Due to difficulties in obtaining information in advance of chapbook releases, chapbook listings for the previous month are published at the end of each month. This post contains information about poetry chapbooks that we know about published during October, 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.
Nine Syllables Press
Desire/Halves, Jai Hamid Bashir
This debut poetry collection from Jai Hamid Bashir is a tantalizing study of desire for care and nourishment. Bashir navigates between English, Urdu, and Spanish, examining the interplay of these languages and the experience of being Pakistani-American. Bashir’s melancholy descriptions of rabbits and dogs, along with her visceral fruit imagery, connect the tender, human experience with that of the nonhuman. Alluring, mesmerizing, and evocative—this debut book of poems invites the reader to examine the embodiment of incompleteness.
Diode Editions
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, KOSS
Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect is a poetic assemblage of a life sown outside the predictability of middle-class, straight America, one where the aftermath of repeated trauma and loss is allayed by unexpected moments of connection, empathy, and love.
KOSS pens inventive textual routes through life transits, forging head-on through the debris with unflinching vision and grit in a timbre that shifts from existential dread to dark comedy. Part dirge and part survival story, Dancing Backwards transmutes the rubble of trauma, abandonment, grief, and suicide loss into a queer, hybrid elixir, their lived story worthy of telling.
Black Lawrence Press
Opheliac, Emma Stone
When a local teen drowns and comes back as more river than girl, it dawns on residents that there is something very wrong in Steubenville. Emma Sloan’s debut chapbook, Opheliac, intertwines modern mythology and one of literature’s most enduring figures, Shakespeare’s Ophelia–using both as a vessel to explore betrayal and grief. It is a collection that wields evocative language, intertwining narratives, and the framing of the gothic American South to instill a thoughtful melancholy that lasts long after the last page has been turned.
Newfound
Transuding, Yunkyo Moon-Kim
Apricots grow in Suncheon, korea, where the author was born. The mountain unfurls bodies. Underneath them, the bedrock leaks saltwater. In Transuding, Yunkyo Moon-Kim seeps across dream states and borders in ecological forms. Constantly transforming, permuting, and mutating, the poems leap toward imagined oneness, toward un-demarcating both nations and gender.
Yunkyo Moon-Kim is a lesbian korean. Between mountains and seas, they write about psychological and geographic locations in perpetual precarity.
Kith Books
Hinting at Decolonization, Nicola Andrews
In Hinting at Decolonization, Andrews brings modern indigeneity full focus, holding the reader in the lived experience of colonial cause and effect. From West Auckland to San Francisco, Andrews tracks erasure, co-option, and theft as they appear in western popular culture, the performance of contrition, and the products on our shelves. At times cheeky and playful, Andrews’ message is simple: it’s time to pull up this anchor. Land and Language Back.
Variant Literature
Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance, Todd Dillard
Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance explores what love and family looks like at the end of the world.
Todd Dillard grew up in Houston, Texas, completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Houston with a concentration in creative writing and poetry. From there, he moved to New York to study in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, where he received his MFA in poetry in 2008. Todd’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Best New Poets, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Superstition Review, and Split Lip Magazine.
The Poetry Box
Searching for Home, Elizabeth Mateer
Searching for Home is an evocative poetry collection that explores love, loss, and the search for belonging. From tiny New York apartments to intimate moments in the desert, this collection captures the essence of human connection and celebrates the unyielding strength found in moments of vulnerability.
Elizabeth Mateer is a poet whose writing sinks into human relationships and the resilience of the human spirit. Originally from New York, Elizabeth’s thirst for adventure has led her to all seven continents, enriching her poetry with a global perspective.
Two Sylvias Press
Letters, Unwritten, Andrew Robin
Winner of the 2023 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, judged by Eduardo C. Corral):
These short epistolary poems are dazzling, rich with surprising language. (To be honest, I wish I’d written some of these lines.) Here, surprise is a prism; it refracts loneliness, grief, humor, and forgiveness. The recipient of these letters is unknown—it doesn’t matter. What matters more is the linguistic pleasures leaping off each page, the way language not addressed to us can sometimes resonate like intimacy. —Eduardo C. Corral, Contest Judge
Yavanika Press
Blue Lovers, Elizabeth Paul
A collection of ekphrastic prose poems inspired by paintings by Marc Chagall.
Elizabeth Paul is a teacher, writer, and artist living in Fairfax, Virginia. Her work has appeared in Cider Press Review, Cold Mountain Review, Sweet Lit, and The Carolina Quarterly, among other places. Collaborative work has appeared in several journals and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). Her chapbook Reading Girl (Finishing Line Press) is an ekphrastic exploration of the work of Henri Matisse. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the Gournay Prize and the Orison Anthology Best Spiritual Literature Award in Non-fiction.
Querencia Press
How to Make an American Mass Shooter: A Primer, Denise Miller
How to Make an American Mass Shooter interrogates the ways in which mass shooters in the U.S. are the product of a deeply and historically nationalistic, xenophobic and racist society that uses the right to bear arms as means of violently enforcing these kinds of beliefs. Miller’s focus is to keep people from declaring all shooters mentally ill or deranged, and to challenge the citizen who refuses to believe these values exist and are practiced by the fully sane minds of those living here-to refuse to see these deeply embedded values as the thread that wove the fabric of this country. However the work also serves to remind people that we cannot justify their behaviors by naming the shooters acts an extension of mental illness, because all this does is allow us to believe that revising gun laws and comprehensive background checks, will stop mass shootings that in the words of the shooters stem out of a need to regulate migration and jobs and the shifting of a nationalist viewpoint.
what are you afraid of? <The LaMDA Sonnets>, JP Seabright
what are you afraid of? is a sequence of de/reconstructed sonnets derived from the transcript of “interviews” between the software engineer Blake Lemoine and a colleague at Google with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications). Tasked by Google to investigate the ethics of AI, Lemoine believed that his interaction with the programme suggested it was sentient. After raising these concerns with the tech giant, he was fired and then made the transcript publicly available in June 2022, sparking global discussion about Artificial Intelligence. These sonnets are accompanied with digitally manipulated photos of the author’s deconstructed computer, and pose questions regarding the nature of human consciousness and the ethical considerations of machine learning.
Bottlecap Press
Monsoons, Jaye Chen
In Monsoons, history becomes a girl. Two sisters fall in love during a war at sea: their incessant arguing rewrites the very history of lyric poetry into one tongue-tied love song. Here we do things our way: we macerate Milton’s form and let Eliot’s meter bleed out, we lace the epic verse of Gilgamesh and H.D with indie rock songs like Car Seat Headrest and Caroline Polachek.
Monsoons is excerpted from Homily, a longform epic poem that recalls Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, and the book-length projects of Tommy Pico. Like the fleeting radio you’d overhear from a fast car, the pulsing fragments of Monsoons rewind and erase the history of war and girlhood. Together, the sisters make a world out of shrapnel and sea-things, traversing genres and styles, theory and traditions, poetry and prose, coming out of history and coming home.
Conversation, Sarah Stoltzfus Allen
Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall so you could hear the conversations that take place behind closed doors? Have you ever wondered if that couple that seems so perfect is that way when they are at home?
Conversation lets the reader do just that. We see this relationship from the beginning to (spoiler alert) the end. It makes us privy to the inner workings of an unnamed couple as they navigate finding each other, reveling in each other, jobs, anxiety, family, and work-life balance. We get to eavesdrop on conversations that are not meant for our ears.
strained, Olivia Zarzycki
The debut poetry collection of Philadelphian writer Olivia Zarzycki, strained, ruminates on ruminating. The poems narrate the author’s anxiety, nostalgia, and fears in dysphoric and introspective states. It is in despair and sarcastic – and at times, walking the line between the two.
Full of self-doubt, blunt confessions, and unanswered questions, the collection reflects the inner monologue of a young woman battling her own thoughts, worries, and revelations. The poems hold their breath and exhale loudly.
Split the Difference, Demetrius Reece
A hot summer night. A boy standing between his mother and an angry man. That boy, now grown, on his knees in the desert, begging for water. Split the Difference is, in many ways, a cry for help: a child and a poet and a lover all looking out from inside a man. At its core it asks, what can poetry do about the undoable?
The three-body problem refers to the way three independent bodies affect each other’s orbit. It has no solution, but that doesn’t stop Reece from attempting to puzzle it out in the pages of this collection. What effect do people have on each other? Is trying to be good a fitting substitute for the real thing? How much money would it cost to fix a broken heart?
Show me the road—I’ll follow the lilt of your shadow, Donna Castañeda
This evocative collection of poems by Donna Castañeda explores the Sonoran Desert in Southern California/Northern Mexico, its immense age and beauty; the U.S.-Mexico border realities; and the natural world of this region. She observes in her poems how the landscape vibrates with a solitary beauty and quiet meaning. Desert windstorms, creatures both real and imaginary, and a landscape of richness and emptiness intertwine to create a new perspective on what it means to be of this area, one embedded in history, as well as the social, political, and environmental forces that shape contemporary responses to the border. Children, migration, water loss, and women’s unique lives are themes and both traditional and modern poetic forms are used to celebrate the natural environment, universalities of death and loss, loneliness, and finally, joy in lasting until the end to happily call out. . .
Honey Shades of Blue, Emelia G Cyr
This is a collection of coming-of-age poetry. Here you may find the intricacies of girlhood and the hopeful lifestyle of growing into a terrifying young woman. “My dull pulse pulsates as I pack away my postcards and a book, a letter from a friend on my birthday last year and a teddy bear with a sweater reading BOSTON.” There is no theme, but one of hope. A new life ahead and holding the door on the way out.
Honey Shades of Blue is a book of poetry by Emelia Cyr. Growing up in the cold North of New England you learn to make friends with the poets, and try to become one. These are words of a recent high school graduate, now studying creative writing at a small liberal arts college in the mountains of Maine. Pondering acceptance, loneliness, rage, and above all; love.
The Professor is Still Learning, CLS Sandoval
CLS Sandoval’s The Professor is Still Learning is a self-reflexive work that turns the expectation of learning from student to the professor. Sandoval’s poetry places the professor in a number of contexts where she is vulnerable, and able to see her deficiencies while still hoping for better.
CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She’s presented at communication conferences, served as a poetry and flash editor, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, and both flash and poetry pieces in literary journals, recently including Opiate Magazine, The Journal of Radical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own.
of god and merriment both, Anna Lucia Deloia
of god and merriment both is a collection of enthusiastic poems. They are love letters to the natural world and efforts to understand how we use language to relate to it. When we are moved by interactions with wild landscapes or non-human life, we so often want to put those experiences into words. Even when we inevitably fail to do justice to what we see and feel, we can’t help ourselves: we try again to describe the delight of feeling connected to beings and perspectives unlike our own. We try again to make sense of the pain we witness and cause. It is a very human form of devotion.
The Absence of His Words, Marjorie Sadin
The Absence of His Words is a chapbook with sequence poetry similar to those by Selema Hill. The poems have smaller units with titles of their own. It is kind of like sequence haiku. It is about my husband, family, friends, an imaginary person, two famous people and my therapist. The poems are edgy and bold but they are executed with love.
There are ten poems with six sections in each. The poems stretch the truth but are honest responses to the people they depict. In other words, they are figuratively true. Each section of the poems can stand alone, but to understand the person the full sequence is necessary.
Whispers from the Moon, Mari Ness
A skeletal wolf slinking through the forest. A deceitful mirror. A mermaid in water drenched rags, dancing in agony, her green stained arms holding a prince. Secrets hidden in tattered fur cloaks. The painful weaving of nettle shirts. A young girl waiting for a midnight kiss. A burning witch in a sugared cabin. The splendors of fairy tales, brought to brilliant, painful, glittering life in a series of intricate terzanelles – or, as poet Mari Ness likes to call them, fairynelles.
Whispers from the Moon presents twenty-two of these fairynelles, collected here for the first time. Taking sharp looks at critical moments in fairy tales – or their aftermath – these poems raise questions about some familiar tales – and answer questions about others. For anyone who loves the wonders of fairy tales, or the delights of structured poetry.
Finishing Line Press
Carpet Weavers, Brenda Najimian Magarity
“Within these poems, Brenda Najimian Magarity’s deep reflections of her inner being are a testimony of her longing for a homeland that was taken away from her ancestors a century before—the soul of that motherland itself lives in her, rising again and again through tribulations of the times.” –Varoujan Der Simonian, President, Armenian Museum of Fresno
Some Wild Woman, Esther Sadoff
Some Wild Woman is a series of portraits that capture the messy and delicious chaos of family life. The poems focus on the poet’s mother who is a veritable force of nature: a source of joy, of mystery, and of nourishment. We meet the mother in a kitchen brimming with fruit, a car fumbling around the roundabout, a piano lesson where she reigns supreme. Wherever this mother goes, she leaves a little bit of herself, transforming her world. Yet running through each poem is the question of the self. How to make it in this rough-and-tumble world? By attempting to make sense of her mother, the author seeks to make sense of herself. The mother of Some Wild Woman will make you want to (in the words of the author), “show up show up show up.”
Ilze’s Daughter, Livija Rieksts Bolster
Ilze’s Daughter invites you into the intimate world of an immigrant girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania. A memoir in verse, this collection of poems captures experiences of displacement, loss, struggle, first love, family, resilience. Bolster traces her family’s uprooting from WWII occupied Latvia, abandoning her mother’s farm, “Don’t ask me./I really can’t say/ if fear surged up suffocating/ mother so breath came only/in gasps/ as she climbed /onto an overloaded wagon . . .” The images and vignettes are personal and crack open a door into her world of duality: honoring her Latvian heritage and grieving her mother’s losses, yet discovering a new world of delights, (“We called them the Rockies/huge boulders as if some god/had scattered them among the trees/just for us to climb and skin our knees.”), the comradeship of six siblings, and falling in love with an American boy.
Tumblehome, Susan Jaret McKinstry
Tumblehome is structured like a musical fugue, moving in three sections from the west coast of Ireland to London, then to Galway, and back to a small town in Minnesota as it interweaves and deepens themes of home, time and loss. The poems contemplate vast human history and the small space of our lives in distinct voices and episodes, with closely-observed objects – coins, stones, birds, water – reappearing and echoing to create a harmonic poetic travelogue.
The Lighter Side of Horse Manure, Linda Drattell
The Lighter Side of Horse Manure shares the humorous (intentional or not) wisecracking wit of writer Linda Drattell’s aging farm animals and the appreciation (or lack thereof) of those animals by her fellow humans. As if looking through the eyes of her mischievous animals, she imagines them all tossing quips as they endure indignities, put up with each other’s orneriness and envy, and suffer through flies, dental visits, trimmed hooves, and more.
Frida Kahlo Wakes Up to Find Diego Rivera in the Mood & Other Poems, Jessica Noyes McEntee
This book brims with restless women: Frida Kahlo, Penelope, a lover, mother, daughter, neighbor, insomniac, consumer, adulteress—and each voice “magics the glass into mirror.” Studded with details that feel intimate yet alien, taking us places that range from a polar bear enclosure to “A Deathbed Confession,” these are poems of uncanny sensuousness. –Nicole Caruso Garcia, author of Oxblood (Able Muse Press 2022)
Nothing Happened Last Night, Karen Morris
Nothing Happened Last Night serves as a membrane for psychic contact. As in silent illumination, it speaks from the interstices between moments of longed-for values that bind existence, of impermanence, imperfection, and our indivisible interconnectedness. These are poems inscribed on the tissue thin skin of the back of our hands before we are born. They ask where our minds flew to last night, what of the unknown companions in our dreams. They bow but never break, honoring the eternal now.
Blue California Sky, B. L. Bruce
“Spoken in meditative prose poetry, award-winning Bruce’s latest work is an ode to life’s acuity. She captures the poignancy of grief and provokes reflection on those defining moments that render us forever changed. . . . [Blue California Sky] is filled with dramatic and poignant moments, as it highlights the challenges of getting older, bearing the weight of memories, and reveling in the beauty of life. Readers are invited to consider the splendour and intricacy of life, and urged to find purpose in both extraordinary and mundane experiences. Passionate and illuminating.” –The Prairies Book Review
Wamponomon: The Place of Shells, Karen Petersen
WAMPONOMON: The Place of Shells is a poignant and heart-breaking look at the past we all carry within us. A reflection on place, it is the Long Island of the author’s childhood, but also the history of the land, both real and imagined. It is both small town America and colonialism writ large, and reading through this collection of poems will take the reader on an unforgettable journey through time and memory.
In the Wake, Ariel Machell
In the Wake—like river water mingles silt, fish, and stone—blends narratives of loss, memory, and environment into one. It rages, whispers, and stills as it flows in and out of prose poetry and lyric. It is a hybrid work that centers the Willamette river—or memory of the Willamette river—as its characters once centered it in their lives, examining the nature of friendship, time, grief, love, and to a certain extent, obsession…and how, ultimately, all of these things dissolve.
Resting Place, Theresa Hickey
Finishing Line Press is pleased to announce the publication of Resting Place, the fourth collection of poems by Dartmouth writer, Theresa Hickey. In each of her poems, Theresa engages the reader to spend time in meditation of the Scriptures as a way to listen to the still, small voice within. Everyone needs a “resting place.” the author says. “Once we realize we are at home within our heart’s center, we can glimpse the depth of God’s love. The desire to share faith becomes centered as we become more like the people we are meant to be.”
Pieces of Me, Monique Rardin Richardson
The poetry collection, Pieces of Me, takes its readers on a journey of courage and self-discovery. It explores the challenges of feeling whole when born half Mexican and growing up with one parent. With vivid poems about first kisses, love, and hope and loss, we are encouraged to find beauty in life—even during the darkest moments, even in the face of adversity.
The Cinder Path, Jim Garrett
The poems in The Cinder Path are quiet journeys down illuminating paths that look back in time to memories of beaches and baseball and forward in time to realities of illness and aging. Whether as boyhood adventures, family tales, or adult wanderings, these poems begin at endings of paths and end at beginnings of new paths, but each journey in The Cinder Path sets out in search of the right path for living between a lost past and an unknown future with the hope of finding love.
Throughline, Cora McCann Liderbach
Throughline weaves a poet’s life story together from childhood through twilight years. Born to warring parents, afflicted with a disability in adolescence, the author never stops searching for meaning, peace and partnership. She eventually learns that finding “reasons to celebrate” in trying circumstances—including a pandemic—and creating lyrical, playful “word pictures” bring serenity, connection and fulfillment. This volume you hold is a snapshot of her journey.
Night Madre, Kay Reid
Kay Reid’s latest poetry collection Night Madre is a gorgeous panoply of astute, at once objective and yet emotional, observations, remembrances, despairs and hopes of a wise poet in the middle of her ninth decade. It begins with “Tattoos,” a sort of memoir of the body after a long life full of loves, battles and each of their scars that decorate the skin.
Don’t see a poetry chapbook published between 10/1 and 10/31 here? Contact us to let us know!
Contents
PCR is calling for submissions of original poetry for the first time between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15. We’re also opening to submissions of poem excerpts from full-length collections. Read this post for details!
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/5 from Querencia Press, Grid Books, Finishing Line Press, Fireside Industries, Princeton University Press, BOA Editions Ltd, Bloodaxe Books, Button Poetry, University of Pittsburgh Press, Persea, W. W. Norton and Omnidawn.
Chapbook Poem: copper by nat raum
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for November 2024, “copper” from salt box by nat raum, along with a few words from the poet.
Poetry Chapbooks (October 2024)
Check out our round-up of poetry chapbooks published in October 2024 by Two Sylvias Press, Yavanika Press, The Poetry Box, Variant Lit, Kith Books, Newfound, Black Lawrence Press, Diode Editions, Nine Syllables Press, Querencia Press, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/12 from Querencia Press, CavanKerry Press, Talonbooks, Finishing Line Press, Black Ocean, University of Calgary Press and University of Wisconsin Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 11/19 from Copper Canyon Press. Random House, Winter Editions, Books and Finishing Line Press.