Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings will be published at the end of each month, beginning with Issue 3 (May/June 2024). This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during July, 2024.
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.
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Finishing Line Press
eyes that look with sun but see with moon, Jack Greene
“eyes that look with sun but see with moon” moves the reader through rooms of Vermeer to atomic fall out shelters to dioramas of taxidermied deer, finally arriving where it started: in light. The experience of the poems is an intimate, internal gallery, one that merges words and images and light into a new gravitational pull, each in and of its own frame, and all a part of this life, this planet.
The Price of the Repair, Jennifer Bisbing
A collection of unexpected, sharp poems that reveal what it is like to be lost in the wilderness—searching for home, where preference comes up against some surprising conflicts, both inward and external. At 48, Bisbing starts backpacking solo in Montana—where nature humbles her. Wildness is different in Montana. She’s run across lion prides in Zimbabwe that looked tamer than her first grizzly sighting. She’s encountered gang members in Chicago flashing their firepower who look less dangerous than bearded men in the backcountry toting rifles. As a murder mystery author and the daughter of a renowned forensic scientist, it isn’t by mistake that villains linger in Bisbing’s work. She invites you to walk this treacherous path with her. Hit the pages like you’re stepping on the trail. See what’s tucked between the words in each poem, and find what she discovered out there in the wild and in a diner booth.
Phantom Joy, Cindy Mitchell Appleby
Phantom Joy is a poignant and luminous collection that explores the tapestry of life, love, and loss. It takes us on a journey reflecting on what it means to create a life built on imperfect moments and the preciousness of devotion. Phantom Joy navigates the intricacies of our human existence with grace and sensitivity and invites us to contemplate how grief can serve as a vehicle for learning what it is to live a life grounded in enough and our enduring search for joy.
On Phillips Creek, Natalie Kimbell
ON PHILLIPS CREEK celebrates the strength of women rooted to a place in Wise County, Virgina. Although the home place is gone, the stories, lives, and memories flow like a river through the author and onto the page. The chapbook begins at the source on Phillips Creek, flows through the natural world and ends with the journey of the author. This collection speaks of loss and it’s resurrective value as well as the enduring nature of family and memory.
Solstice, Helene McGlauflin
Solstice, Helene McGlauflin’s third collection of poetry is a sweet selection of poems written for and during the dark days before the winter solstice. Helene’s poems utilize imagery from the night sky, root cellars, fireflies, gestation in darkness, birth to remind readers to search for light, wait for light, hope for light, see light. Her poems are an accessible, welcome comfort in these times of uncertainty when every soul needs the reassurance of the beauty and faith found in poetry.
Not My First Walk on the Moon, Linda Hillman Chayes
Not My First Walk on the Moon takes the reader on a journey through time and geographies. It moves through seasons and generations, through cityscapes, seashore, barrier islands, and backyards. The poems reflect on loss and how it reverberates throughout a lifetime including the tiny but continual losses of aging. They also celebrate moments of joy and awe inspired by breeze, light and love. Many of the poems use a framework of visual art and imagery—including a mother’s love of Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate, a crime scene photo in which the facts fail to tell the story, and a portrait of a family leaving Rockaway beach in late afternoon. The moon slips in and out these poems but takes center stage in one as the author recalls watching the 1969 moon landing and imagines her very own walk on the “moon’s luminescent dustscape”.
Dreams of the Floating House, Karen Sandberg
Karen Sandberg lives and writes in Richfield, Mn. This book contains her brief account of one person’s journey through times of joy, sorrow and amazement. She studied at The Loft in Minneapolis, attended Northwoods Writers Conference in Bemidji, Mn twice, and since 1995, been a member of Northfield Women Poets. Karen has published in Midwest Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Grey Sparrow, Vita Brevis, Main Street Rag and others.
Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone, Magdalena Louise Hirt
A storm, engine problems, or a ripped sail can halt your sailing dreams. For this traveling family of six, it was not weather, mechanics, or techniques, it was leukemia. From the middle of the Pacific, after the Marquesas, the Tuamotu Atolls, and Tahiti, sailing had to come to an abrupt stop. Just living life became the challenge. Poet Magdalena Hirt and her family stayed State-side to save her brother who was diagnosed with AML Leukemia, and then returned to continue their journey onwards to Moorea and Bora Bora. In Pacific Prescription: Leukemia Cyclone, there are poems of dreams and poems of survival. In sequential order, these poems tell the story of the ocean and sacrifice.
Post-Traumatic Poetry, Mackenzie Rose
Mackenzie Rose is a survivor. On August 26, 2017, only two days after her 28th birthday, the man with whom she shared a home plunged a chef’s knife into her throat, past her tongue, and through the roof of her mouth. After eight days of recovery in the hospital, Mackenzie re-entered the world with a limited ability to speak, a PEG feeding tube, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). After relentless therapies, she began to reclaim some semblance of normality and retrained her voice to carry her new narrative. Mackenzie is a professor of Communications and English at Shenandoah University and a PhD student of trauma studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She can be found speaking at public functions about destigmatizing trauma.
Look: Love Letters, Maxx Dempsey
Look: Love Letters asks us to imagine the interception of the past and present, and how they fit together to create an internal portrait of a person. The poems open a window to the mind of the author who is grappling with their own personal history and the echoes of their lineage. They are the culmination of the confusion of a curious child, and a penchant for obsession. The poems fit together like puzzle pieces, creating a landscape of the author’s internal journey through loss. Each short poem is a letter to someone or something that doesn’t exist anymore except in memory. They allow for meditation, both by author and reader. They are each a self-contained rumination nostalgic for a past fire that still somehow burns.
Because Time, Liz Abrams-Morley
The poems in Because Time invite the reader into the imagined future of the poet’s youngest students, and grandchildren, as this fragile generation negotiates the “unprecedented” times of pandemic, school shootings, abridgement of bodily autonomy and a climate gone bizarre; simultaneously the poems interrogate and redefine experiences and traumas of generations gone. A rumination on disruptions, on “life after so much death,” an homage at times to resilience, and a prayer for the future, the poet seeks words to keep this youngest generation, despite logic and the odds, “crazy for hope.”
Little Thistles, Stacey Forbes
Stacey Forbes won first place in the 2021 Plough Poetry Prize, and was a semi-finalist for the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, New Ohio Review, and Terrain, among others. Born in the Pennsylvania countryside, Stacey now lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Break Self: Feed, Gabrielle Myers
Break Self: Feed meditates on eroticism and relationships with searing language play. The poems sing of our ecosystems, their human threats, and possible cures based on nourishment and barrier fracture. In eco-poetic lyrics, borderlands and boundaries evolve in reference to a deep connection with the natural world that surrounds us with its seasonal shifts and the impacts of climate change. We never know when abundance and satiation will come. We spend so much time preparing for devastation and desiccation, so much energy we waste planning our ruin. Break Self: Feed repurposes that drive, energy, and time towards preparing for our proliferation, our unfurling, our living into our potential. Dig into the soil, feel fine-webbed roots working out their networks of nutrient pull and harvest. Let’s mimic the roots’ motion to gather, see what we can get out of the perfect soil, set ourselves on expansion, lengthening, growth.
Eclipse, Sarah Wolbach
The poems in Eclipse illuminate the complicated history of a married couple over more than two decades. Reflecting both ambivalence and affection, the poems explore their early adventures and revelations and the eventual transformation of the relationship during the course of the husband’s decline and death. The final poems in the collection describe the wife’s journey through the aftermath of his passing.
East Side Solitude, Asyia Gover
East Side Solitude is a mixed poetry and prose journal about love, longing, and liminality in the Pacific Northwest. Asyia Gover reveals the mysterious leading characters through a series of vignettes that trace their tragic romance from the Middle East, to the Far East, to the East and West Coasts of the US. These experimental poems and illustrations dazzle the reader’s appetite as if they were “simmering curry, flame-licked beef, … hot shawarma.” Follow along with this heartfelt collection to find out if the semi-fictional personae in East Side Solitude ever reach reconciliation and justice in the midst of “the obscured otherworld, the / opposite of the train horn, / the ears closed to alarm, / the city subdued with stillness.”
The Residents, Matthew J. Friday
The Residents begins with the author’s arrival at the height of the COVID pandemic and explores his new life as a US resident. The poems reflect on this new journey and study what being a resident means for other people, flora and fauna. While Oregon’s inhabitants and landscape form the basis of many poems, others explore residency in a wider sense, crossing borders near and far away.
Mississippi Meanderings, Barb Geiger
The poems in Barb Geiger’s collection, Mississippi Meanderings, invite you to witness America’s iconic waterway through lyrical snapshots of the river’s many moods, moments in its rich history, and the inhabitants and travelers of its waters and shores. You’ll be awed by river wildlife and sand island sunsets, fascinated by mammoth barges and pearl button factories, and entertained with poems of mishap and moonshine. Photos accompanying the poems in the collection are available under the Photo Gallery tab at www.barbgeiger.com.
Free-Fall, Dana Yost
Free-Fall is a tightly packed, often-intense chapbook with poems about mental health, today’s politics and culture and about family — with the three sometimes interwoven. And yet there are moments when it finds beauty and wonder in the world. It’s all done with rock-solid images and language that poet Susan McLean says ‘’find a solidity as real as the stone that slips soundlessly into the river.’’
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Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 7/1 and 7/31 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.