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

Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems, David Rigsbee

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: June, 2024
Format: Paperback

Known for their lyrical intensity and thematic range, David Rigsbee’s poems have appeared prominently in literary magazines for five decades, as well as in a dozen full-length collections. Watchman in the Knife Factory: New and Selected Poems features the key works of his career, gathering poems from volumes long out of print, as well as presenting a generous selection of work from the new millennium. As Peter Makuck noted, “Few other poets so powerfully capture both the ignorant cruelty and profound love we bear one another.”

David Rigsbee is the author of 23 books and chapbooks, including twelve previous full-length collections of poems.  In addition, he has also published critical works on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky, whom he also translated.  He has co-edited two anthologies, including Invited Guest:  An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry, a “notable book” selection of the American Library Association and the American Association of University Professors. His work has appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others.

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Where I Dry the Flowers, Ollie Schminkey

Publisher: Button Poetry
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

If Ollie Schminkey’s Dead Dad Jokes asks the question, “What was it like to watch my father die?”, Where I Dry the Flowers asks “How did watching someone die teach me how to live?” This unrestrained and raw sophomore collection explores themes of grief, healing, and forgiveness while refusing to sacrifice the hard truths that come with addiction, care taking, and the death of a loved one. Ollie opens their heart to readers and tells them that these emotions are okay, no matter how conflicting and confusing they may be.

Ollie Schminkey is a non-binary transgender poet/musician/artist living in St. Paul, MN. They facilitate, direct, coach, and host many organizations, including a weekly writing workshop called Well-Placed Commas, which serves primarily queer and trans writers. They’ve performed poems in 18 states, and their work has been featured everywhere from THEM to Upworthy. When they’re not writing and performing poetry, they spend their time making pottery under the name Sick Kitty Ceramics. Their collections, Dead Dad Jokes and Where I Dry The Flowers are available or forthcoming via Button Poetry.

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Barfly, Michael Lista

Publisher: Biblioasis
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In Barfly, the poet comes back to haunt himself, and us. In this incomparable third collection, his first in a decade, Michael Lista returns to reinvent poetry with humour, pugnacity, and a deeply singular voice. Splicing Byronic rhymes and Auden’s meters with the twenty-first century irreverence of a late-stage Twitter feed, the poems in Barfly are alternatingly aggressive, sweet, deadly, and raw with a break-your-heart vulnerability.

Michael Lista is an investigative journalist, essayist and poet. He has worked as a book columnist for the National Post and as the poetry editor of The Walrus. He is the author of four books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough; Strike Anywhere, a collection of his writing about literature, television and culture; and The Human Scale: Murder, Mischief and Other Selected Mayhems, a book of longform journalism. His essays and investigative stories have appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus, Canadaland, and Toronto Life. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean’s. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Awards for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story “The Sting” is being adapted by Adam Perlman, Robert Downey Jr., and Team Downey into a television series for Apple TV+.

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Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2024: A Selection of the Shortlist, A.F. Moritz (Edited by)

Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

Alfred F. Moritz was born on April 15, 1947, in Niles, Ohio, USA, and educated at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from which he received a Ph.D. in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British poetry. His most recent books of poems are The Garden: a poem and an essay (2021), As Far As You Know (2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018).

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Reborn, Abraham Rodriguez

Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Step into the vivid world of Reborn, the second collection of poems and photographs by actor Abraham Rodriguez. Delve into a raw and personal journey of intimacy, sexual identity, religion, and self-discovery through captivating visuals and confessional verse in both English and Spanish. Rodriguez’s lens captures the essence of transformation, guiding you through the shadows to embrace a rebirth that illuminates even the darkest nights, fostering healing and unveiling new opportunities. Are you ready to be reborn?

Abraham Rodriguez is an actor, poet, interior designer, and artist based in Los Angeles. As an actor, he is best known for his roles in the iconic reboot of Saved by the Bell and Power Rangers Beast Morphers, earning him a Kids Choice Award nomination for Favorite Male TV Star. Abraham made his feature film debut in the psychological thriller Exposure. He is the owner of Casita Gigante, a home decor brand inspired by his Mexican roots. Abraham uses poetry to showcase the beauty and intricacies of vulnerability from the human experience. He is the author of Mixed Feelings and Reborn.

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Lunette, Bruce Bond & Walter Cochran-Bond

Publisher: Green Linden Press
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Lunette, poet Bruce Bond and photographer Walter Cochran-Bond explore brokenness—culturally, physically, and psychologically—as a summons, a plea for greater outreach and self-understanding. In dialogue across an intimate distance, poems and photographs deepen their engagement as independent sources, enlarging conversation through forms of interrogation as opposed to mere translation or description. As a figure of fragmentation, intrinsic to both vitality and crisis, the lunette voices what it, in turn, would question, be it openness or exclusion, recovery or loss, trauma or the ache of the phantom wound.

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-five books, including, most recently, Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Nicholas Shaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023), Choreomania (Madhat, 2023), and Therapon (with Dan Beachy-Quick; Tupelo Press, 2023).

Walter Cochran-Bond is a former class action employment attorney who retired from the pursuit of justice and now embraces the art of seeing.

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Fabulosa, Karen Rigby

Publisher: Jackleg Press
Publication Date: June 10, 2024
Format: Paperback

Karen Rigby writes with “fingers cocked like a gun.” Deliciously inventive in its linguistic unfurlings, Fabulosa fibrillates with “noir and glitz” in these strange, seductive poems that are in conversation with a range of players from Dior to Endeavour Morse to Hieronymus Bosch. Shimmering with diamond-cut precision, Fabulosa underscores Rigby’s observation that “I never write / without measuring, each line / hooking a quicksilver hunger.” There is no bloat in this book; it is exquisitely hewn. Underpinning the collection is a keen interest in cinema, fashion, feminism, transformation, and textuality (from ars poeticas to portmanteaus to ekphrastics). Seamed with goldshine and darkness, we find in these fireball poems a “wilderness / glanced through the bull’s eye.” As the title suggests, Fabulosa is indeed absolutely fabulous! -Simone Muench

Born in the Republic of Panama, Karen Rigby is the author of two collections of poetry, Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Fabulosa (JackLeg, 2024). Her awards include the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize for Chinoiserie and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals, including Poetry Northwest, The London Magazine, and Bennington Review. She lives in Arizona. www.karenrigby.com

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Cahier, Friedericke Mayrocker, Donna Stonecipher

Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: June 5, 2024
Format: Hardcover

Friederike Mayröcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself—unless it’s writing. What counts, in her view, is only the poetry and “the echoic inventions” of a life that lasted for almost a century, which is preserved in her writings.

Widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mayröcker passed away in 2021 at the age of ninety-six. On the outside, her life may be subject to the impertinence of the finitude of all human existence. But on the inside, and in its transformation into the eternal moment, life only becomes richer and richer in forms of experience. In radically concentrated language and compellingly beautiful images, Mayröcker presents in this cahier a life that follows only one maxim: “Not just what is written, but existence, too, must be poetic.”

Friederike Mayröcker (1924-2021) is widely considered one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The recipient of numerous awards, including the renowned Georg Büchner Prize, she published over eighty works, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books.

Donna Stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry and one of prose. She has translated works from Ludwig Hohl, Alexander Kluge, and Friederike Mayröcker. She lives in Berlin.

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Lossless, Matthew Tierney

Publisher: Coach House Books
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

Tierney’s new collection takes its title from lossless data compression algorithms. It positions the sonnet as lines of code that transmit through time and space those ‘stabs of self,’ the awareness of being that intensifies with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people.

The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of dust motes in the air. Playing against this intimacy are loopy chapters of Borgesian prose poems – with appearances from Duns Scotus and Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, Niels Bohr and others – that extract knowledge from information to reconstruct the source experience into a subjectivity, a personality, and a life.

Matthew Tierney is the author of four books of poetry. His most recent, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande, was nominated for a ReLit Award. He won the 2013 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and is also a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award and the P.K. Page Founders’ Award. He works for U of T as a writer in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and lives in the east end of Toronto with his wife and son.

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Pleasure Principle, Madeleine Cravens

Publisher: Scribner
Publication Date: June 4, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook

In her stunning debut collection, Madeleine Cravens explores desire in all its transgressive power and wildness. Pleasure and pain are inextricable in these carefully observed poems, capturing a young woman on the threshold of adulthood as she seeks to understand herself. With a hard-edged vulnerability and singularly bold style, Cravens is unsparing about the struggle to make sense of one’s longings.

Taking us from the parks and plazas of Brooklyn to the freeways of California, these poems allow us to watch a life unfold where “womanhood felt like an incorrect container,” and love is performed “in the historic way, with bartering and harsh alliances.” As Cravens casts her questioning eye across the possibilities of queer relationships and the curious shapes of family bonds—both the ones we’re born into and the ones we choose—she urges readers to consider how we become ourselves.

Moving, captivating, and funny, Pleasure Principle heralds the arrival of a fearless and vibrant new voice in American poetry.

Madeleine Cravens was a 2022–2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. She was the first-place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Poetry Contest and 2020 30 Below Contest, and a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Washington Square Review. She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Oakland. Pleasure Principle is her debut poetry collection.

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Las Piedrecitas, Noelia Cerna

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: June, 2024
Format: Paperback

In June of 2023, Black Lawrence Press welcomed numerous existing and forthcoming Nomadic Press titles to our catalogue. Las Piedrecitas was originally selected for publication by Nomadic.

Noelia Cerna is a Latina poet based in Springdale, AR. She was born in Costa Rica and immigrated to the United States at the age of 7 where she received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Westminster College in Missouri. Her poems have been published in audio form in Terse. Journal and in print in the The Revolution [Relaunch], the Girl Gang blog, the Plants and Poetry Journal and The North Meridian Review. Noelia is a book editor for the North Meridian Review and an award winning writing mentor for Pen America’s Prison Writing Mentorship program.

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Earthwhere, Lindsay Illich

Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
Publication Date: June, 2024
Format: Paperback

Earthwhere was written under the sign of disaster–a house fire, a global pandemic, the health crisis of a spouse, the stillbirth of my niece. In many of the poems, I address a “you,” a regular feature of lyric poetry, partly because it powerfully conjures a singular other, the “to whom” of address, our most precious loved ones. It made writing the poems feel like receiving the gift of their attention, like they were with me. Also, it made the act of writing an act of preservation, for poems enact and elicit emotion, connection. They’re all love letters, really.

Lindsay Illich is the author of Fingerspell (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), Rile & Heave (Texas Review Press, 2017), and the chapbook Heteroglossia (Anchor & Plume, 2016). Rile & Heave won the Texas Review Press Breakthrough Prize in Poetry. She also co-authored Teach Living Poets (National Council of Teachers of English, 2021). She teaches at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts.

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Moonscape for a Child, Allie Rigby

Publisher: Bored Wolves
Publication Date: Spring/Summer, 2024
Format: Paperback

In Moonscape for a Child, Allie Rigby recounts personal confrontations with anxiety and despair at the local and collective level: from burning a pot of rice to scanning the Pyrocene’s horizon for wildfires. Ranging from the terrain of Southern California to sojourns and seasons amidst vibrant Arizona desert and the thick forests of central Maine, the poet shapes a collection meeting the question: “How does one live well and with purpose while also navigating the daily reality of depression?”

These poems describe experiences when even proximity to the people and places usually capable of providing solace fails to alleviate the dead weight of despondency. What happens then, when one is unmoored by the flow of a depressive interiority into a frangible external environment? Rigby’s poems expand the possibilities for what it means to remain tethered to a planet on which life may tenaciously teem even in the absence of rain. Throughout, she seeks to regain the “purpose from a time / when women fed birds / fed all the birds.”

Moonscape for a Child is illustrated by artist Julia Rigby, working in ink and blue wash to convey the merging of psyche into observed landscape and the domestic everyday into the realm of myth and back again.

Allie Rigby is a poet, editor, printer, educator, and initiator of literary communities.

Julia Rigby is an experimental sound artist, filmmaker, visual artist, and sculptor.

The two collaborators share sisterhood, roots in Southern California, and an attunement to entanglements among people, landscapes, non-humans, and natural processes.

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Don’t see a poetry title published between 6/4 and 6/9 here? Contact us to let us know!