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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Full-length

Proverbs of Limbo, Robert Pinsky

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook

Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.

In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. For Pinsky, they include the familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as limbal realities that are more personal—clashing ways of understanding, personal history and world history, health and illness, freedom and compulsion, intimacy and community, personality and culture—all the countless variations of in-between.

Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.

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Elements, Jamesie Fournier, Jaypeetee Arnakak

Publisher: Inhabit Media
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

In this complex, at times dark, poetry collection from Inuk author Jamesie Fournier, readers are taken through the recesses of a character struggling with inner demons whispering into his mind. As he attempts to overcome his inner turmoil within a Colonial and contemporary system that oppresses him, the speaker guides readers through verse both ethereal and imagistic. Echoing artists as varied as Margaret Laurence and The Velvet Underground, this sweeping collection of bilingual verse deals with erasure, resilience, and—above all—resistance through the voice of one complex protagonist.

An Inuk raised in Denendeh, Jamesie Fournier‘s work has appeared in Inuit Art Quarterly, Red Rising magazine, Northern Public Affairs, and the anthology Coming Home: Stories from the Northwest Territories. His brother, Zebede Tulugaq Evaluardjuk-Fournier, illustrated his last two projects with Inuit Art Quarterly. Jamesie was guest author at the 2018 & 2020 Northwords Writers Festivals and a runner up for 2018 Sally Manning Award for Indigenous Creative Non-Fiction. He lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

Jaypeetee Arnakak is a linguist, translator, and educator. He spent many years as a policy analyst specializing in Inuit culture, language and education issues. He is the editor of Unikkaaqtuat Qikiqtaninngaaqtut, a collection of thirty-three versions of traditional stories, transcribed and edited from oral recordings of ten Inuit elders from two High Arctic communities, Arctic Bay and Igloolik. He has also adapted several traditional Inuit stories into children’s storybooks.

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Canandaigua, Donald Revell

Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

Revell’s fifteenth collection weaves anxiety and morality into a tangled web, asking how we’re supposed to live in a world where our imaginations can cause irreparable harm. These poems investigate the immediacy of our lives, what it means to be living, and the magnitude of our own humanity. In our culture of technological advancement and communication, the poems explore how the desires for “more” and how feeding this greed and fear can be detrimental to empathy. Probabilities, mortality, curiosity and the unknown keeps us living (living in the sense of feeling alive and not just existing).

Donald Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently White Campion (2021), and The English Boat (2018), both from Alice James Books. Revell has also published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words. His critical writings have been collected as: Essay: A Critical Memoir; The Art of Attention; and Invisible Green: Selected Prose. Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Having previously taught at the Universities of Alabama, Denver, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, and Utah, Donald Revell is currently a Professor of English at UNLV and faculty affiliate of the Black Mountain Institute.

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A Blind Salmon, Julia Wong Kcomt, Jennifer Shyue

Publisher: Phoneme Media
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt’s sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand.

In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.

Born into a tusán (Chinese Peruvian) family in Chepén, Peru, Julia Wong Kcomt (1965-2024) was the author of eighteen volumes of poetry, seven books of fiction, and three collections of hybrid prose. In English, her work has been published in The Margins, McSweeney’s, Poetry, and other outlets. She lived between Lima and Lisbon.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator from Spanish. Her translations include Julia Wong Kcomt’s chapbook Vice-royal-ties and Augusto Higa Oshiro’s novel The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu.

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Gorgeous Freak, Julie Poole

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Written 2016-2017 during a taut political moment, Gorgeous Freak follows Poole’s decision to start keeping a poetry journal while commuting by foot around Austin. Her intent, folded carefully in these slender and jagged poems, is to call out to a future soulmate, pulling them back into her present: hot, humid Austin, Texas in the first year of the Trump presidency, traversed by foot miles a day, watching the seasons change through surrounding urban flora and fauna.

Julie Poole was born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from The New Writers Project at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a profession track journalism student at UT’s School of Journalism and Media. Her first book of poems, Bright Specimen, was inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at UT and was published in June 2021. She has received fellowship support from the James A. Michener Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, The Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, and Yaddo. In 2017, she was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her poems and essays have appeared Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Cold Mountain Review, Porter House Review, HuffPost, and elsewhere. Her arts and culture writing has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Publishers Weekly, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Scalawag, Yes! Magazine, and Bon Appétit. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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We Alive, Beloved, Frederick Joseph

Publisher: Row House Publishing
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

We Alive, Beloved moves beyond being a poetry collection; it’s a celebration of the profound aspects of our existence. Each poem seeks to immortalize the fleeting moments of joy, love, resilience, and inspiration that often slip through the grasp of our fast-paced lives.

In this poetic testament, we defy the ephemeral nature of beauty and goodness, daring to clutch onto these facets of life for just a little longer. With words that stand as guardians against the relentless march of time and the ceaseless tides of change, trauma, and grief, this collection becomes a sanctuary of light in a world that sometimes seems dim.

We Alive, Beloved explores a rich tapestry of themes, from the intricacies of relationships and the heartache of loss, to the wide-eyed wonder of existence and the challenges of exploring the possibility of parenthood in our modern age. Each poem reaches out to readers, offering a mirror to their own journeys and emotions, inviting them to be seen and acknowledged in its lyrical embrace.

Frederick Joseph is the two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Black Friend (2020) and Patriarchy Blues (2022), as well as the author of Better Than We Found It (2022) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – The Courage to Dream (2022). He was recognized for the International Literacy Association’s 2021 Children’s & Young Adults’ Book Award, is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list-maker for marketing and advertising, an activist, philanthropist, and a poet. Joseph was also honored with the 2023 Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award, the 2018 Comic-Con Humanitarian of the Year award, and is a member of the 2018 The Root list of “100 Most Influential African Americans.”

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Becoming Sam, Samodh Porawagamage

Publisher: Burnside Review Press
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

“A vivid, gutting, and memorable collection, becoming sam moves from poem to poem like a deftly crafted memoir in verse. It recounts, both, the quotidian dramas and violent terrors of a childhood lived through the Sri Lankan civil war alongside the quieter violences committed against an immigrant acclimating to life in the U.S. The subtle shocks and startling turns in Samodh Porawagamage’s poems bring me sometimes to wonder, sometimes to tears, and always to gratitude for their brilliance.” —Jaswinder Bolina

Samodh Porawagamage’s first book, becoming sam, was selected by Jaswinder Bolina as the winner of the 2022 Burnside Review Press Book Award. He writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, and colonial and imperial atrocities. His poems have appeared in the anthology Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka & Its Diasporas (Bloodaxe Books) and a number of journals.

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Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince

Publisher: YesYes Books
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Paperback

There is an absence at the heart of Katie Prince’s debut collection, Tell This to the Universe, and an obsessive search to find what’s missing. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief as they move through physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction. It could be said that this book is trying to find god—to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it—but it’s just as true to say it’s looking for a home, a family, an answer to a question it still doesn’t know how to ask.

Katie Prince is a poet and essayist. Her first poetry book, Tell This to the Universe, was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and won the 2021 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books. In the spring of 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at Klaustrið, in Iceland’s Fljótsdalur valley, and in 2019, she received a GAP Award from Artist Trust to continue working on the project she began there. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, New South, Fugue, the Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can find her online at www.katieprince.com

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By This Time, Ian Ganassi

Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 14, 2024
Format: Paperback

As the title of the book suggests, the poems in it are largely concerned with the passage of time and the assortment of expectations and challenges that come with it. Our personal histories are not segregated in memory, but are constantly interrupting the continuity of the present, both consciously and unconsciously. And no one can live up to the demands of time without failure of some sort. But there is also humor here, which comes to our rescue in the form of lines, poems, and scenarios that make us look at ourselves from a comic perspective. If failure is one natural result of our dealing with time as adults in society, humor gives us a way of seeing our failures and successes in a wiser light.

By This Time is Ian Ganassi’s third poetry collection. Ian is a retired dance accompanist, having played African and Caribbean percussion for dance classes for at least 30 years. As a poet and musician he has collaborated with dancers and musicians throughout the New York metropolitan area. Since 2005 he has collaborated with the painter Laura Bell on an ongoing collage project called The Corpses (after the surrealist parlor game). The collages have appeared in galleries, literary journals, and other venues. He has published poetry in numerous literary journals, including The Yale Review, The American Journal of Poetry, New American Writingand Blazevox,, among many others. His two other collections are Mean Numbers and True for the Moment.

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Crying of Small Motors, Craig Brandis

Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 14, 2024
Format: Paperback

Through portraits of working class life and meditations on strange, even comedic aspects of personal tragedy, Crying of Small Motors follows the poet’s search for a poetics of devotional wildness, for language that balances sorrow, absurdity and optimism. Brandis’s voice is lyric, narrative and spare.  His poems are acts of restless defamiliarization: a voracious sea lion he encountered while rowing is like a familial unkindness carried to the grave; a wounded veteran is like a fermata in a wheelchair. He approaches his large subjects by way of small gestures. As reviewer John Wall Barger wrote, “we trust the poet and follow him into increasingly strange, Tranströmer-like spaces: above the small print / grasses, a horse’s / double field / of vision folds / the country / lengthwise.” The arc of the book follows the poet’s struggle to fashion something useful, like a new utensil, from the grief and tragic beauty found in life’s difficult places.

Craig Brandis lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon. His poems and reviews have been published in Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, Parhelion, Trampoline, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Plume and elsewhere. His work was long-listed for the 2021 Frontier OPEN prize and long-listed for the 2020 Palette Poetry Emerging Poet prize, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. He is a 2021 Sewanee Writers Conference Participant and a 2019 Breadloaf Writers Conference Participant.

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Handful of Stallions at Twilight, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: June 14, 2024
Format: Paperback

Handful of Stallions at Twilight is an eclectic collection of poems with varied styles of writing ranging from narrative to lyric, covering a vast array of topics. These poems speak to the personal and, at the same time, universal experiences of daily life, yet often with a surprising take or twist. Some poems lean on musicality and sound, with emotion as the strong undercurrent, while others are brief anecdotes that delve into the extraordinary experience of being human with a touch of wit and tenderness. There is always a glimpse of light woven through the melancholy as this collection elevates the ordinary with emphasis on the mystery of hope, an undefinable yet prevalent thread that runs from poem to poem and lingers beyond the final page.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas recently graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program, where she received a Merit Scholarship. She is a twelve-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. She has served as the Editor-in-Chief for the Orchards Poetry Journal and Tule Review, and according to family lore, she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson.

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A Bit Left of Straight Ahead, Kim Peter Kovac

Publisher: The Poetry Box
Publication Date: June 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

A Bit Left of Straight Ahead is an exploration—a journey within journey—born from Kim Peter Kovac’s eclectic knowledge and his free-form imagination. The poems are inhabited by poets, painters, musicians, action figures, fairy tale characters, myths, historical persons, who venture across time and geography to places such as Andalusia, Romania, Robben Island, Sarajevo, Wadi Rum, Okinawa, and Saturn.

Kovac has created a tapestry of magical realism, time-shifts, stylistic variety, and non-linearity that is woven with interludes of humor, philosophy, whimsy, and music. His poems explore reconciliation through communion with the past; critique notions of mental health, war, and “othering” people; and cast a quirky yet truthful eye on the zeitgeist.

Kim Peter Kovac began writing poetry in 2012, toward the end of his career in national and international theater for young audiences (TYA), starting work on his first Poetry Barn asynchronous online workshop on the plane home from a festival in Okinawa, just barely beating a typhoon. Kim’s first poetry collection, Border Sounds: Poem & Dispatches from Other Timezones, was published in January 2021. He also has 150+ pieces in print and online in journals from Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the USA.  He has a BA in Theatre from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

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Vitals and Other Signs of Life, David A. Goodrum

Publisher: The Poetry Box
Publication Date: June 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

David A. Goodrum’s debut book of poetry, Vitals and Other Signs of Life, reflects a deep love of family with all their ordeals and imperfections, a steely-eyed view of mortality, and a sense of astonishment and relationship to nature.

In the book’s first section, aptly titled “Vitals,” the poet portrays the emotional impact of life’s milestones through narrative poems on childhood, illness, tragedy, parenting, divorce, and loss. Goodrum then bluntly faces aging and impermanence in the next section of the book, “Fully Aware of the Falling Fistfuls of Dirt Still to Follow,” before leading the reader into the final section of the book “Somewhere between the Sleep of Roiling Water and the Sleep of Ice,” with his lyrical poems anchored in nature, offering us an intimate view of our external world while connecting us to our inner spirit.

David A. Goodrum, writer/photographer, was born, raised, and educated in Indiana and currently lives in Oregon in the Willamette Valley. Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box, 2024) is his first book-length collection of poetry. His poems have been published in Tar River Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Passengers Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Fireweed: Poetry of Oregon, Willawaw Journal, Spillway, Eclectica Magazine, Scapegoat Journal, Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. A chapbook entitled \’spärs(,)pō’etə̇kə\ (Sparse Poetica) was published in late 2023 on the Audience Askew imprint.

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What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused, George Franklin

Publisher: Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Publication Date: June 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

In What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused, the angel doesn’t know the purpose of his presence among humans, but grief draws him to itself repeatedly. He is helpless to improve matters, even though he sees what is happening with perfect clarity. The saint, more precisely an anti-saint, also refuses any subterfuge, excuse, or consolation that would diminish the harshness and injustice he witnesses. If the saint had been Job, he would have spit into the whirlwind or, better yet, laughed. He wants to shake people out of their certainties and especially rejects the transcendence of the philosophers. Unlike the angel, the saint sees a bitter humor in the tragedies that surround him, and that humor gives him an equanimity that surfaces in his conversations and encounters. Both angel and saint are creatures of negation and irony. They are fundamental, modern, even mirror images of ourselves. If the angel of sorrow and the saint of unbelievers did not exist, just maybe, it might have been necessary to invent them.

George Franklin practices law in Miami. Remote Cities is his third full-length poetry collection with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, complementing Noise of the World (2020) and Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions manuscript competition in 2018). He has also authored the dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (translated by Ximena Gómez and published by Katakana Editores, 2020), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press, 2020). He is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día / Last Day and co-author with Gómez of Conversaciones sobre agua / Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores 2019 & 2023).

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Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem, Lesia Ukrainka, Nina Murray (tr.)

Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Publication Date: June 11, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook

Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, is cursed with the gift of true prophecies that are not believed by anyone. She foretells the city’s fall should Paris bring Helen as his wife, as well as the death of several of Troy’s heroes and her family. The classic myth turns into much more in Lesia Ukrainka’s rendering: Cassandra’s prophecies are uttered in highly poetic language—fitting for the genre of the work—and are not believed for that reason, rather than because of Apollo’s curse. Cassandra as poet and as woman are the focal points of the drama.

Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem encapsulates the complexities of Ukrainka’s late works: use of classical mythology and her intertextual practice; intense focus on issues of colonialism and cultural subjugation—and allegorical reading of the asymmetric relationship of Ukrainian and Russian culture; a sharp commentary on patriarchy and the subjugation of women; and the dilemma of the writer-seer who knows the truth and its ominous implications but is powerless to impart that to contemporaries and countrymen.

This strongly autobiographical work commanded a significant critical reception in Ukraine and projects Ukrainka into the new Ukrainian cultural canon. Presented here in a contemporary and sophisticated English translation attuned to psychological nuance, it is sure to attract the attention of the modern-day reader.

Lesia Ukrainka (pen name of Larysa Kosach-Kvitka, 1879-1913) was one of the most prominent Ukrainian writers, poets, playwrights, literary scholars, and activists of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Along with Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko, she forms the triumvirate of Ukrainian national poets. Ukrainka was well-known for her feminist and progressive views, which found representation in her own works.

Nina Murray is a poet and an award-winning translator of Ukrainian literature, including works by Oksana Zabuzhko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lesia Ukrainka. She is the author of several poetry collections and a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service.

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This One We Call Ours, Martha Silano

Publisher: Lynx House Press
Publication Date: June 15, 2024
Format: Paperback

Martha Silano’s award-winning new collection is a passionate cry on behalf of the Earth and all who dwell upon it. Very few poets have dared to show us, so clearly, the edge of peril to which we have brought our only home. This is a staggeringly important book.

Martha Silano has authored multiple poetry books, including Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). She is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Martha’s poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, Image, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College and Hugo House in Seattle, Washington.

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