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.
The Stuff of Hollywood, Niki Herd
Editor’s Pick
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Stuff of Hollywood is a meditation on the pervasiveness of violence in America. In this book-length poem, Niki Herd relies on various modes—images, prose, lyric and documentary poems—to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest. A busy Waffle House, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, inside an Uber on a Chicago street, readers are placed in various “film” locations and watch as America becomes a character in its own absurd movie. In one section, excerpted language from the continuity script of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation is juxtaposed with text from the January 6 congressional hearings, suggesting a fragile line between real and engineered brutality. Herd interrogates empire and the ways in which violence is consumed and normalized. The Stuff of Hollywood is an elegy for a country that never existed beyond the screen.
Niki Herd is the author of The Stuff of Hollywood, The Language of Shedding Skin, and the chapbook don’t you weep. She also co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University.
DEED, torrin a. greathouse
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook
DEED, the follow-up to torrin a. greathouse’s 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winning debut, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, is a formally and lyrically innovative exploration of queer sex and desire, and what it can cost. Sprawling across art, eros, survival, myth, etymology, and musical touchstones from Bruce Springsteen to Against Me!, this new book both subverts and pays homage to the poetic canon, examining an artistic lineage that doesn’t always love trans or disabled people back. Written in a broad range of received and invented forms—from caudate sonnets and the sestina, to acrostics and the burning haibun—DEED indicts violent systems of carceral, medical, and legal power which disrupt queer and disabled love and solidarity, as well as the potentially vicarious manner in which audiences consume art. This collection is a poetic triptych centered on the question of how, in spite of all these complications, to write an honest poem about desire. At its core, DEED is a reminder of how tenderness can be made a shield, a weapon, or a kind of faith, depending on the mouth that holds it.
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk poet and essayist. Their debut collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (2020), was the winner of the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Bluff, Danez Smith
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.
Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.
Danez Smith is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award.
Sonnets for a Missing Key, Percival Everett
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
These sonnets were inspired by the Preludes of Chopin.
Do keys matter? Do they speak to different parts of us? Inspired by the Preludes of Chopin and the piano solos of Art Tatum, these experimental sonnets seek to question timbre and tone. That’s bullshit. They are just sonnets.
Percival Everett is the author of fifteen novels, among them The Water Cure, Erasure, and Glyph. He is the author of the poetry collection Abstraktion und Einfühlung, the coauthor of A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel), and provided annotations for Akashic’s publication of The Jefferson Bible. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Sturge Town, Kwame Dawes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Hardcover / eBook
The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality, and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader—serious, confessional, alarmed, and sometimes teasing. Metrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualized spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.
Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He is a chancellor emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the Windham-Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022, Kwame Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Cloud Missives, Kenzie Allen
Publisher: Tin House Books
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.
Cloud Missives is an investigation, a manifestation, and a celebration: of the body, of what we make and remake, of the self, and of the heart. With care and deep attention, it asks what one can reimagine of Indigenous personhood in the wake of colonialism, what healing might look like when loving the world around you—and introduces readers to a profound new voice in poetry.
Kenzie Allen is a Haudenosaunee poet and multimodal artist. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other venues. Born in West Texas, she now shares time between Toronto, Ontario; Stavanger, Norway; and the Oneida reservation in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Blue Flare: Three Contemporary Haitian Poets, Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Celie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (Bilingual edition)
Publisher: Zephyr Press
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback
Three celebrated poets illuminate the complexity of life in Haiti and its diaspora in the 21st century, particularly for women, in this exceptional and unprecedented trilingual collection. In Évelyne Trouillot’s sensual poems about love and yearning, she asks repeatedly “in what language should I speak to you”? Marie-Célie Agnant addresses poverty, pain, death, but also the pleasures of passion. Maggy De Coster’s concise and personal poems explore the world — its nature, light, wind — and, sometimes, political themes. Together, these poems navigate between an impulse to “capture gently these moments of light” (De Coster) and the very different insistence that we see how “pain sits at ground level / at times charging like a beast” (Agnant). The original poems in French and Haitian Kreyòl appear facing the English translations by Danielle LeGros Georges. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Évelyne Trouillot lives in Port-au-Prince, where she is a professor of French at the Université d’Etat d’Haiti. She is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two volumes of stories for children, two books of poems, and an award-winning play. She is a member of one of Haiti’s most fertile intellectual and literary families, standing alongside her siblings: novelist Lyonel Trouillot; anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and Kreyòl scholar and children’s book author Jocelyne Trouillot. She, her daughter, and her brother Lyonel, founded Pré-Texte, a writer’s organization that sponsors reading and writing workshops.
Marie-Célie Agnant is a writer, translator, and activist whose novels have been widely-translated and include The Book of Emma (2004) which evokes the hardships endured by enslaved women in the Caribbean and the challenges to giving voice to this history today. Living in Montréal and writing across literary genres, she has produced poetry, fiction, tales, and books for young readers. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois of the Academie des Lettres du Quebec in 2017 for her most recent collection of poetry, Femmes des terres brûlées (2016). Her critically-acclaimed work offers poignant refusals of silence. She worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre and regularly visits Vermont. Agnant is the 2023 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate (national poet laureate).
Maggy de Coster is a poet, essayist and anthologist who lives in Paris. She has worked as a journalist in Haiti, France, Switzerland, England and Barbados, and is the author of more than 20 books in a variety of literary and other genres. De Coster received the Jean-Cocteau Poetry Prize in 2004. She founded and directs the literary journal Manoir des Poètes, and her poems have been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Arabic.
Translator Danielle Legros Georges is the author of Island Heart (2021), translations of the poems of Haitian-French writer Ida Faubert, among other titles. Her poems have been widely published, anthologized, and included in international artistic commissions and collaborations. In 2014, Legros Georges was named Poet Laureate of the City of Boston. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature, and a professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
Signal Infinities, Melanie Siebert
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Signal Infinities a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention. Pain arrives. Collective and personal injuries and errors pile up. The glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing.
Unlike the Iliad’s soldiers, the cast of youth in this long poem harbour traumas that are internal, hidden, unsung. Yet each wounded one flickers with defiance and dignity. So too the blue-collar winds, the little brown bats and roadside ferns who send out their urgent signals.
With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes, tonal shifts, chemical transmissions and streaming kinesics. It seeks an ethics that respects the body’s imperfect intercom, its private coulees and unstable weathers, its sheer limits.
Amid too-little-too-late conditions, Signal Infinities floods with connections that are elemental, illuminating and wildly felt.
Melanie Siebert is the author of Deepwater Vee, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction book Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada and was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize. Melanie grew up in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan, raised as a white, third-generation settler of European/Mennonite heritage. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest on the beautiful homelands of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nations and the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Melanie practices attachment-focused and nature-based therapy in Victoria, BC.
And & And, Bob King
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 23, 2024
Format: Paperback
And & And joins the literary conversation fueled by French & Spanish Surrealists, The New York School, its postmodern proponents & contemporary adherents, & under centripetal force these poems spin & collide with humor, play, empathy, & wild literary-to-pop-culture allusions. At this collection’s core are energetic particles, brief-bright moments of friendship & family, love & loss, grief & gratitude, morality & meaning.
Bob King is an Associate Professor of English at Kent State University at Stark. He lives in Fairview Park, Ohio, with his wife & daughters.
Confessional, Fletch Fletcher
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 23, 2024
Format: Paperback
Confessional is a sequence of poems pulling at the raw emotions, the regrets and mistakes, the parts of ourselves we rather leave buried. Dig them up and question the ties of family, religion, tradition, love, your own mind, and how much of you is your choice or the choice of others. Steer clear of 835, as there must be parts of each of us, some hurts or joys or secrets, that must be kept to ourselves.
Fletch Fletcher is a poet (obviously), a science teacher, a brother, and a bunch of other random things that may or may not help you understand him. He was lucky enough to work with and learn from amazing poets while getting an MFA in Poetry at Drew University. Fletcher’s first collection, Existing Science (2021), was published by Assure Press.
gutter rainbows, Melissa Eleftherion
Publisher: Querencia Press
Publication Date: August 23, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Lorine Niedecker writes about the contemporaneous existence of past, present and future in organisms like minerals and rocks. These breathing capsules catch us in crystalline as if we were vapor. However, we are not vapor. We catch them too. In declivities and emotional residue. In grief & indelible skull designs. An exchange over time in pockets and leaves. An exchange that fosters reciprocity. Symbiosis of exchanges.
gutter rainbows is about transformation through trauma. It’s about growing up in Brooklyn & forming alliances with sidewalks. About being a girl on the verge of something shattering. About the fur. Many of the poems in this collection are based on a type of mineral. Melissa Eleftherion works with the language of minerals and rocks to tell a story of the relationship between women & geological trauma, along with the sediment of betrayal that lingers in our foundation. This book is about trusting yourself enough to claw your way out.
Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, she holds degrees from Brooklyn College, Mills College, and San Jose State University. They are the author of two poetry collections, field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), & gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), & twelve chapbooks including abject sutures (above/ground press, 2024). Her work has been widely published & featured in venues like Quarter after Eight, Sixth Finch, Entropy, & Barren Magazine. Melissa now lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah. Recent work is available at www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/20 and 8/26 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.