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.
Don’t Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan
Publisher: Wave Books
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In his latest collection, Don’t Forget to Love Me, Anselm Berrigan is at his most intimate, allowing us to tag along through the immediate histories of present moments in poems that were primarily written at the height of the pandemic. In reading these poems, we are permitted to witness their creation, as Berrigan pivots between semiotic slippage and shrewd assertions, letting the form of each poem take shape as it will, a surprise of sound and sight. In one poem he writes that “poetry / contains / multiple / unresolvable questions / A T / TH E / SLAME / TLIME” and later reminds us “there are / no accidents / in poetry / either.” With the same acerbic wit found in Berrigan’s previous work, Don’t Forget to Love Me is an apogee of politics, pathos, and poetics.
Anselm Berrigan is the author of many books of poetry: Pregrets, (Black
Square Editions, 2021), Something for Everybody, (Wave Books, 2018), Come In Alone (Wave Books, May 2016), Primitive State (Edge, 2015), Notes from Irrelevance (Wave Books, 2011), Free Cell (City Lights Books, 2009), Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Integrity and Dramatic Life (Edge, 1999). He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He was the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail from 2008 through 2023. With Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan he co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2005) and the Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan (U. California, 2011). More recently, he co-edited Get The Money! Collected Prose of Ted Berrigan (City Lights, 2022) with Notley, Edmund Berrigan, and Nick Sturm.
Liontaming in America, Elizabeth Willis
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
“To disrupt the relationship of predator and prey, to reshape one’s relation to power, is to renovate the lived and living world,” Elizabeth Willis writes in this visionary work that delves deep into the ancient enchantments of the circus and its timeless disciplinary displays. Liontaming in America investigates the utopian aspirations fleetingly enacted in the polyamorous life of a nineteenth-century religious community, interweaving archival and personal threads with the histories of domestic labor, extraction economies, and the performance of family in theater, film, and everyday life. Lines reverberate between worldliness and devotion, between Peter Pan and Close Encounters, between Paul Robeson and Maude Adams, between leaps of faith and passionate alliances, between everyday tragedy and imaginative social possibility. As Willis writes in her afterword to the book, “The repeated unmaking and remaking of America, as a concept and as an ongoing textual project, is not impossible. It is happening all the time.”
Elizabeth Willis is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Alive: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She also writes about poetry, labor, and art. Willis is the editor of the essay collection Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place and she teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Terminal Maladies, Okwudili Nebeolisa
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and Autumn House Press, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a Nigerian mother and son. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa navigates the guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his home country and from his mother, who is battling cancer.
Depicting tender moments between mother and son, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical and emotional distance between them. He reflects on the reasons behind his Nigerian mother’s withholding, questioning her need to act bravely alongside his own assumed role as her protector.
Okwudili Nebeolisa was born in Kaduna, Nigeria, and currently lives in Iowa City. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggetts Prize for Fiction. He has received support for his poetry from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Granum Foundation. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Image, Salamander Magazine, Sewanee Review, and Threepenny Review, and his nonfiction has appeared in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers.
The Girl Who Became a Rabbit, Emilie Menzel
Publisher: Hub City Press
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Format: Paperback
Examining reclaimed narratives of embodiment, gentle hauntings, and fables of the body, Emilie Menzel approaches the body as a home we consciously build, spinning myths and fairytales as ways to rewrite the body’s history.
In the spirit of Maggie Nelson and Max Porter, Menzel’s writing is wild, lush, recursive, and intentionally messy. A mesmerizing and unique debut, The Girl Who Became a Rabbit intersects fable and trauma, femininity and creatureliness, and imagines the transformation of the body, perhaps, into language.
Emilie Menzel’s poetry hybridities have garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (selected by Molly McCully Brown), the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry (selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen), and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction (selected by Leigh Newman), and feature in such journals as the Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, and The Offing, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as an editor and librarian for The Seventh Wave community. Raised on barefoot Georgia summers, they now live in Durham, North Carolina and online at emiliemenzel.com.
Querida, Nathan Xavier Osorio
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Format: Paperback
Querida offers a place-based lyrical meditation on the poet’s immigrant parents, collective memory, language, and family in the San Fernando region of Los Angeles, California. Through a constellation of interweaving persona poems, confessional reflections, imagistic portraits of people and places, and decolonial poetic rituals—braided with a crown of sonnets—a choir of speakers navigate the fraught inheritance of memory frayed by the generational trauma of migration, coloniality, and the exploitative labor of late-stage capitalism. Swaying between maximalist and carnivalesque textual decadence and sparse, brutalist, bilingual inquiries into language as yet another exploitative and extractive tool for control, these poems honor familial and community wisdom as the only way to survive the steadily destabilizing Capitalocene.
Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
TRANZ, Spencer Williams
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In her debut collection, TRANZ, Spencer Williams writes equally riotous and vulnerable poems, penning a love letter to trans people and their audacity to exist in a world that constantly endangers them structurally and individually. Her blistering lyrics and acerbic wit never flatten her subjects but rather filet normative hypocrisy to reveal unspoken truths. Williams observes, “i am not dangerous until i’m made in the mouth / of someone who fears me,” and remembers receiving apologies whose “guilty resonance burns / like a wet willy from god.” She articulates a vast landscape of physical and ideological violence against trans people by illuminating this fundamental paradox: “i can’t fear u less until u fear me less—.” And yet the radical poetics of TRANZ is a celebratory self-becoming. Because of Williams’ subversive genius and lyrical grace, every indictment is also a declaration of triumph, a reminder that the ever-dynamic trans community continues to thrive despite, not through, its opposition to an antagonistic cultural discourse. In every place, in every time, trans people are enduring. Extant. “on the milk carton. on the public access / television. everywhere i go i am there so brutally.”
Spencer Williams is a trans writer from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of the chapbook Alien Pink (The Atlas Review, 2017) and her work has been featured in Literary Hub, Indiewire, and Polygon, among others. She received her MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark, and is currently a PhD student in poetics at SUNY, Buffalo.
Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction — as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons. Fierce and intimate, this poet’s meditative transformations engage with South Asian experiences of addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness, refusing to ignore narratives treated as unspeakable and overlooked by the English canon. Mapping the collision of abuse, psychosis, and rage, Pinto sees beyond them, buoyed by an inscrutable but abiding faith in the holiness of life itself, in a cold God nevertheless capable of gentleness. Once, “desire was an arrow, but now desire / is the field.” Pinto presides over this expanse, deciding, “I have three choices: to drift through life / anesthetized, to soften. . .” In that unspoken “or,” the merciful lacuna of that ellipsis, reside the lyrical mystery and medicine that feed this astonishing collection and strengthen resolve, both ours and the speaker’s: “The lake looks frozen, but it is not.”
Megan Pinto’s poetry has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Guernica, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Poets & Writers, and The Peace Studio. She lives in New York City.
New Vrindaban, Jacob Strautmann
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
New Vrindaban lives in the disputed territory between the past and present, between the idealistic hopes and complicated reality of creating a better world. An electrifying collision of uniquely Appalachian cultural forces, the formal division of poems into “Side One” and “Side Two” pay homage to the concept albums of 1970s garage rock, while the book’s title alludes to the intentional Hare Krishna community in West Virginia founded in the same era.
Jacob Strautmann’s latest collection builds an extraordinary temple on the compromised ground — it houses the compressed narratives of varied characters, monumentalizes the beautiful illusions of failed ideas, and remembers the irretrievable innocent love of youth. The music of New Vrindaban is both a ballad of survivor’s guilt and the raucous soundtrack of a record party among friends. It is the “black swift-moving waters,” “the bright clouds unmoored in the wind.”
Originally from Marshall County, W.Va., Jacob Strautmann is a recipient of the Massachusetts Poetry Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, Sequestrum, Asimov’s Science Fiction, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. He lives in Greater Boston with his partner Valerie Duff and their two children.
Go Figure, Carol Moldaw
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Go Figure, Carol Moldaw demonstrates an incandescent mastery of figuration in its many forms. As the title suggests, these poems invite readers to draw their own conclusions. Observing, inquiring, and delving, Moldaw brings the intertwined strands of life and art to light at their most intimate. A wife-muse who interrogates the role, a mother hard-pressed by motherhood, a daughter whose own mother’s decline causes her to probe their connection, and an artist with an exacting eye and ear who contemplates the creative mysteries, Moldaw is driven to understand and articulate the self in all its manifestations. Like a skater cutting first lines in ice, Moldaw displays lyric immediacy and lyric expanse in her poems with an unswerving command. Complex and inviting, with deft wit, the poems engage public and private life and voice a necessary and resounding affirmation of the feminine and of language emerging through silence.
Carol Moldaw is the author of six previous books of poetry: Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018); So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010); The Lightning Field, 2002 winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2003); Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001), also translated into Turkish and published in a bilingual edition in Istanbul (Iyi Seyler, 1998); Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998); and Taken from the River (Alef Books, 1993). She is also the author of a novella, The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). She has received a Merwin Conservancy Artist Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, as well as many anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Along with Turkish, her poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. A volume of her selected poems, translated into Chinese, is forthcoming from Guangxi Normal University Press in Beijing in 2025. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Indirect Light, Malachi Black
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
Reliving the overdoses of beloved friends, Malachi Black closes this book’s opening poem with a resuscitating command: “Doctor, / turn back. One of us lives.” Indirect Light is a testament to and apologia for this assertion of vitality, each eponymous poem an elegy dedicated to one of Black’s dearly departed. Though this book mourns an irretrievable past, it wages war against amnesia, refusing to let death erase the vibrancy of their lives. These poems preserve “the breath we left beside us on the train tracks,” “the watery inscriptions of nearby dogwood branches / dipped in shade,” “our bookbags’ mouths / pouting open on our laps,” “our street-scabbed bodies / briefly tinseled in the sun.”
Insofar as this collection returns to friends and kin to honor them by the indirect light of memory, it also seeks to memorialize the author’s personal experience of adolescence and addiction amidst the opioid epidemic. It is a lament for all that’s lost and a paean to the near misses and the just enough: a dim glow you can see by, a cup of coffee passed during NA, a prayer during detox to “be // as empty / as the sky” if floating means survival.
Malachi Black is also the author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). Black’s work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black’s poems have several times been set to music and have been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Dutch, Croatian, Slovenian, and Lithuanian. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California.
Rara Avis, Blas Falconer
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity.
These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it” … The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass/tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.”
Blas Falconer is the author of Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, and A Question of Gravity and Light as well as the coeditor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. The recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, he teaches in San Diego State University’s MFA program and is the editor in chief at Poetry International Online.
Greater Ghost, Christian J. Collier
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Christian Collier’s debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir—a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy.
Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024) and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His works have appeared in December, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal. More about him and his work can be found at www.christianjcollier.com.
What if the Invader Is Beautiful?, Louise Mathias
Publisher: Four Way Books
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
What if the Invader is Beautiful explores the ineffable yet primal connections between outer and inner landscapes — the impact that the natural world has on the psychological terrain of our interior lives. Through compressed, musical, and often deeply mysterious language, the poems enact the extreme outer limits of emotional experience. Often set in equally extreme natural settings, the poems ride the knife edge between beauty and terror — exploring concepts of the sublime, the spiritual power of the elements, the redemptive beauty of flora and fauna, and the psychological freedom of wide-open spaces — and illuminate how deepening our connection to these elements is ultimately what will save us from our human afflictions of separation, isolation, and fear.
Louise Mathias was born in Bedford, England, and grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Lark Apprentice (Winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize) and The Traps (Four Way Books), as well as a chapbook, Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, which won the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. For the past fifteen years, she has resided in Joshua Tree, California.
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, Kinsale Drake
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket traverses the Southwest landscape, exploring intricate relationships between Native peoples and the natural world, land, pop culture, twentieth-century music, and multi-generational representations. Oscillating between musical influences, including the repercussions of ethnomusicology, and the present/past/future, the collection rewrites and rerights what it means to be Indigenous, queer, and even formerly-emo in the twenty-first century.
Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a poet, playwright, and performer based out of the Southwest. She is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, Nylon, MTV, Teen Vogue, Time, and elsewhere. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she received the J. Edgar Meeker Prize, the Academy of American Poets College Prize, the Young Native Playwrights Award, and the 2022 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. She was named by Time Magazine as an artist representing her decade “changing how we see the world,” and is the founder of NDN Girls Book Club (www.ndngirlsbookclub.org).
Autobiomythography of, Ayokunle Falomo
Publisher: Alice James Books
Publication Date: September 10, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject—a person, yes, but also a literary subject—in the wake and afterlife of colonization. Intimate and personal, it is interested in figuring out how to wrest subjectivity—one’s notion of self—from this failed project of modernity.
As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. Amidst myriad speakers in the collection, there is a prominent speaker who, in search of his self/voice, tries on multiple voices—including Frederick Lugard’s—and other personas: some closer to who/what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite.
Tangentially, this is a book about a son’s relationship with his father. Poem after poem, the speakers interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and in the pursuit of Truth they erode the boundaries between fact and fiction to show us the fragility of the lines we draw in service to these abstractions, of the beliefs we hold about them, of the acts we perform in service to them.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of New Delta Review’s 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published.
Heliotropia, Manahil Bandukwala
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.
Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.
South Side of a Kinless River, Marilyn Dumont
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
South Side of a Kinless River wrestles with concepts of Métis identity in a nation and territory that would rather erase it. Métis identity, land loss, sexual relationships between Indigenous women and European men, and midwifery by Indigenous women of the nascent settler communities figure into these poems. They add up to a Métis woman’s prairie history, one that helps us feel the violence in how those contributions and wisdoms have been suppressed and denied.
Marilyn Dumont is a celebrated poet of Cree and Métis ancestry. Her first collection of poetry, A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), won the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets; it continues to be read and course-adopted across Canada and in the US. Her most recent book, The Pemmican Eaters (2015), won the 2016 Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award. She has been the writer-in-residence at five Canadian universities and the Edmonton Public Library as well as an advisor in the Aboriginal Emerging Writers Program at the Banff Centre. She teaches sessional creative writing for Athabasca University and Native Studies and English for the University of Alberta. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.
echolalia echolalia, Jane Shi
Publisher: Brick Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
In Jane Shi’s echolalia echolalia, commitment and comedy work together to critique ongoing inequities, dehumanizing ideologies, and the body politic. Here are playful and transformative narratives of friendship and estrangement, survival and self-forgiveness. Writing against inherited violence and scarcity-producing colonial projects, Shi expresses a deep belief in one’s chosen family, love and justice.
Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Blog, Briarpatch Magazine, The Offing, and Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press), among others. Jane is an alumnus of Tin House Summer Workshop, The Writer’s Studio Online at Simon Fraser University, and StoryStudio Chicago. She is the winner of The Capilano Review‘s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest and the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
Gospels From the Lower Shelf, Thomas Dukes
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: September 13, 2024
Format: Paperback
When Tom Dukes calls himself an “old southern queen / with poodle, the love child of Liberace / and Flannery O’Connor,” he’s both funny and right, though there’s much more to him than that. His has been a life triangulated by family in South Carolina, friends from his college days in Texas, and those mature years of settling into Ohio. He has the southerner’s knack for storytelling, often about Mama and Daddy and his permissive Aunt Ruby who used to say, “Sometimes God goes out for a smoke.” He also has what all poets crave: a gift for indelible beginnings and endings that hit the sweet spot, as in his poem “Red Onions” that starts “They put the day on its feet” and ends with “I need this Old Testament fruit, / The peculiar charity of its taste.” We come from his poems fully satisfied by their grace and wry humor and a poignancy that has gone on too long for tears: “I live in the kingdom / Of the haunted and the grateful, / Keeping my ghosts in line.” –Elton Glaser
Thomas Dukes was born in Gainesville, Florida, and grew up in Aiken, South Carolina. He received his BA and MA in English (Creative Writing) from The University of Texas at El Paso. He received his Ph.D. in English (Modern Literature) from Purdue University. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at The University of Akron, where he taught and served as an administrator. He is a member of Christ Church, Episcopal, Hudson, Ohio, and his husband and he live in northeast Ohio with their very demanding pets.
Still Life with Rope and River, Chavonn Williams Shen
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Publication Date: September 13, 2024
Format: Paperback
Still Life with Rope and River explores racism through a chorus of voices surrounding Emmett Till’s murder. Through research in combination with emotional truth, Williams Shen uses persona poems to dive deep into the psyche of both common and lesser known people and objects regarding Till’s lynching. Williams Shen also weaves in their own narrative and family history of how Blackness is dissected and dismissed, illustrating how the past is a ghost to the present.
Chavonn Williams Shen (she/they) is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was a 2022 McKnight Writing fellow and a first runner-up for The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest. She was also a Best of the Net Award finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series, a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, and an instructor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, VONA, and Hurston/Wright workshop alum, her writing has appeared in: Diode Poetry Journal, Anomaly, AGNI, and others. Still Life with Rope and River is her debut book.
Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.
As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.
Perry Janes is a writer from metro Detroit who lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a screenwriter. A Pushcart Prize recipient, his work appears in POETRY, Zyzzyva, Electric Literature, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere.
Altars of Spine and Fraction, Nicholas Molbert
Publisher: Curbstone Books 2
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback / eBook
Altars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.
Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by boys raised in the Deep South.
Nicholas Molbert was born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the chapbooks Goodness Gracious and Cocodrie Elegy.
Exit Garden State, John Hennessy
Publisher: Lost Horse Press
Publication Date: September 15, 2024
Format: Paperback
John Hennessy’s Exit Garden State never strays far from family life as it ranges from childhood in New Jersey’s industrial corridor to mid-life in the woods of New England, from Rahway prison’s sullen grey dome, Newark’s steel flyway, to Lisbon’s labyrinths and miradouros, from the smooth volcanic peaks of the Cyclades to his dead in Dublin. Keenly mindful of their ancestors and the immigrations that have brought them here, the speakers of these poems, their various personae, explore the knots of familial experience, what it’s like to be both parent and child simultaneously, to be embraced by family as well as to lose it, to celebrate kinship and endure its sorrows and changes. Hennessy remains rooted in the propulsive energy of his lines, the clarity of his craft, while traversing emotional territory as broad as the book’s geography.
John Hennessy is the author of two previous collections, Coney Island Pilgrims (Ashland Poetry Press) and Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books), and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2024, The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Yale Review. With Ostap Kin he is the translator of A New Orthography (also from Lost Horse Press), selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and co-winner of the Derek Walcott Prize, the anthology Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature), and Set Change, selected poems by Yuri Andrukhovych (NYRB/Poets Series). Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
[Among the Many Disappearing Things], Meredith Davies Hadaway
Publisher: Grayson Books
Publication Date: September 16, 2024
Format: Paperback
Rivers and streams flow through many of the poems in this eloquent book, their quiet currents taking things with them and leaving other things behind. All that is in danger of disappearing from our world is celebrated and mourned in the poems here. Hadaway writes of “A baby boy, born safely and on time in the eye / of the pandemic.” Yet she returns often to her concern about the plundering of our planet. She sees “fools and dreamers / rushing toward our last // desire because it sparkles / even as it burns.”
An award-winning poet and teacher of ecopoetry, Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of four collections of poetry, Small Craft Warning (a collaboration with artist Marcy Dunn Ramsey), At The Narrows, The River is a Reason and Fishing Secrets of the Dead. Hadaway’s work explores the birds, bugs, trees, marshes—and especially the waters—of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, evoking memory and mystery as they shape our braided lives.
Don’t see a poetry title published between 9/10 and 9/16 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/3 from Press 53, Variant Lit, Orison Books, Red Hen Press, Signal Editions, Knopf, New Directions, Wesleyan University Press, Bloodaxe Books, Blair, Third Man Books, BOA Editions Ltd., Copper Canyon Press and University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chapbook Poem: Frank’s Shoebox by Daniel Damiano
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for September 2024, “Frank’s Shoebox” from The Concrete Jungle and the Surrounding Areas by Daniel Damiano, along with a few words from the poet.
Poetry Chapbooks (August 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in August 2024 by Small Harbor Publishing, Gnashing Teeth Publishing, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 9/10 from Lost Horse Press, Curbstone Books 2, Finishing Line Press, Brick Books, Alice James Books, University of Georgia Press, Four Way Books, University of Pittsburgh Press, Hub City Press, Autumn House Press, New Directions, Grayson Books and Wave Books.
Check out new poetry books being published the week of 9/17 from Red Hen Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, The Kent State University Press, Tin House Books, Wesleyan University Press, W. W. Norton & Company, Ecco, ECW Press, American Poetry Review, Querencia Press, White Pine Press, City Lights Publishers, BOA Editions, Holy Cow! Press, 42 Miles Press, Driftwood Press, Finishing Line Press, Button Poetry, Birds LLC and Metatron Press.