to inform new ways of understanding ancestral and modern migrations and the injustices that have burdened them. Ultimately, Metres uses movement to create a new place—one to home and dream in—for all those who seek shelter.

A Lebanese-American poet, translator, scholar, and activist, Philip Metres (he/him) is the author and translator of eleven books and chapbooks, including Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018), finalist for Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism; Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize; and Sand Opera (Alice James 2015). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, numerous journals and anthologies, and has garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, a Lannan Fellowship, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, three Arab American Book Awards among many other fellowships and awards. A professor of English, he is the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

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Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, CAConrad

Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback

Recalling the historical and symbolic significance of the boomerang as an instrument of return, these poems emerged from a (soma)tic poetry ritual in which the author wrote to animals who have found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene, resulting in sculptural poems that are both hopeful and cautionary as they emerge organically from the bottom of each page. Guided by the urge “to/desire/the world/as it is/not as/it was,” CAConrad writes from an ecopoetics that is generous and galvanizing, reminding us of how our present attentions collectively shape a future humanity.

CAConrad has been working with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), which won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Prize. The Book of Frank is now available in nine different languages. Other titles include While Standing in Line for Death, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tic for the Future Wilderness, and A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics. They received a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, and a Believer Magazine Book Award. With Robert Dewhurst and Joshua Beckman, they co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. In 2022 Augusto Cascales made a film of their play The Obituary Show. They recently had their first solo exhibition at Fluent Gallery in Santander, Spain, titled 13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

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After, Geoffrey Brock

Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The title of Geoffrey Brock’s third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock’s father, who was also a poet. Some of those and many of the others are also in some way “after”—as in, in the manner of—other poems or works of art. Such texts are often called “imitations” and have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.” 

Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but clearly separate tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it’s a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets are indebted to other poets as surely as each of us is indebted to those who raised us, and the poems in After attempt to account for such personal and poetic inheritances.

Geoffrey Brock, born in Atlanta in 1964, is an American poet, translator, editor, and professor. He is the author of two previous collections of poems, Weighing Light and Voices Bright Flags; the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry; and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. Since 2006 he has taught in the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and the founding editor of The Arkansas International. He currently divides his time between Arkansas and Montreal.

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Light Me Down: New and Collected, Jean Valentine

Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth.

In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn’t be lost. Even Jean’s therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions—a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean’s wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books—back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle.

In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is “leaving all worlds behind.” Love doesn’t disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: “This is happiness. Old life,/ I’m glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found,/ I was written on a wall in air.” The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet.

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 13th book of poetry was Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 – 2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. In 2014 she was given an award for exceptional accomplishment in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was awarded Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2017. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Jean Valentine died on December 29, 2020, in New York, NY. She was 86.

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Gatherer, Todd Osborne

Publisher: Belle Point Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

What does it mean to belong when all the foundations are cracked? This debut poetry collection works toward many answers, attempting to shape a life inside deep loss and abiding love. Todd Osborne navigates questions of home and family amidst the complexities of Southern culture and personal grief. At its heart, Gatherer seeks solace in a faith that eludes without entirely fading. In every setting, the poet quietly lets us into a world in which “each day we survive feels like a miracle”—and we are left more attuned to its ordinary wonder.

Todd Osborne is a poet and teacher originally from Nashville. He is a feedback editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and a poetry reader for Memorious. His poems have been featured at Scrawl Place, CutBank, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry, and EcoTheo Review. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his wife and their three cats.

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Built Around the Fire, Nathan Lipps

Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

Built Around the Fire delves into notions of place, the enveloping wonder and plight of our environment, and the complexities of rural culture: an examination of hierarchies, conservatism, generational religion, and the perpetuation of patriarchal norms. Such concepts are juxtaposed with a personal narrative: the rise and failure of a relationship, the deafening silence that arrives within any new vacancy, and the eventual need to learn to adapt in order to grow. These two themes—the notion of a midwestern place and its ideologies, and the notion of a failed relationship— work in tandem to speak for a shared struggle. The small family farm is dying out and the personal relationship dies right alongside it. What remains is a chance at rebirth, change, a looking outward, finally, as much as a looking inward. Though there is brokenness, and pain, there is also hope.

Nathan Lipps is the author of the chapbook the body as passage (Open Palm Print). Born and raised along the rural coast of western Michigan, he currently lives in Ohio where he is a Professor at Central State University. A recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship (Kenyon Review), an Excellence award in Research (SUNY Binghamton), and a Poetry Fellowship (Wichita State University), Nathan’s work has been published in the Best New Poets, BOAAT, Cleaver, Colorado Review, EcoThe, North American Review, Third Coast, TYPO, and elsewhere. 

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Absence of Wings, Arleen Pare

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: April 12, 2024
Format: Paperback

Absence of Wings depicts the extraordinary and tragically foreshortened life of A.— Paré ’ s niece, Brazilian, adopted, racialized, and living with multiple mental health diagnoses. In her deft and clear poetics, accompanied by documentary pieces in the tradition of C.D. Wright’ s One with Others, Paré is both witness to and emotionally engaged in the life and death of A. The result is deep and heart-felt, both factional and fictional, poetry and prose, holding its subject, A., heart-close and 3,000 miles away. Absence of Wings unfolds on many levels; it embraces the private and public spheres; it is as intimate as family, as worldly as the public and personal politics that surround each life. It both observes and embraces, always with the important question of the world’ s unprotected children in mind.

Arleen Paré is a writer with eight collections of poetry, based in Victoria, BC. She has been short-listed for the BC Dorothy Livesay BC Award for Poetry and has won the American Golden Crown Award for Poetry, the Victoria Butler Book Prize, a CBC Bookie Award, and a Governor Generals’ Award for Poetry.

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As the Sky Begins to Change, Kim Stafford

Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and author of eighteen books of poetry and prose, including Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press) and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared (Trinity University Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Harpers, the Atlantic, and other magazines. His books have received Pacific Northwest Book Awards and a Citation for Excellence from the Western States Book Awards. In 2018 he was named Oregon Poet Laureate for a two-year term. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.

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Playhouse, Jorrell Watkins

Publisher: Curbstone Books
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Jorrell Watkins’s debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States’s fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in PlayHouse embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner, and witness. Throughout, Watkins inflects a Black/trap vernacular that defamiliarizes the urban Southern landscape. Across three sections of poetry scored by hip-hop, blues, and trap, Watkins considers how music is a dwelling and wonders which histories, memories, and people haunt each home. Past figures such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and the short-lived 1940s trio Day, Dawn & Dusk intermingle with Migos, the Watkins family, childhood friends, and loved ones both parted and departed. At its core, PlayHouse reckons with the truths and failures of masculinity for Black boys and men, all the while documenting moments of triumphant Black joy and love.

Jorrell Watkins is from Richmond, Virginia. He is an alum of Hampshire College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry.

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Whiny Baby, Julie Paul

Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

Chomping / champing / championing / churlish / … / There’s a wolf at the door / that looks exactly like me Who is the “whiny baby” in this book? Rather than calling names or hurling insults, the candid poems in this collection most often implicate the poet herself. Expansive in form and voice, the poems in Julie Paul’s second collection offer both love letters and laments. They take us to construction sites, meadows, waiting rooms, beaches, alleys, gardens, and frozen rivers, from Montreal to Hornby Island. They ask us to live in the moment, despite the moment. Including a spirited long poem that riffs on the fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” these poems are like old friends that at once console and confess. They blow kisses, they remember, and they celebrate the broken and the lost alongside the beautiful. At turns frank, peevish, introspective, and mischievous, the poems share sincere and intimate perspectives on the changing female body, our natural and built landscapes, and the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Whiny Baby calls on us to simultaneously examine and exult in our brief time on earth.

Julie Paul is the author of three short fiction collections and the poetry collection The Rules of the Kingdom. She lives in Victoria, BC.

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I Am of the Tribe of Judah, Stephen A. Sadow, Ilan Stavans

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

The first anthology of its kind, I Am of the Tribe of Judah: Poems from Jewish Latin America brings together poetry from the Mexican border to the tip of South America. Originally written in Spanish, Portuguese, Yiddish, Ladino, Casteidish, and Hebrew, these poems have been translated into English, many for the first time, by a group of prize-winning translators.

This multilingual collection looks at the tradition across more than five hundred years, featuring poems that exalt being Jewish, whether Ashkenazi or Sephardic, and poems that express humor and satire. Conversely, there are poems in response to anti-Semitism and poems of exile, of protest, and of the Holocaust. In a different mode, there are wondrous poems on mysticism and Kabbalah.

The book includes an insightful introduction and historical background by world-renowned literary and social critic Ilan Stavans, professor at Amherst College.

Stephen A. Sadow is a professor emeritus of Latin American literature and Jewish studies at Northeastern University in Boston. His books include the National Jewish Book Award-winning King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers (UNMP).

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Dreamcraft, Peter Dale Scott

Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

so the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not know In his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter). In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford. Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and emeritus professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, is an award-winning poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of many books, including Mosaic Orpheus.

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Felling, Kelan Nee

Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

This collection is a record of one man’s navigation of loss, addiction, and labor. At once a meditation on the allure of a legacy in self-destruction and a giving over to hope, Felling is an exploration in honesty. Rendered in direct language and through clear eyes, this book, as its title indicates, is concerned with tensions of agency, creation, and destruction- upward and downward motion.

Kelan Nee is a poet and carpenter from Massachusetts. He is a 2023 Adroit Djankian Scholar and has received support from the Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He lives in Texas, is pursuing a PhD, and holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He has lived and worked throughout New England.

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Any Moonwalker Can Tell You, Joel Peckham

Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover

Selected from six collections and over two decades of poems beginning with the promise of Nightwalking and carrying through to the award-winning Bone Music, Joel Peckham’s Any Moonwalker Can Tell You draws from the best of a maximalist, gritty body of work that manages to balance page and stage. Intense and accessible, these poems channel the cosmic, longlined, and loose-limbed expansiveness of Whitman and the sonic, image-driven experimentation of Kinnell. Though this is a Selected Poems, there is thematic unity—a focus on how the personal and the collective intersect, how acts of empathy can access the ecstatic, and how music has the capacity to transform despair into hope. Beginning with the poet walking at night through a midwestern town and ending among the stars in a sequence of new poems that completes the collection, there is an upward and outward trajectory. Of Peckham’s collection, The Heat of What Comes, composed in the aftermath of an accident that took lives of his wife, Susan, and his oldest son, Cyrus, Jack Ridl once wrote that “Joel Peckham has written a survival guide to America” in which the reader is “hurled through the culture’s plurality of attacks on the heart. His grief is searing. He leads us through.” Taken as a whole, this New and Selected Poems is a testament to the poet’s recognition that survival is not enough, we must find a way to keep living, keep making music even after the record has stopped spinning: “the song having ended but not the hurried beating of the heart.”

Joel Peckham, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Regional Literature and Creative Writing. A scholar of American Literature and a creative writer as well as a former Fulbright Scholar, his reviews, essays, scholarly articles, and poetry have been published in numerous journals, including American Literature, Black Warrior Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, River Teeth, The Southern Review, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and The Sun. 

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Under a Gathering Sky, Daniel A. Simon

Publisher: Stephen F. Austin University Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

Journey into the lyrical world of Under a Gathering Sky, a compelling poetry collection that weaves together a narrative of exploration, introspection, and the timeless act of questing. In a masterful arrangement of five sections, these poems beckon readers to traverse a landscape marked by personal reckonings and the enduring legacies of literary greats. Opening with “Auguries,” this collection gracefully dances across facial and temporal boundaries, laying down the foundation of an odyssey that challenges and inspires. The second section presents a series of slant dialogues, evoking powerful conversations with iconic poets and writers such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson, revealing the universality of human experience across eras.

Daniel A. Simon’s poetry has also appeared in various literary journals in the US and abroad— including Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, and Ambit—and been translated into French, German, Greek, Spanish, and Turkish. Poems from this MS have appeared in Harvard Review, Art Focus Oklahoma, and Oklahoma Today.

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Moorings, Christopher Levenson

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: April 12, 2024
Format: Paperback

Moorings, the fourteenth collection from award-winning poet Christopher Levenson, is a profound meditation on loss and ageing. “ It is an intricate business, growing old,” posits the speaker in the titular poem. “ Though I once had a photographic memory,” the poet reminisces, “ those negatives are lost, and will not develop.” Time and old age make room for loss, but so does greed— “ with time language disintegrates… lost to dementia … speech taken over by corporate empires, unique ways of feeling lost.… ” Moving from memories of childhood and artistic tributes to frustrated critiques of capitalism balanced with doses of lighthearted wordplay, these poems celebrate the colour of life, yet are wary of the darkness that can be found inside and around us. Pulling from a wide range of experience and memories but always anchored in the particular and the familiar, the poems in Moorings confront ageing and death head-on, while also celebrating the spiritual sustenance of friendship and memories in our steadily changing world.

Christopher Levenson was born in London, England, in 1934. After working internationally and studying in the US, he came to Canada in 1968 to teach English and creative writing at Carleton University in Ottawa. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Small Talk (2022), and three chapbooks. He was the co-founder and first editor of Arc magazine. Levenson was the recipient of the inaugural Eric Gregory Award in 1960; the 1987 Archibald Lampman Award for Arriving at Night; and his collection Night Vision was short-listed for the Governor General’s award in 2014.

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A Brief and Endless Sea, Barbara Pelman

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.
Publication Date: April 12, 2024
Format: Paperback

Born out of the early days of the pandemic, Barbara Pelman’ s A Brief and Endless Sea explores the concept of ‘ gaps’ : those moments of nothingness that are paradoxically full of potential. Many of the poems are rooted in Jewish tradition: the Angel Purah who cuts the ties between soul and body; the prophet Isaiah’ s words of comfort; the concept of “ Tsimtsum,” a withdrawal in order to create space for something new. The poems reach toward a potential built from seeming emptiness; Pelman mines the depths, taking us to difficult places— the dissolution of a marriage, caring for a parent with dementia. But she doesn’ t leave us there, waiting. Using the power of words to map a route out, A Brief and Endless Sea pulls us toward life in all of its vibrant details— the simple beauty of a small garden, the pleasures of teaching, long walks with a grandson, and encounters with spirituality. For Pelman, there is comfort in the “ smallest life you can love.” Like the glosa form she turns to often, something small transforms into something larger, expansive. In A Brief and Endless Sea, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and waiting in itself presents fertile ground for hope and possibility.

Barbara Pelman has an MA in Literature from the University of Toronto, and lives in Victoria, BC. She taught high school and university English courses for three decades before retirement. She has three books of poetry: One Stone (2005), Borrowed Rooms (2008) and Narrow Bridge (2017), and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (2016). Many of her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies, and her glosa, “ Nevertheless,” won the Malahat Review Poetry Contest in 2018. She is an active member of Victoria’ s vibrant poetry community, assisting at Planet Earth Poetry and conducting workshops.

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Kitchen Aprocrypha, Gregory Emilio

Publisher: Able Muse Press
Publication Date: April 12, 2024
Format: Paperback

Gregory Emilio’s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation. Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts.

Gregory Emilio’s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation. Drawing upon his food service experiences, Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts. He navigates meals ranging from sacred family recipes to unassuming roadside diners, sprinkling biblical and mythological allusions throughout. Central to his narrative is a deep reverence for food’s power to nourish not just the body, but the spirit and human connection as well. A finalist for the 2021 Able Muse Book Award, Kitchen Apocrypha offers a feast both earthy and sublime.

Gregory Emilio is a poet and food writer from southern California. His poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, North American Review, [PANK], the Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. He holds an MFA from the University of California Riverside, and a PhD in English from Georgia State University. A mean home cook and avid cyclist, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.

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Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

Publisher: Paraclete Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

In the summer of 2021, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell honored the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, by embarking on a three-month pilgrimage through the 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy, reading one canto per day. This new collection, Dear Dante, is her response to Dante’s epic poem: 39 poems (13 for each of the 3 canticles), plus an additional 3 to serve as prologue and epilogue, all written in the poetic forms Dante loved best: the sonnet and the form he invented, terza rima.

In O’Donnell’s words: “Dear Dante is a species of accompaniment, an act of homage, and a long love letter to Dante. It might also be read as a series of meditations that attest to how dear Dante is to us. The Commedia is our inheritance, a gift granted to readers by our brother poet 700 years ago. These poems are an admittedly small expression of gratitude for that grand and graced gift. Grazie Mille, Maestro.”

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., is a writer, poet, and professor. She teaches English, Creative Writing, and courses in Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. She is also co-editor of the Curran Center’s new book series, “Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series,” published by Fordham University Press.

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Some Dark Familiar, Julia C. Alter

Publisher: Green Writers Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

Julia C. Alter’ s Some Dark Familiar begins as an excavation of the shadow sides of motherhood— often hidden from plain sight and public view. In the collection, Alter turns an unflinching eye on postpartum depression, maternal ambivalence, pregnancy termination, and the complex weaving of sexuality with motherhood. However, the author knows that no shadows are cast without light. Some Dark Familiar also seeks to illuminate the reclaiming of erotic power/true selfhood after giving birth. By the close of the collection, the book becomes a love letter from a single mother to her only son; a son being raised in America during the last gasps of the patriarchy, in the face of all of its interpersonal and ecological violence.

Julia C. Alter holds an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and appeared widely in journals including The Southern Humanities Review, The Raleigh Review, The Santa Clara Review, The Oakland Review, Sixth Finch, Palette Poetry and Permafrost, as well as Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, and Ecobloomspaces: Poetry at the Intersection of Identity and Place. She lives in Williston, Vermont with her son.

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The Selected Shepherd, Reginald Shepherd, Jericho Brown

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Hardcover

Drawing from all six of his collections, The Selected Shepherd offers a new retrospective on the work of an important and sometimes controversial Black, gay poet. Although well known for his erotic poems about white men, Shepherd also wrote consistently about the natural world and its endangerment and his grief over his mother’s death. Presented in both publication order and the order in which they originally appeared within each collection, these poems highlight the most important themes of Shepherd’s work, along with both his predictability and unpredictability as a poet. Jericho Brown’s introduction provides additional context and insight on the life and work of this complex, groundbreaking figure in American poetry.

Reginald Shepherd (1963–2008) was a Black, gay poet who grew up in the Bronx and went on to receive two MFAs, one from Brown University and one from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He authored two collections of poetry criticism and six poetry collections, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Red Clay Weather, Fata Morgana, Otherhood, Wrong, Angel, Interrupted, and Some Are Drowning. His work has been widely awarded and anthologized and has appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry and two Pushcart Prize anthologies. Shepherd received many awards and honors over his career, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. 

Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

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Every Minute Is First: Selected Late Poems, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jody Gladding (tr.)

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.

Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932-2019) is the author of Every Minute Is First and more than thirty other collections of poetry and several novels. In her lifetime she was the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Prix Supervielle, the Prix Max Jacob, and the Prix Robert Ganzo. Bancquart was also president of the French arts council La Maison de la Poésie and a professor emerita of the Université Paris-Sorbonne, where she taught French literature until her retirement in 1994. She lived in Paris for most of her life with her husband, Alain Bancquart, a musician and composer.

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator with five books of poems and forty translations from French by authors such as Roland Barthes, Jean Giono, Julia Kristeva, and Pierre Michon. She has published three previous books with Milkweed Editions, including her own poetry in the books Rooms and Their Airs and Translations from Bark Beetle as well as a translation of Geneviève Damas’s novel If You Cross the River, which was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She has won the Whiting Award, Yale Younger Poets Award, and numerous others for her poetry and was a finalist for the 2004 French-American Foundation Translation Prize with Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. Gladding has taught in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and has lived in France for extended periods over the last twenty-five years. Her most recent poetry collection is I entered without words. She lives and works in East Calais, Vermont.

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Jinzhou, Kyoto, Baltimore, Scott Francis

Publisher: Loom Press
Publication Date: April 10, 2024
Format: Paperback

Poems of a nearly forgotten China caught in abject poverty. A long sonnet sequence full of jokes and puns, inspired by the transcendental energies of the gardens of Kyoto. A sequence of tanka-like images celebrating America’s western mountains, deserts and shores. A longer work detailing a ten-year-old’s attempts to understand his uncle’s death in Vietnam. A semiautobiographical epic expressing the inner life of a man caught in a savage ice storm. Jinzhou, Kyoto, Baltimore is an inspiring, forthright book, which never shrinks from taking on the contradictions of the inner life and resolving them through the art of poetry.

Scott Francis received an MFA from the University of Califoria, Irvine, where he was a Regents Fellow. He went on to teach in Jinzhou, China from 1986 to 1989. In 1989, he moved to Kyoto, Japan and taught there, staying for sixteen years. His peregrinations after his return to the United States ended up in Baltimore, Maryland, where he works for the public school systems.

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Ember Days, Mary Gilliland

Publisher: SUNY Press
Publication Date: April 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

The riveting poems of Ember Days begin with ritual and end with prayer as they tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s cash worthless, Saturday’s prodigal feet. Plant disease incurable as colonialism inhabits nature’s solace; funds for libraries disappear, abandoned houses compel secrets. Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo. Soldiers in Baghdad, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes, witnesses for peace—these and other intercessory voices step up to our world’s disasters, level with its possibilities, interrogate faith, justice, militarism, madness, and the perception and affection of intimate relationships.

Mary Gilliland is the author of The Devil’s Fools, winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

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Animal, Patricia Grisafi

Publisher: White Stag Publishing
Publication Date: April 9, 2024
Format: Paperback

Animal explores the depths of self-reflection through a coalescence of opposing forces, a confessional display of raw tenderness that blooms through a violent wilderness. These poems are open wounds that unveil memories & their ghosts, offering gifts of hard won wisdom and visceral clarity to carry into the present. In this debut collection, Grisafi unveils beauty found in the darkest niches of the self & reveals a reclamation of the animal that howls within us.

Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a freelance culture writer and essayist. She is the author of Breaking Down Plath (Jossey-Bass), a literary companion on Sylvia Plath for middle and high school students. She lives in New York City with her husband, two children, and two rescue dogs. This is her first poetry collection.

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Whipsaw, Suzanne Frischkorn

Publisher: Anhinga Press
Publication Date: April 10, 2024
Format: Paperback

The latest collection from award-winning Cuban American poet Suzanne Frischkorn, Whipsaw delves into the culture of violence in the United States, the Anthropocene, and family history. Poems of place and climate grief are braided with the harrowing experience of motherhood in the time of ‘me too’, police brutality, and mass shootings. Through lyric, erasure, and origin story Whipsaw bears witness in the age of anxiety. Along the way Frischkorn observes the forest, its ecology and its wildlife, as it transforms through the seasons. In lucid images and lyrical language she reveals the resilience of the natural world and reflects on the wisdom it has for humanity. Voice driven, defiant, elegiac in mood, yet not without hope: ‘Do you remember the morning after the ice storm? / How the wind through the branches / sounded like the parting of bead curtains?’ Throughout Whipsaw the wonders of the forest provide solace.

Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban-American poet and essayist. She is the author of four poetry books including Whipsaw (Anhinga Press, 2024), Fixed Star (JackLeg Press, 2022), Girl on a Bridge, Lit Windowpane (both from Main Street Rag Press), and five chapbooks. She’s the recipient of The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and a 2023 SWWIM Residency Award at The Betsy. She is an editor at $ -Poetry Is Currency, and serves on the Terrain editorial board. She lived and wrote in Connecticut for many years and currently resides in New York.

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