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.
A Window That Can Neither Open Nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance, Lauren Russell
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date: August 27, 2024
Format: Paperback
In A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. “Though I no longer wanted to die,” writes Lauren Russell, “our first years together were not easy … because I also did not want to live.” From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality and love.
Resisting the neurotypical expectation to choose any one answer arising from her explorations, she invites readers to engage: a pop quiz, a twelve-sided die, an abecedarian confession, a box of mirrors, several idiosyncratic diagnostic tools, and a suite of obsidian waiting rooms. Holding binaries in suspense, Russell seamlessly unfolds and enfolds the various operations of language, moving through forms with the restless brilliance of an architect turned ethicist turned collagist turned origamist. And everything, it seems, finds some way to turn back into poetry.
From psychological evaluation to clickbait, Russell transforms the world’s furious search for explanations into open inquiry. “How flat is the silence in your pocket?” she asks. “Is the inside of a wish an ossuary?” “Do questions stick you to the wall of sociability?” “Did I say I am making my own bestiary?” “What kind of cascade is this?” In a book dedicated to knowing, to not-knowing, and to its readers, Russell pulls back the curtain and invites us in.
Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close; Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the New York Times Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.
Called Back, Rosa Lane
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In bold tribute with a title utilizing the last two words Emily Dickinson wrote, Rosa Lane’s Called Back converses with one of our greatest poets in theatrical monologue—decoding secrets amid the blatant. Evoked by epigraphs selected from Dickinson’s work, Lane’s poems, through her I-speaker, reveal the extraordinary to be found in the ordinary and speak to the struggle of sexual orientation, otherness, and the challenges of living in a Calvinistic socioreligious world of oughts and noughts as evidenced in Dickinson’s poems. From sapphic eroticism and subsequent pangs of nonbelonging to tacking next life as a welcome reprieve, poems in Called Back create a de novo dot-connecting lyrical narrative.
Rosa Lane, poet and architect, is author of four poetry collections, including Chouteau’s Chalk, Tiller North, and Roots and Reckonings. Her work won the 2018 William Matthews Poetry Prize and a Maine Literary Award and is forthcoming or has appeared in the Asheville Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Five Points, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, RHINO Poetry, River Heron Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a PhD in sustainable architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. She splits her time between her native home in coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her wife.
The Book of Drought, Rob Carney
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In The Book of Drought, Rob Carney skips ahead to the ending, setting his unnamed Listen-Recorder in a near-future landscape newly wrecked by drought. Instead of water: dead lakebeds. Instead of wild animals: bones. The sky is now cloudless, and the city’s faucets are dry. No one has adjusted yet, but some gather in an empty river to grieve, remember, and to tell their stories, the stories that become this book. Part dystopian warning, part dry-humor protest, part mythology and song—get ready for some sad-mad beauty, but with open-eyed hope.
Rob Carney is the author of eight previous books of poems, most recently Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press 2021) and The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence 2018), which won the 15 Bytes Book Award. He is a recipient of the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry, and he has written a featured series called “Old Roads, New Stories” for the award-winning online journal Terrain.org for the last nine years. Carney has read his work on national public radio and at conferences, festivals, and universities across the country. Favorite drink: coffee. Favorite animal: the Great White. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.
What Good is Heaven, Raye Hendrix
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Set in a rural agricultural community in north Alabama, deep in the Appalachian foothills, What Good is Heaven interrogates the complicated relationship between violence and love. Viewed through the lens of a young, bisexual woman, the poems in this collection layer a queer coming-of-age narrative with poems of witness to the difficult realities not only of rural and farm life, but of violent cultural norms based around the patriarchal religious beliefs that the region is steeped in. Like the social setting of this place, the landscape, with its dark forests and darker hollers, is a space of turbulence—of ideas butting up against each other—and those in the middle are left to sort out the wreckage. This collection is concerned with navigating that wreckage, which predominantly manifests as violence done to bodies. For the speaker of these poems, the bodily harm done to livestock and wild animals, plant life, and even the earth itself as simply part of the justifiable or “acceptable” violence of farm life comes to mirror the mirror the bodily transgression queer folks and women face in her community—violence that is similarly considered to be “acceptable.” In registers that move between the religious, personal, political, and even ecocritical, What Good is Heaven asks what it means to love and be loved by what hurts you, to be implicated in perpetuating the same kinds of harm, and what it means to call such a complicated place your home.
Raye Hendrix is the author of the chapbooks Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press, 2021) and Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press, 2021). Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and the 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review), they have also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Oregon Humanities Center, and the Juniper Writing Institute. Raye holds a BA and MA from Auburn University, an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.
The Book of Wounded Sparrows, Octavio Quintanilla
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
In The Book of Wounded Sparrows, his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently—a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation.
In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that—more than a narrative of loss—it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self.
Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and of The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, and elsewhere. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Midway Journal, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and elsewhere. His poetry and Frontextos can be found at the San Antonio Labor Plaza, and at Poet’s Point, a San Antonio community space.
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body, Lory Bedikian
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body presents the voice of a daughter of immigrant parents, now gone, from Lebanon and Syria and of Armenian descent. In this five-part testimony Lory Bedikian reconstructs the father figure, mother figure, and the self. Using a sestina, syllabics, prose poems, and longer poetic sequences, Bedikian creates elegies for parents lost and self-elegiac lyrics and narratives for living with illness. Often interrupted with monologues and rants, the poems grapple with the disorder of loss and the body’s failures. Ultimately, Bedikian contemplates the concept of fate, destiny (jagadakeer), and the excavation of memory—whether to question familial inheritance or claim medical diagnoses.
Lory Bedikian is the author of The Book of Lamenting, winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in multiple journals, including Tin House, the Adroit Journal, the Los Angeles Review, and Gulf Coast. She teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles. For more information about the author, visit lorybedikian.com.
The Double Feature of the Murdered Woman, Carole David, Donald Winkler (tr.)
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
It’s an ordinary summer in the twenty-first century. There’s a heat wave in Rome, where the poet has just set down her valises. What is she seeking amid the crowds of tourists, she, Italian-born, exiled to America, who speaks the language only haltingly? In the capital’s streets, at the railroad station or the museum, an exuberant city life rubs shoulders with a thousand tragedies. Rome is a theatre of recurrent violence, the cinema where you are seated, apprehensive, watching The Double Feature of the Murdered Woman. For six months the poet wanders the city, alert to the phantoms passing by. This book could be the written record of her conversations with ghosts. It’s a return to the crime scene, a renewal of vows, face to face with a haunting past: that of Italy, and the blood drenched story of women.
Donald Winkler was born in Winnipeg in 1940, graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1961, and as a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, did graduate study at the Yale School of Drama. From 1967 to 1995 he was a film director and writer at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal, and since the 1980s, a translator of Quebec literature: in 1994, 2011, and 2013 he won the Governor General’s Award for French to English translation, and has been a finalist for the prize on three other occasions.
Carole David was born in Montreal and earned a PhD in literary studies from the University of Sherbrooke. She has taught at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal and was head of the Public Lending Rights Program at the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2006, she was elected president of the Maison de la poésie de Montréal. David received the Prix Émile-Nelligan for Terroristes and in 1996 she was awarded the Terrasses Saint-Sulpice poetry prize by the magazine Estuaire for her poetry collection Abandons. Her novel Impala was a finalist for the Journal de Montréal prize and for the City of Montreal prize. La Maison d’Ophélie was on the shortlist for the Governor General’s Award for French-language poetry in 1999. She received the Prix Alain-Grandbois in 2011 for her collection Manuel de poétique à l’intention des jeunes filles; the same collection was also included on the shortlist for the Governor General’s poetry award. In 2020 se was named the recipient of Quebec’s Prix Athanase-David for lifetime achievement in literature.
Glance, Chanda Feldman
Publisher: LSU Press
Publication Date: August 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Glance, the second collection of poetry by Chanda Feldman, explores the experiences of a Black and white and Jewish American family that moves abroad to find respite from contemporary racial violence. Spanning diverse landscapes in Israel and the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, the poems grapple with the inability to escape brutalities and prejudices, asking where—and if—it is possible to find a sense of home and community. Feelings of belonging and estrangement, safety and threat, as well as questions of identity, both of the self and the family, drive the speaker to look inward and outward in order to navigate the world.
Though never breaking free from their attendant anxieties, Feldman’s poems revel in the beauty of environment and place as they traverse global spaces, from the sea to the city, from the playground to the museum, from orchards to the synagogue, seeking a home in the world.
Chanda Feldman is the author of Approaching the Fields. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, AGNI, Poetry magazine, and the Southern Review, among other publications. She is the recipient of a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Stegner Fellowship in poetry from Stanford University. Feldman is associate professor of creative writing at Oberlin College.
My Blue Sweetie, Neal Zirn
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
My Blue Sweetie is an assemblage of poems that center around relationships with women involving romance, secrets, melancholy, desire, nostalgia, abandonment, and love, often told with humor, delicacy, and, at times, a tinge of the metaphysical. The poems have been carefully crafted, are accessible, and, most of all, contain an energy that beckons the reader to enter their own, interior world and discover what he or she shares in common with the author.
Neal Zirn has been published in numerous journals in the United States and Canada. He is an award-winning poet, painter, and printmaker as well as a dedicated tai chi practitioner.
A Goat in a Tequila Cup, Faleeha Hassan
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: August 30, 2024
Format: Paperback
Hassan’s poetry draws us into her unique experiences from Iraq to Turkey to the U.S. of a life lived always surrounded by war, loss, and loneliness but searching for life and love. Through this collection from an award-winning, internationally-recognized poet, the reader can wait “in a secret garden,” lying in the grass, and let the words “grow on your tongue” and “jump into the heart artery.” She invites us to “keep moving, breathing” and to focus on the fortune of being alive. This is the book we need for living in these times. –Ellen Hernandez, author of In Morocco: Rihlat Amri’yat Amrikia and Voices from a Pandemic
Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now lives in the United States. Faleeha is the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq. She received her master’s degree in Arabic literature, and has now published 25 books. Ms. Hassan has received many awards in Iraq and throughout the Middle East for her poetry and short stories. Faleeha Hassan has also had her poems and short stories published in a variety of American magazines.
The Sahara of I, Luis H. Francia
Publisher: Beltway Editions
Publication Date: September 1, 2024
Format: Paperback
Luis Francia is a poet in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and José Garcia Villa, and shares with them a compulsion to write serious poems—poems deeply concerned with the metaphysical—that are nonetheless filled with incandescent wordplay, humor, and even, at times, joy. In The Sahara of I Luis H. Francia once again shares his marvelous gift for probing insight, humor, alliterative wordplay, and serious observations of humanity in all its complexity. Francia contemplates our living and our dead, not to mention our hidden connection amid apparent isolation. Few writers wield such irony and romance simultaneously. It is a sparkling pathos, a playful gravity.
Luis H. Francia is a poet, playwright, and nonfiction writer. He is an adjunct professor at New York University, where he teaches Filipino Language and Culture. His last poetry collection was Thorn Grass (University of the Philippines Press, 2021). Previous collections include Tattered Boat, The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems, Museum of Absences, and The Beauty of Ghosts. Included in many anthologies, he has been a first-prize winner in the Philippines’ most prestigious literary competition, the Palancas, and honored by the Union of Philippine Writers in 2014. His works have been translated into Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, French, and German. He has read at numerous literary festivals, including in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Australia, Canada, China, and Nicaragua.
Ambush at Still Lake, Caroline Bird
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: August 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Caroline Bird’s new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else’s baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: ‘It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.’ ‘Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.’
Caroline Bird’s selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.
The Shark Nursery, Mary O’Malley
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: August 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The poems of The Shark Nursery respond to a disturbed world. The experience of lockdown, of lives lived in an online reality, and of the animal world are the interlocking parts of the poems’ world. The animal poems draw on the tradition of animals in Irish poetry and myth. From the wolf’s touch to the rat’s tweet, animals and fish refuse the roles human beings impose on them. O’Malley’s animals find new language in the face of contemporary perils. In fusing mythic with modern elements, The Shark Nursery is marked by rigorous attention to language and tone. Its poems weave between human, animal and metaphysical realms. In a space before noise begins, tigers visit cities and a white leopard sits on a lawn in Suburbia. In the strange, sealed off world portrayed in the ‘The Ballad of Googletown’ – an eerie, genuine ballad, where the familiar tropes and refrains of ballad are hung out to dry – lives are lived online and social interaction is unnecessary. This new book promises, as Joseph O’Connor has written, all those things ‘we go to Mary O’Malley for: truthfulness, seriousness, playfulness, too, and then a particular sort of hesitating and hard-won wisdom.’
Mary O’Malley was born in Connemara in Ireland and educated at University College Galway. She lived in Lisbon for eight years and taught at Universidade Nova. She served on the council of Poetry Ireland and was on the Committee of the Cú irt International Poetry Festival for eight years. She was the author of its educational programme. She is active in environmental education, specifically marine. She is a member of Aosdá na and has won a number of awards for her poetry, including the 2016 Arts Council University of Limerick Writer’s Fellowship.
From Base Materials, Jenny Lewis
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Publication Date: August 29, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Rich and various, From Base Materials ranges thematically from violence towards women, love in old age and surviving cancer to translations from Arabic and Russian and a topical re-imagining of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The poems speak of formation, transformation and the struggles of the human spirit to transmute ‘base matter’ and accept mortality and frailty of the flesh with courage and compassion. For the long poem, ‘Love in Old Age’, Jenny Lewis says: ‘Although it addresses a lover, it is really about multiple experiences of love (both real and imagined) throughout a long life and how I am as much a literary construct as a human individual. I have drawn on literature that has shaped me, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, early Celtic nature poetry and hermit poetry and, more recently, feminist writings such as those of Hélène Cixous.
Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed at major UK theatres and published four collections; the most recent, Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet, 2018), was a New Statesman Book of the Year, an LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first audio book. Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 8/27 and 9/2 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.