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 full-length poetry titles we know are releasing in the following week. (Beginning with the May/June 2024 Issue, chapbooks will be listed in one post at the end of each month.)
Information, including product descriptions, are provided by the publisher.
The Strange God Who Makes Us, Christopher Kennedy
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
An exploration of memory, mourning, and humanity’s precarious relationship to the Anthropocene, Christopher Kennedy’s The Strange God Who Makes Us documents our fragile relationship with time and the imperfect ways in which we document our lives. These prose poems written by one of the form’s masters serve both as attempts to preserve and honor the past and as a call to action to ensure an inhabitable planet for future generations.
Christopher Kennedy is the author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, 2018) Ennui Prophet (BOA 2011), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is also one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA 2013). In 2011, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Kennedy is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. He lives in Syracuse NY.
Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Geometry of the Restless Herd, Sophie Cabot Black stages a powerful allegory for the social and political realities of our human world. Through hauntingly metaphysical poems set within a sheepherder’s domain, Black conjures fields of harvest and resurrection, of wagers and outcomes—animals to keep, and those destined for slaughter. Here, both singular voices and polyvocal choruses argue through discourse, asking who has the real power, and how are we to survive the violence we do to each other?
Black’s scenes are at once oneiric and raw: a squeaking gate wails against neglect; a field receives a runt body; a raccoon flees with egg dripping from its mouth—all while lush rains and long winters quiet the dead. Navigating both confining pens and wide-open spaces, these poems ask startlingly immediate questions about captivity and freedom, protection and exploitation, confronting the predicaments of late capitalism: industries of infinite regress, technologies that exceed us, and a soul stranded somewhere between expectation and redemption. Ultimately, these stark pastorals paint a moving portrait of life: as utterly inseparable from the world it inhabits.
Sophie Cabot Black (she/her) is the author of four collections of poetry Geometry of the Restless Herd, The Exchange, The Descent, the Connecticut Book Award winner, and The Misunderstanding of Nature, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award winner. Black has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Provincetown’s Fine Arts Center, and the Radcliffe Institute as well as prizes including the Grolier Poetry Prize, John Masefield Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Emerging Poets Award from Judith’s Room. She was also recognized as a Lambda Literary finalist. Her work can be found in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Black has taught at the New School, Rutgers, and Columbia University, and she currently teaches creative writing at the 92nd St Y and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She divides her time between New York, Connecticut, and Colorado.
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Catherine Barnett
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces—at bedside vigils and in city streets—quickens Catherine Barnett’s metaphysical poems, which are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience. Here loneliness is filled with belonging, which is in turn filled with loneliness, each state suffused and emptied by the other. Barnett’s fourth collection is part manifesto, part how-to manual, part apologia: a guide to the homeopathic dangers and healing powers of an emotion so charged with eros, humor, and elusive beauty it becomes a companion both desired and eschewed, necessary and illuminating.
Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space is never far from grief or a comedy of bewilderment, inadequacy, hope. Entering Barnett’s world is a little like entering an electrically charged cloud, and the prospect of either falling or getting caught in a storm brings vertiginous and unpredictable pleasures. Bristling with uncanny intelligence, the poems are sometimes quiet elegies, sometimes meditations on art, love, and the failures of love that so often define love. Barnett might be called a realist—her style is radiantly exact—yet somehow she is a guide both into and out of the existential void. She has written a tender, dazzling collection of estrangement and intimacy.
Catherine Barnett is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Human Hours, winner of the Believer Book Award, and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in New York City.
In the Days that Followed, Kevin Goodan
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In The Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended. How do you miss someone who you never even knew?
It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the landscape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgment, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.
Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana, Kevin Goodan began working for the U.S. Forest Service at a young age, and attended the Universities of Montana and Massachusetts. He has lived in Northern Ireland, and lectured at universities on terrorism. His poems have been published in Ploughshares and other journals. Currently, he resides in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire.
All About You, Chris Nealon
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
Written with keen perception and insatiable curiosity, Chris Nealon’s fifth book of poetry, All About You, is both a study of personhood and a diary of release from it.
“You almost let your ego go,” he writes, “but oh—/maybe tomorrow.” Revolving through moments of sociability and passages of inwardness, the poet’s address shifts in these poems from “I” to “you” and back again, inviting his audience to shift along with him. Out of that agility, All About You builds a generous model of what it means to pay attention, and drafts a delicately post-pandemic “we”: “imagine what a healed people could do / Just flesh – full of chatter – / Hush now / Come on, let’s run – ”
Chris Nealon is John Dewey Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Shore (Wave Books, 2020), The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004), Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014), as well as three books of literary criticism. He lives in Washington, DC.
The Curve of Things, Kathy Kremins, Ysabel Y. Gonzalez
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
In this collection of poems, curves in all their forms—a woman’s full hips, a rolling mountain, water’s soft bend, or the thrum of Irish immigrants living at the hard edges—are the focus. In their music, these poems celebrate queer love, map loss and liberation, and explore lovers’ scars and the knot of kinship that remains even when love fades. Tragic and tender, The Curve of Things traces the ecstatic joys and difficulties of loving women, celebrating this sweeping terrain of desire. A hymn of unapologetic intimacy and delicate language, these poems choose love over defeat and celebrate the warmth that humanity is capable of.
Kathy Kremins is a retired New Jersey public school teacher and the author of two chapbooks of poems, Seamus & His Smalls and Undressing the World. She is also the author of An Ethics of Reading: The Broken Beauties of Toni Morrison, Nawal el Sadaawi, and Arundhati Roy. She is an editor for NJ Audubon Magazine and a member of the feminist poetry collective Write On! Poetry Babes.
The Day Before, Aoife Lyall
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
These intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.
Tender, challenging, and historically significant, The Day Before asks what it means when home is the one place you cannot leave, and the one place you cannot go.
Aoife Lyall is an Irish poet living in the Scottish Highlands. Awarded an Emerging Scottish Writer residency by Cove Park in 2020 and twice shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards, she was longlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018. Her debut collection Mother, Nature (Bloodaxe Books, 2021) was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award, one of Scotland’s National Book Awards 2021. She has worked as a guest curator for the Scottish Poetry Library and as a guest editor for Butcher’s Dog.
Collected Poems, Fleur Adcock
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
This first complete edition of her poetry is published on her 90th birthday, and updates her earlier retrospective, Poems 1960-2000, with five later collections published by Bloodaxe, along with 20 new poems.
Born in New Zealand, Fleur Adcock has explored questions of identity and rootedness throughout her work, both in relation to her personal allegiances to her native and adopted countries as well as her family history, whose long-dead characters she brings to life. She has also written movingly of birth, death and bereavement, and has tackled political issues with honest indignation and caustic wit. All her most celebrated poems are here, from the highly entertaining ‘Against Coupling’, ‘Smokers For Celibacy’ and ‘The Prize-Winning Poem’ to modern classics such as ‘The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers’ and ‘Things’.
Fleur Adcock was born in New Zealand in 1934, and spent the war years in England, returning with her family to New Zealand in 1947. She emigrated to Britain in 1963. She received an OBE in 1996, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006 for Poems 1960-2000 (2000). In 2019 Fleur Adcock was presented with the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry by the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern. She has lived in East Finchley, north London, since 1963.
We Go On, Kerry Hardie
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
Kerry Hardie’s poetry – as the poet Claire Askew has noted – is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’, using images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion or technology but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a particular Irish landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy. Its title holds an echo of Beckett: ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, and holds something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’.
Kerry Hardie was born in 1951, grew up in County Down, and now lives in County Kilkenny. She published six collections with Gallery Press in Ireland: A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn’t Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006), Only This Room (2009) and The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012). Her Selected Poems was published in Ireland by Gallery and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her most recent collections, The Zebra Stood in the Night (2014), Where Now Begins (2020) and We Go On (2024) are published by Bloodaxe in Britain and Ireland. The Zebra Stood in the Night was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
Vert, Catherine Staples
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
Catherine Staples grew up in Massachusetts and it’s there, in New England woods, meadows, and Cape Cod coasts, that the loss of her brother plays out as a quest across space and time: from a weathervane in Madison Square Park to a rusty pump in the mountains, from words etched on nineteenth-century glass to the track of skates on the Charles River. Place is at the heart of the transformation of loss. So, too, are myth and the lives of New England’s early naturalists and Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau’s narrative echoes and enlarges hers. He, too, lost a brother and found his way by tuning ear, eye, and stride to “the living earth,” a new way of seeing things. Vert is an old word in danger of being lost. “In English forest law,” it’s “everything that grows and forms a green leaf, serving as cover for deer.” It’s suggestive of habitat, our imperiled earth, the small spinney of a brother’s memory.
Catherine Staples is the author of The Rattling Window and Never a Note Forfeit. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and Academy of American Poets at poets.org. Awards include the Guy Owen Prize, a McGovern Poetry Prize, and a Walter Dakin Fellowship. Staples teaches in the Honors and English programs at Villanova University.
WHAT: new poems from the Poet Laureate of Punk, John Cooper Clarke
Publisher: Picador UK
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Hardcover
Dr John Cooper Clarke’s dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original ‘People’s Poet’ comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain’s most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker’s acerbic pen – and that’s just the first poem.
Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke’s could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection from one of our foremost satirists.
John Cooper Clarke shot to prominence in the 1970s as the original ‘people’s poet’. Since then his career has spanned cultures, audiences, art forms and continents. Today, JCC is as relevant and vibrant as ever, and his influence just as visible on today’s pop culture. Aside from his trademark ‘look’ continuing to resonate with fashionistas young and old, and his poetry included on the national curriculum syllabus, his effect on modern life is huge. I Wanna Be Yours is his long awaited autobiography.
Gospel of a Whole Sun, Katerina Jeng
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Gospel of a Whole Sun is a moving collection of poetry chronicling one woman’s journey of self-discovery over the course of three pivotal years. It documents the aftermath of a traumatic breakup, navigating anti-Asian violence during a global pandemic, coming out, and, ultimately, falling in love with life again.
A joyous and inspired debut from a gifted creator and healer, Gospel of a Whole Sun is a poignant look at the relationship of art-making to personal liberation.
Katerina Jeng is a poet, community leader, and weaver of the sacred into the everyday. They are here to help guide humanity into a new paradigm world through humble service that is abundantly joyful, pleasurable, and free. Katerina’s writing explores love and power, and is inspired by their identity as a queer, neurodivergent, Filipina-Taiwanese-American femme; as well as the work of artists and activists of color who have come before them. Born and raised in New York, Katerina holds degrees in English and music from Cornell University. They are currently a fellow at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop.
Just Like, Lee Sumyeong, Colin Leemarshall (tr.)
Publisher: Black Ocean
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
These poems build strikingly on the breakthroughs of Korean forebears like Yi Sang and Oh Kyu-won. They also establish Lee as an interlocutor in a wider conversation: her problematized “repetitions” chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton. Marked by a distinctive voice and approach, Just Like introduces a brilliant and singular contemporary Korean writer into English.
The poems of Lee Sumyeong’s Just Like evince a striking tension between clarity and complexity. Purged of any heightened diction or preciously wrought syntax, Lee’s writing can give the impression of being austere to the point of crystallinity. But it is the opposite-a teeming space where concrete objects become unstable and where simple propositions constantly buckle and fissure.
Lee Sumyeong was born in Seoul in 1965. She is the author of eight poetry collections in Korean as well as numerous critical writings and books on poetics. In addition, she has translated several texts into Korean, including books on Romanticism, Lacan, Derrida, and Joyce.
Colin Leemarshall lives in South Korea. He runs the print-on-demand press Erotoplasty Editions, which sells innovative and idiosyncratic books of poetry at cost price.
We Don’t Know That This Is Temporary, Adrienne Marie Barrios
Publisher: Stanchion Books
Publication Date: May 7, 2024
Format: Paperback
The poems that makeup We Don’t Know That This Is Temporary form a fiercely heartbreaking treatise on the aching chasm that too often forms between lovers. An emerging master of her craft, Barrios unapologetically taps into the inner monologue of a human still learning what it means to be seen, held, touched, made safe, to be enough for themselves and others, and to be filled with something more substantive than another’s thoughtless limbs. These poems are for anyone who has loved with every vulnerable ounce of their being, and everyone who’s been left unsatisfied with the results.
Adrienne Marie Barrios is a disabled, neurodivergent writer and editor. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in such magazines as X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Punt Volat, mac(ro)mic, Interstellar Literary Review, Queerlings, Drunk Monkeys, superfroot mag, and Sledgehammer Lit. She serves as editor-in-chief for Reservoir Road Literary Review and edits award-winning novels.
The Under Hum, Simone Muench, Jackie K. White
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: May, 2024
Format: Paperback
Collaboration means creation. These poems expand from that natural cycle of visionary poetry, that invites more than one poet to get involved with the poems, until language itself becomes a complete process of imagination and meaning. The result is a book that shares a complex world with the reader and proves that true poetry does not leave anyone alone. —Ray Gonzalez, author of Suggest Paradise
Simone Muench is the author of several books including Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and NYT Editor’s Choice; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (2010 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Poetry; Sarabande, 2010), and Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her chapbook Trace won the Black River Chapbook Competition (Black Lawrence, 2014), and her collection, Suture, is a book of sonnets written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She also co-edited the anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence, 2018). Some of her honors include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, several Illinois Arts Council fellowships, the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry, and residency fellowships to Yaddo, Artsmith, VCCA, and VSC.
Jackie K. White has been an editor with RHINO, faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, and professor of English at Lewis University. She has published three previous chapbooks–Bestiary Charming (Anabiosis), Petal Tearing & Variations (Finishing Line), and Come clearing (Dancing Girl)–along with numerous single-authored poems and translations in such journals as ACM, Bayou, Fifth Wednesday, Folio, Quarter after Eight, Spoon River, Third Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, and online at prosepoem.com, seven corners, shadowbox, and superstitionreview.com, among others. An assistant editor for They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, her collaborative poems (with Simone Muench) have appeared in Ecotone, Hypertext, The Journal, Pleiades, and others.
On the Way to Putnam, Brad Davis
Publisher: Grayson Books
Publication Date: May 8, 2024
Format: Paperback
In these poems spanning the writing career of a top-notch poet, Brad Davis wrestles with darkness and celebrates the luminosity of the natural world. He grapples with the difficulties of faith in a cynical world. For the most part, he faces life with a cautious optimism. The poetry here is clear and graceful; it hits the mark. This is the work of a mature poet confident in his craft.
Brad Davis taught Creative Writing at Pomfret School, The College of Holy Cross, Eastern Connecticut State University, and, most recently, The Stony Brook School, where he was also Dean of Faculty Care. While chaplain and squash coach at Pomfret School, he earned the MFA and won an AWP Intro Journal Award. Since then, poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Michigan Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Image, LETTERS, Presence, Spiritus, JAMA, and many other wonderful journals.
Fluent in Blue, Erin Murphy
Publisher: Grayson Books
Publication Date: April, 2024
Format: Paperback
From displaced bluegills to Picasso’s Período Azul, Fluent in Blue examines blue in its many permutations: color, emotion, mental illness, nature, politics, and music. Through both lyricism and narrative, the poems are always attuned to language itself, to the way “the world is every word unfurled.”
Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Taxonomies; Assisted Living, a collection of demi-sonnets about caregiving; and Fields of Ache, a chapbook of centos. Her co-edited anthologies include Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine and Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers, both of which won Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.
Don’t see a full-length poetry title published between 5/7 and 5/13 here? Contact us to let us know!
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