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.
Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire, Jason Schneiderman
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Following up on his landmark collection Hold Me Tight, Jason Schneiderman extends his personal and historical explorations in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. Schneiderman’s signature sense of humor works as a connective tissue across the book, even as the juxtapositions become more unlikely (Kafka and Hillary Clinton?), the historical scope becomes wider, and the personal revelations cut deeper than ever before. These poems represent Schneiderman’s most direct and explicit exploration of Jewish heritage and history, bringing to the surface a theme that has often been missed in his work. The strength of these poems is in their power to trace the wound as a form of healing, to confront the agonizing in order to make way for joy and, yes, love.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections and the editor of the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is a longtime cohost of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and has guest hosted American Public Media’s The Slowdown. He is a professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. He lives in New York City.
Every Where Alien, Brad Walrond
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Every Where Alien is Brad Walrond’s dazzling afro-futuristic, afro-surrealist journey through New York City’s underground art movements, including the New Black Arts Movement, Black Rock Coalition, the Underground House Music-Dance community, the HIV/AIDS Black Queer Artivists, and the House Ballroom Scene.
Every Where Alien catapults us to New York City mid-1990s, early-2000s to rebroadcast the black queer creative genius of marginalized communities. Walrond questions narrow conceptions of “alien” as outsider, to explore how feelings of alienation also call us toward our shared humanity.
Brad Walrond is a poet, author, conceptual/performance artist, and one of the foremost writers and performers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City. His works include the recordings Underneath the Metal, Eargasms: Crucial Poetics: vol.1; fallopia, on Shelley Nicole’s album, I Am American, produced by Vernon Reid, Walrond’s own full length album, Alien Day, produced by Howard Alper; Blood Brothers, a multimedia installation; and Brad and Kimberley Knox’s short film Cyborg Heaven. Walrond holds a B.A. from The City College of New York and an M.A. from Columbia University.
Next Day: New and Selected Poems, Cynthia Zarin
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Beginning with several dozen new poems that have appeared in The New Yorker, among other publications, this volume is a tour through Zarin’s five exquisitely made collections, beginning with The Swordfish Tooth, published in 1989. Zarin, a poet in the line of Elizabeth Bishop, allows the reader to experience human truths through a poem’s shape and music, bodied forth through intimate images—the turn in the stair, a snow globe, naked birch branches, a vase of flowers—and a propulsive syntax. From the clarity of childhood memory to the maze of marriage and divorce, from her own consciousness—shaping landscapes of New York, Cape Cod, and Rome, to the shifting tides of history and the troubled conscience of a nation, her subject matter encompasses all of a woman’s life, with passion—its risks, satisfactions, and shattering immediacy—her first and truest subject.
Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of five previous collections of poems, including most recently Orbit, as well as a novel, Inverno, and two books of essays, Two Cities, and An Enlarged Heart, and several books for children. She is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. A winner of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, she teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.
Asterisms, Donna Kane
Publisher: Harbour Publishing
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Reflecting on subjects ranging from Comet NEOWISE to swallowtail butterflies to The Incredible Hulk, Kane’s new book is a thought-provoking follow up to her last collection, Orrery. Diverse in tone and subject matter, mixing humor and wonder, the poems in Asterisms take readers on a soul-stirring journey through the expansiveness of space and the interconnectedness of all life on earth.
Donna Kane is the recipient of the Aurora Award of Distinction: Arts and Culture, and the British Columbia Medal of Good Citizenship. Her poems, short fiction, reviews and essays have been published widely. She is the author of the non-fiction book Summer of the Horse (2018), and of three books of poetry-most recently Orrery, a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award. She divides her time between Rolla, BC, and Halifax, NS.
A Walk with Frank O’Hara, Susan Aizenberg
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: August 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Susan Aizenberg uses a range of techniques in her newest collection of poetry to explore contemporary daily life in a difficult world. She critiques gender, grief, culture, and the myriad experiences that define us. But even when grappling with old wounds, a strain of romance runs throughout the book, reminding readers that it’s between the love and the grief that we’ll find the moments worth being shared and savored.
Susan Aizenberg is the author of the poetry collections Quiet City and Muse and the coeditor of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women.
Unruly Tree, Leslie Ullman
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Publication Date: August 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The cryptic prompts—fragments, really—of Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies unveiled themselves to Leslie Ullman as rough translations from an obscure language. As an experiment, Ullman used each one as a poem title, and in doing so she accessed a thrill of freedom, uncertainty, and propulsion beyond her own familiar patterns and landscapes. In the process, she found herself exploring the literary, visual, and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to her before.
Unruly Tree showcases the most successful of Ullman’s play, and the result is a marvelous work by a poet at the height of her craft. At its heart this book is about process itself—even when it applies to experiences outside the arts—and about reclaiming an inner freedom many of us lose in our lives as adults in these noisy, rancorous times.
Leslie Ullman is the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction, including Progress on the Subject of Immensity (UNM Press) and Little Soul and the Selves.
Catch and Release, Sarah Van Arsdale
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Catch and Release takes the reader into vivid oceanic realms off the coast of Mexico through Sarah Van Arsdale’s watercolor illustrations of stoplight parrotfish and nurse sharks, sergeant majors and barracuda. The poetic and richly detailed story of an imprisoned shark’s liberation confronts humanity’s role in the destruction of the magnificent underwater world, while offering hope for the planet’s future.
Sarah Van Arsdale is a writer and illustrator. Her sixth book, Taken, a poetry collection, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She is the author of four books of fiction: Toward Amnesia (Riverhead, 1996), Blue (winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, University of Tennessee Press, 2003), Grand Isle (SUNY Press, 2012), and In Case of Emergency, Break Glass (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016) and a single book-length poem, titled The Catamount, published by Nomadic Press in 2017. Her watercolors illustrate The Catamount and In Case of Emergency, Break Glass. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College, and teaches in the Antioch University/LA low-residency MFA program. More of her drawings, short films, and writing can be seen at sarahvanarsdale.com
The Wrong Place, Tawn Parent
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
The Wrong Place attempts to answer the question: How does a mother cope when her worst nightmare comes true? This collection of poems and essays chronicles the author’s journey alongside her young son as he is diagnosed and treated for a rare cancer. Readers follow the family as they learn the vocabulary of cancer, develop a new way of parenting, and grieve the loss of their son’s innocence. The family navigates endless medical procedures and hospital stays while seeking to maintain a sense of themselves outside of “cancer world.” Throughout, the author relies on humor and hope to pull her through.
A native and resident of Indianapolis, Parent has been a professional writer and editor for 30 years. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Home Planet News Online, Anti-Heroin Chic, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Nzuri. She has worked for various business publications, and also served as proofreader for two books.
Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, Cheryl Clarke
Publisher: TriQuarterly
Publication Date: August 15, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.
Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.
Poet, critic, and activist Cheryl Clarke was born in Washington, DC. She earned her BA from Howard University and her MA and PhD from Rutgers University. Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), and By My Precise Haircut (2016), which won a Hilary Tham Capital Competition. She wrote the critical study “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), and a volume collecting her poetry and prose was published as The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980–2005 (2006).
Old Stranger, Joan Larkin
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: August 13, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The speaker in Old Stranger: Poems begs to be seen and known, even when faced with her aging and her own mortality. Even as we age, there’s a looming space for the mysterious stranger we embody without realizing it. Do we ever truly know who we are?
In the book, familiarity takes so many forms, as does the stranger: sometimes the stranger is a loved one, sometimes it is the speaker to themselves, and other times it’s one who might seem like a stranger in the poem but turns out to be recognizable in one or more ways. We are looking back, but at the same time we are so much in the present, there’s an in-betweenness of the temporal that is so dreamlike and delicious. The poems are suspended and feel weightless even as their subjects are weighty and, at times, dark.
Joan Larkin is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana’s Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetry (1997). Her prose works include If You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap.
Ditchlapse / [Really Afraid], Tommy Wyatt
Publisher: Querencia Press
Publication Date: August 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
tommy wyatt’s writing ensures you get winded and wounded in this vivid recollection surrounding modern technology, identity, tragedy, and loss. right from the beginning, tommy’s words guide you through their body and their personal tragedies, taken apart and meticulously inspected through the form of modern social media. DITCHLAPSE is the true amalgamation of the juxtaposition of tommy’s selves: on media and in life. tommy’s words ensure a crisis in DITCHLAPSE’s readers, while furthering their own understanding of tommy, both as a poet and as a person. there is no limit to the level of understanding, tragedy, and identity crises that DITCHLAPSE induces upon its readers. DITCHLAPSE itself is best described as raw and visceral, and tommy does an absolutely amazing job conveying their emotions to their readers. —arushi (aera) rege
tommy wyatt (he/they) lives with his boyfriend and their fiendishly goofy cats. he’s the author of NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL HORROR!; So, Who’s Courage?; TASEREDGED (watch out!); Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen; moviemotion; and others.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/13 and 8/19 here? Contact us to let us know!
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.