New Books in Poetry

I won’t say Ailish Hopper‘s collection Dark~Sky Society (New Issues Press, 2014) is “about” anything because that would do it a disservice. These poems are human. They move like legs on a street, like a mind at work that calls you to ruminate with it. Because we can’t understand everything, we have to be comfortable in that space of being unsure. Hopper calls it “Art out of Ignorance” and I agree,...

About twenty years ago, I heard William Stafford read his poetry for about twenty minutes. For a young aspiring writer like I was then, he was mesmerizing, a mix of poetic energy and grandfatherly wisdom, with a high-spirited charm. I think it was the first poetry reading that I attended in which I realized that poetry didn’t have to be solemn and ponderous to be profound.  All of us in the audien...

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Ross Gay Lace & Pyrite Organic Weapon Arts Press, 2014 Two gardens, 500 miles apart, managed to be in conversation with one another over the span of five seasons. What came of their conversation was this collection of epistolary poems by two brilliant poets. Part exchange, part mediation on hands in dirt and the deep well of winter, this collection off...

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Rachel Moritz Many Forms in Water above/ground press, 2014 Born of a connection to Theodor Schwenk’s 1965 text Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air, this collection seeks to inhabit that infinitesimal space left between water and that which holds it. Not everything that conforms to its container is formless– sometimes, like Moritz’s verse, a liquid...

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Nikki Wallschlaeger I Would Be the Happiest Bird Horseless Press, 2014 It is transient, it is migratory, it embarks from the restlessness of youth and family and lands in self-actualization. I’ve never/ thought of myself as much of a threat, sitting here in a room w/ cats & a space heater trying to figure out/ how birds flying in the sky still has relevant meaning, how not ca...

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Daniel Borzutzky Bedtime Stories for the End of the World Bloof Books, 2014 This is a collection in which the synaptic leaps have their own synaptic leaps. In direct confrontation with neoliberalism, Borzutzky holds nothing back. His verse levels the page like a chainsaw, leaving the surreal, bloodied and bare. “At times like this he thinks: I can say just about anything righ...

Chapbookapalooza 2014 Amber Atiya the fierce bums of doo wop Argos Books, 2014 Densely-packed prosody and firecracker content fill the pages of this stunning, debut collection. It is a native NYC voice, it is a fearless voice, and it commands your attention. Atiya weaves flawless verse; buy this chapbook and bear witness. You’ll want to wear her poems like a vintage leather jacket. Learn more abou...

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 the clearest lens. Learn more about your...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newb...

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 poems in this collection are worlds– worlds orbiting memory and understanding Learn mo...

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 new life. This chapbook is must-read for...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

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 crack and fissure of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f...

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, 2014) that nothing is surface-level when minds are involved. Her unfor...

In his new book of poems, Origins (Palimpsest Press, 2012), the Canadian writer Darryl Whetter uses 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 and truth. “Fossils share a lot of analogues...

Dorothea Lasky‘s Rome (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 language as a roadblock. The communication is in the s...

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 render it in such a way that it startles our desensitized consciousness once again. Th...

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 is taken into the minds of each family member as they navigate the joys...

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 a way. We, as Americans, will recognize ourselves in these landays. We will see our drones and occupying soldiers e...

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 enter a foreign landscape and exit much wiser.     Kiss the lights...

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, as though into blackness, that he makes in each piece. Churches (Four Way...

To read Venus Thrash‘s The 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, the place we return to when no more is expect...