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.
Information, including product descriptions, is provided by the publisher and not a critical judgment. If we cover the book on this site, links will be included.
Leaving Biddle City, Marianne Chan
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Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: July 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What’s achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman Fellow, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Cincinnati.
Fish Love, Bryanna Licciardi
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Publisher: Alternating Current Press
Publication Date: July 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Fish Love, Bryanna Licciardi leans into her obsessive nature and twisted humor, offering readers a landscape of bizarre realism. From dark, familial narratives to imagined dates with serial killers, she eagerly distorts the line between love and loathing, self and other, fantasy and actuality. With a dreamlike quality and gut-punching lines, Licciardi guides readers through the stages of rage, hurt, laughter, and raw memory, ultimately ending her debut full-length poetry collection in the realm of hope among the most sinister of places—regret.
Bryanna Licciardi resists the question, “Where are you from?” She has lived all over the country—California, Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, Louisiana—and currently resides in a small town near Nashville, Tennessee. She is a degree collector of sorts, with a BA from Austin Peay State University, an MFA from Emerson College, and a doctorate from Middle Tennessee State University. She works as an English lecturer and professional development coordinator, also at MTSU. Her spare time is spent taking care of four cats and one husband. Licciardi’s first book, Skin Splitting, is a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press (2017). Her literary works have also appeared in such publications as BlazeVox, Cleaver Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Red Flag Poetry, and The Adirondack Review. For more about her work, go to bryannalicciardi.com.
Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems, Todd Davis
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Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In an age when many find themselves disconnected from the natural world, celebrated poet Todd Davis offers the possibilities of reconnection, of listening to the earth’s labored breathing, to the thoughts of other-than-human animals and the languages trees speak. In thirty new poems, and with ample selections from his previous seven books, Davis’s roots run deep in Rust-Belt Appalachia, attending to the harmed but healing landscape, the people whose lives are too often neglected, and the looming threat of climate collapse and extinction. Orion Magazine likens Davis’s work to Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, as he continues to demonstrate what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.” Known for both narrative and lyrical impulses, Davis asks readers to acknowledge their kinship with all living beings, which demands some grieving for past sins but also suggests a way toward restoration. With a Foreword by David James Duncan.
Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry—Coffin Honey, Native Species, Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and coedited the anthologies A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia and Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year silver and bronze awards. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and Poetry Daily. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies, creative writing, and American literature at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.
A Calligraphy of Days: Selected Poems, Krzysztof Siwczyk, Piotr Florczyk (tr.), Alice-Catherine Carls (tr.)
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Publisher: Seagull Books
Publication Date: August 5, 2024
Format: Paperback
The sixty-four poems in A Calligraphy of Days reflect Krzysztof Siwczyk’s wide-ranging and variegated style. Born in 1977, Siwczyk has lived most of his life in the Silesian city of Gliwice. In 1995, he became a wunderkind of the Polish poetry scene with his debut volume Wild Kids, an edgy and unsentimental narrative of youthful tribulations and urban malaise during Poland’s transition from communism to capitalism. Siwczyk’s poems careen down the page at great speed, relying on clever turns of phrase or an idea that illuminates a larger meaning. As in calligraphy, a meandering subterranean process connects meaning and memory, thought and verse. Teased to the surface, words and images emerge in rapid, terse, and precise bursts.
Throughout his career, Siwczyk has never ceased to challenge our sense of who we are—changing course multiple times in the process. Following several volumes full of expansive lines, his most recent works offer spare meditations on illness and grief. Clipped and understated, these post-Holocaust poems address our inability to speak of death and tragedy.
Krzysztof Siwczyk is an award-winning poet, critic, and essayist from Poland. He has published over fourteen volumes of poetry, and his work has been translated into numerous languages, including Italian, French, and German. He lives in Gliwice, Poland, and works at the Rafal Wojaczek Institute in Mikolów.
Piotr Florczyk is an award-winning poet and translator of a dozen volumes of contemporary Polish poetry. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Alice-Catherine Carls is Tom Elam Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She is a translator from Polish and English into French and from French into English.
Left Turns in Brown Study, Sandra Ruiz
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Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: August 2, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.
Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre and English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance.
Washing the Wings of the Angels, Bob Heman
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Publisher: Quale Press
Publication Date: July 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
As a poet of the imagination, Bob Heman’s “information” pieces create microcosms in which all things are possible, where language creates everything and anything, and into which reality sometimes rears its head. His “information” series reflects prose poems written over a span of almost thirty years and this collection, Washing the Wings of the Angels, draws upon seventy-nine written in the past decade that figure most securely, as well as most enduringly, in Heman’s consciousness. Written with no premeditation at all, these prose poems just happen, often taking on a life of their own, hopefully to take wing and surprise the reader with a startling and engaging juxtaposition of language and image.
Bob Heman‘s words have been anthologized recently in Contemporary Tangential Surrealist Poetry: an anthology (SurVision Books), A Shape Produced by a Curve (great weather for MEDIA), Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry: An International Anthology (Lamar University Literary Press) and Alcatraz (Life Before Man), and have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Italian and Hungarian. In the late 1970s he was an artist-in-residence at The Brooklyn Museum. Quale Press has published two other collections from him: How It All Began (2007) and Demographics, or, The Hats They Are Allowed to Wear (2009).
The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton
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Publisher: Delete Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Near the end of her stunning debut, Katie Naughton asks a simple question, not so simple at all: “and what is mine?” The question tunes the ear to the undergirding ethic these poems explore, a frequency that cancels the static of capital’s all-too-easy “time is money” to reveal the deeper economy, one that knows the real, letter by letter, is embedded within the ethereal, with an E as the only excess, calling out so quietly the heart’s inner urgent more. More what? More days, more time, more of the honest inheritance that makes a life—for any of us—mine. Naughton is a spare poet of life’s wild abundance, practicing poetry’s oldest motions, the garland and the crown, weaving together inner life with worldly experience, stitching day to day, asking what the hours are in hopes of honoring what the days bring. It is the worthiest kind of work I know, to play us the tune of “time our oldest song the wind wilt blow.” – Dan Beachy-Quick
Katie Naughton is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021), A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (forthcoming from Bunny/Fonograf Editions, 2025). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Fence, Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University and is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at State University of New York at Buffalo. She is an editor at Essay Press, the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project, and Etcetera, an online journal of poetry and poetics.
Find Your Own Way Home, Michael George
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Publisher: Livingston Press
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
“Beginning in the voice of a punchline villain and ending with a philosophically rapturous finale, Michael George’s Find Your Own Way Home is a deep meditation on loneliness, the reverberations of violence, and ‘homelessness’ in an existential sense. Jumping between multiple perspectives—from a female truck driver to a wandering preacher to a police detective—George constructs a cutthroat world that bends meticulously around perception, vengeance, and the sticky tethers that bind us to the worst versions of our humanity. This tightly wound novel in verse renders a raw world that we can’t—despite our best human efforts—resist: a cyclic cosmos of darkness that spreads as predictably as our interstate highways. What’s remarkable about this brutal place, like that of our own violent world, is that it still carries the fragility of a single plate of glass, that it still carries all the vulnerability of an abandoned, pink shoe. I am astonished with what George sets out for us to do in all this muck; that we ‘might bend / the way the light bends, toward the dark / without succumbing to it.’ A brilliant and necessary read.” —Jessica Q. Stark, Author of Buffalo Girl and Poetry Editor at AGNI
Writing as Michael George, Michael Wiley is the author of eleven novels and two books of literary criticism. Recipient of the Best Novel Shamus Award for A Bad Night’s Sleep as well as other prizes and nominations for his long fiction, he also publishes short stories, including “Where There’s Love,” selected for the Best Mystery Stories of 2022 anthology. His fiction focuses on crime, in Chicago, where he grew up, the Southeast, where he has lived for the past twenty-five years, and, as in Find Your Own Way Home, the spaces in between. Having worked as an itinerant cherry picker, an attendant at an in-patient mental health facility, and a speechwriter, Michael is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of North Florida.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 7/30 and 8/5 here? Contact us to let us know!
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Contents
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/2 from Black Lawrence Press, LSU Press, Persea, Omnidawn, Bloodaxe Books and Central Avenue Publishing.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for June 2024 from Driftwood Press, Sheila-Na-Gig Inc., Diode Editions, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Finishing Line Press, Bottlecap Press and an Editor’s Pick from Tupelo Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/9 from Finishing Line Press, New Directions, Phoneme Media, University of Calgary Press and Curbstone Books.
July ‘24: A Fledgling Journal No More
We’ve completed our first volume, there’s a new featured chapbook poem, and we’re starting to look for a Poetry Editor to expand what we publish. Check out the editor’s note for July 2024.
Chapbook Poem: Whenua by Nicola Andrews
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for July 2024, “Whenua” from Māori Maid Difficult by Nicola Andrews, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/16 from Finishing Line Press, Soft Skull, Penguin Books, Regal House Publishing and University Of Minnesota Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/23 from Host Publications, W. W. Norton & Company, Carcanet Press Ltd., LSU Press, Finishing Line Press, The Song Cave and Wake Forest University Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/30 from Delete Press, Quale Press, Duke University Press, Seagull Books, Sarabande Books, Michigan State University Press and Alternating Current Press.
Southern Literary Tradition: On ‘Snake Lore’ by Jane Morton
In this essay, C.M. Crockford reviews “Snake Lore” by poet Jane Morton, a chapbook published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2024.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 8/6 from NYRB Poets, Belle Point Press, Finishing Line Press, Black Lawrence Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, Penguin Books, Bloodaxe Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Alice James Books, Mercer University Press and two Editor’s Picks from Coffee House Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Chapbook Poem: It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye by Amanda Rabaduex
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for August 2024, “It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye” from Resin in the Milky Way by Amanda Rabadeux, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for July 2024 from Seven Kitchens Press, Small Harbor Publishing, Belle Point Press, Orison Books, Variant Lit, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/13 from Querencia Press, Alice James Books, Finishing Line Press, University of New Mexico Press, Harbour Publishing, Knopf, Amistad, TriQuarterly and Red Hen Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/20 from Querencia Press, Finishing Line Press, McClelland & Stewart, Zephyr Press, Tin House Books, W. W. Norton & Company, Red Hen Press, Graywolf Press, Wesleyan University Press and an Editor’s Pick from Copper Canyon Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 8/27 from Carcanet Press Ltd., Beltway Editions, Finishing Line Press,, LSU Press, Milkweed Editions, Tupelo Press, Guernica Editions, University of Nebraska Press and Texas Review Press.
Resistance and Resignation in Will Russo’s Glass Manifesto
“Glass Manifesto is a meditative collection of poems that call to resist the powers that move the world at times, or resign and offer oneself up to them at others.” Review by PCR contributor, Drishya.
Meet our contributor, Drishya, a writer and artist based in Kolkata, India, publishing under a single name to protest India’s caste system. Read about his writing life and other work.