New Books in Poetry

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Ashley Inguanta For the Woman Alone Ampersand Books, 2014 More artistic creation than poetry collection, more journal than sketchbook: For the Woman Alone resists category to transport the reader into the mind of an artist. In her own handwriting, Inguanta invites the reader into a world of fragmented beauty, memory, and vision through [...]

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Ken Pobo When the Light Turns Green Spruce Alley Press, 2014 A garden is not always a garden: our metaphors speak of our experiences and musings. Pobo shows the reader how seasons can mean change of weather, passage of time, and realizations of mortality.

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Laura Foley Joy Street Headmistress Press, 2014 Within Joy Street are access panels to the poet’s mind. She has a stunning way of bringing a reader to a place and time and then making them feel comfortable only to pull their attention and turn their head towards the heart of the matter. The [...]

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet The Greenhouse Bull City Press, 2014 In a collection that subverts sentiment even as it delves into the rich inner life of human sentimentality, Stonestreet stretches language and the reader’s expectations across the page. White space is a mind at work, parenthesis are interrogations, and prosody is the song of [...]

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Leslie McGrath By the Windpipe ELJ Publications, 2014 A poetry of the mind, a poetry of form, a poetry of sound? McGrath’s verse resists a container— it springs up organically from human impulse and psyche. By the Windpipe is a collection, years in the making and guided by a brilliant and deliberate hand.

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Yu Han Chao One Woman Fruit Stand Imaginary Friend Press, 2014 Stunning and startling imagery carry this collection of fruit, bearing, and creation through to the final line, “…and life will never be the same again.” This is a journey of place, of memory, and the human capacity to find meaning in every [...]

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Dan Brady Cabin Fever/Fossil Record Flying Guillotine Press, 2014 Modeled after Eugene Leroy’s layered paintings, these poems assemble and dissemble themselves right before the reader’s eyes. This is an exciting form that complicates the content of what we say and what lies just below the surface of our intent and meaning.

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Megan Moriarty From the Dictionary of Living Things Finishing Line Press, 2014 Part dictionary, part guide to living, and part historical record of content, From the Dictionary of Living Things turns its own pages. It is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking first collection from a poet at the beginnings of her career.

Chapbookapalooza, 2014 Lyric Hunter Swallower Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014 Mastering a bi-lingual prosody, these poems confront the idea of “city” and our romanticizing of containers. They show a brilliant mind disassembling trite societal structures.

At Chapbookapalooza, our headliner goes first. And here she is with a stunning collection of poetry that subverts pop culture by placing it in direct conversation with everything it hints at but is too shifty to engage outright. With Elegant and cerebral verse, Leah Umansky shows us in Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, [...]

[Cross-posted from New Books in Literature]In his new book of poems,Origins(Palimpsest Press, 2012), the Canadian writerDarryl Whetteruses metaphor to excavate the links between pre-historic life, extinction, evolution and modern-day sex. In this interview with the New Books Network, Whetter says the fossilized remains of ancient creatures are like poems that use metaphors to convey emotion [...]

Dorothea Lasky‘sRome (Liveright, 2014) is a collection that will catch you off guard. Lasky lures the reader in with familiar language and imagery only to have them suddenly realize they’ve been brought to room where the walls wobble and collapse, eternally revealing darker passageways. She is undoubtedly a language poet but also one who sees [...]

Bangalore (Copper Canyon Press 2013) by Kerry James Evans calls out to its reader from an urgency that is its own place and time. He has inhabited many spaces, geographically and socially. His poems reach out from them. Evans shows us that poetry, as the great communicator, can hold the violence of this life and [...]

She Has A Name (Four Way Books 2014) by Kamilah Aisha Moon is a startling collection that dares to intimately address the way a family transforms when caring for an Autistic child. Deemed a “biomythography,” (a term coined by Audre Lorde), the works are cautious in their rendering and respectful in their assertions. The reader [...]

In my dream, I am the president. When I awake, I am a beggar of the world. The landay represents an oral tradition of a mostly illiterate people. It is a dirge, a calling out to, that is specific to each woman who sings it. Even within the confines of an unwavering regime, life finds [...]

Language Arts (Wave Books 2014) by Cedar Sigo is a departure and then reintroduction to form on avant garde’s terms. In addition to disparate explosions of imagery, Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You [...]

Kevin Prufer is a rare poet who manages to layer narratives and weave metrical variations seamlessly into his work, all while placing it on the page in an organic and “effortless” way. This is especially notable when we come to understand the process by which his poems are born; the disparate connections and glorious jumps, [...]

To read Venus Thrash‘sThe Fateful Apple(Urban Poets and Lyricists, 2014)is to venture into two assertions of self-hood.The first is a raucous, boundary-setting with the world and the second is reverent consciousness of ancestry and quietude.Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a journey back to the center, [...]

In Jason Koo’s new collection, America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014), we see a poet placing himself on the timeline of his art. This timeline covers an ethnic, geographic, and artistic lineage that pays homage to Brooklyn’s literary heritage. As founder of “Brooklyn Poets,” he extends his literary citizenship to offer community to disparate groups [...]

In The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press), Mark Wunderlich presents a world unfamiliar to most of us: rural life. While many poets are enamored by the impact of the Internet and the smartphone upon the self and how the digital landscape has changed our understanding of the worlds around us, Wunderlich’s book seems to be arguing [...]