Copper nickel issue 42

Remember the bees

In an ancient Moroccan apiary, a young boy’s inheritance of bees is endangered by climate change, family secrets, and the silence surrounding grief.High in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, surrounded by valleys once rich with lavender and thyme, stands a centuries-old complex of communal beehives....

Banbas/exile

From acclaimed poet and scholar Rajiv Mohabir, a brilliantly crafted retelling of the ancient Ramayan that valorizes the epic poem’s queer heart.Rajiv Mohabir first learned of the Ramayan from his grandmother while sitting on his parents' brown-tiled porch, surrounded by the scrub forest of centr...

North american stadiums

“An engrossing urban pastoral . . . These distinctive poems deserve a wide audience.” —WASHINGTON POST

Tressing motions at the edge of mistakes

The newest entry in the Multiverse series, Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.This is a book of what its teenage nonspeaking autistic author Imane Boukaila, calls “tacit treasures.” Where manifestos encounter poems and ...

Good night, mr. wodehouse

“More than forty years of history bookend a lifelong love affair with reading for the resilient heroine of [this] novel set in Harvester, Minnesota.” —Kirkus ReviewsA Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of the YearWhen Nell Stillman’s boorish husband dies soon after they move to the small town of Har...

Vestments

A priest struggling with temptation moves back into his working-class childhood home in this “suspenseful, illuminating, and highly readable saga” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entir...

Metamorphosis

"These stories are grounded in soul, a deep communion with the belief that we can—and must—rebuild our relationship with the planet.”—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange ParadiseOtherworldly but remarkably familiar, ancestral but firmly rooted in alternate futures, these twelve innovative stori...

North to katahdin

When Thoreau ventured into the Maine woods in 1846, he was one of a handful who did so simply to see what was there. Now, hundreds of thousands of people pursue "the wildest country" either for itself, as Thoreau did, or as the terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Using Mount Katahdin as his lab, E...

An american child supreme

John Nichols was raised by a family as American as the Stars and Stripes. He enjoyed a top-notch private school education and at 23 wrote a best-selling novel, The Sterile Cuckoo. At that point, he considered himself “a child blessed by the culture and fated for delirious success.”However, a trip...

A little gaelic kingdom

“A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past.”—John Banville“He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist's eye and a scientist's sensibility.”—Colm Tóibí...

I love information

I Love Information, selected by Brian Teare as a winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, is a sophisticated and cerebral examination of knowledge, belief, and which begets which. Egret feathers. Pulverized chickpeas. A “faint but constant series of ovals and lines” that, remarkably, spell the ...

Hope, human and wild

Bill McKibben’s first book, the bestselling The End of Nature, offered a devastating portrait of the harm human civilization has done to the planet. Hope, Human and Wild sets out on a dramatically different journey to provide examples and hope for a sustainable future, one in which our society’s ...

Wound from the mouth of a wound

“[This collection] feels like we’re holding a small thunderstorm in our hands.” —AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

Birthstones in the province of mercy

Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, a tender, yearning collection of poems that pieces together identity with the different shapes absence can take.“Blurry eyes mean a longing for home,” writes Bo Hee Moon in her prize-winning collection, “but we’re unsure what home means.” A South Korean adoptee...

House of caravans

A sweeping and richly evocative debut novel of a family bound by memory and legacy, love and loss, and a homeland forever changed.Lahore, British India. 1943. As resentment of colonial rule grows, so do acts of rebellion. Seduced by idealistic visions, at seventeen Chhote Nanu is imprisoned for p...

The tarball chronicles

WINNER OF THE PHILLIP D. REED MEMORIAL AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WRITING ON THE SOUTHERN ENVIRONMENTBeyond the oil-soaked pelican, beyond the oil-soaked beach, beyond the Deepwater Horizon oil spill entirely, there is a deeper story of sacrifice unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Reporters and governme...

The nature of college

Stately oaks, ivy-covered walls, the opposite sex—these are the things that likely come to mind for most Americans when they think about the "nature" of college. But the real nature of college is hidden in plain sight: it’s flowing out of the keg, it’s woven into the mascots on our T-shirts. Enga...

Black observatory

Telescopes aim to observe the light of the cosmos, but Christopher Brean Murray turns his powerful lens toward the strange darkness of human existence in Black Observatory, selected by Dana Levin as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize. With speakers set adrift in mysterious settings—a motel in th...

Copper nickel

Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations.Copper Nickel Issue 22 features three essays on contemporary publishing by Dalkey Archive Press founder John O’Bri...

Fiction on a stick

“Twenty-four sad, funny, touching, intriguing, and sometimes-unsettling stories by some of Minnesota’s best writers.” —St. Paul Pioneer PressWriters from Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Louise Erdrich and Garrison Keillor have called Minnesota home, contributing to the state’s rich lite...

The salt stones

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDFinalist for the Vermont Book AwardsA New Yorker Best Book of the YearFeatured on NPR's Fresh Air and PBS NewsHourA Globe and Mail "Best Book of the Year""Revelatory. . . magical. . . Whybrow beautifully explores interconnectedness and disruption in nature."—...

Translations from bark beetle

"A powerful, eerie book." —CECILIA VICUÑAIn this inspired collection, acclaimed poet and translator Jody Gladding takes the physical, elemental world as her point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape, and deriving a lexicon for these poems from the rich offerings of the world ...

The silenced

Marena struggles to remember what life was like before the Zero Tolerance Party installed listening devices in every home. Before they murdered her mother and put her father under house arrest. A time when difference was celebrated.When the new Minister of Education cracks down in her school, eli...

Aquaboogie

“Aquaboogie is a love story in fragments . . . A book by a writer whose love for her characters infuses her work with the dignity and urgency they so clearly deserve.” —The New York Times Book ReviewFull of defiance and tenderness, Aquaboogie chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of the residents...

Winter stranger

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Jackson Holbert’s Winter Stranger is a solemn record of addiction and the divided affections we hold for the landscapes that shape us.In the cold, seminal countryside of eastern Washington, a boy puts a bullet through his skull in a high school parking lot. A...

Being esther

From a masterful storyteller, comes a Midwestern epic that illuminates the majestic in the commonplace.When David Rhodes burst onto the American literary scene in the 1970s, he was hailed as “a brilliant visionary” (John Gardner), and compared to Sherwood Anderson and Marilynne Robinson. In Drift...

In winter's kitchen

Beth Dooley arrived in Minnesota from her native New Jersey with preconceptions about the Midwestern food scene. Having learned to cook in her grandmother’s kitchen, shopping at farm stands and making preserves, she couldn’t help but wonder, “Do people here really eat swampy broccoli, iceberg let...

Dreaming the mountain

The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.In addition to being a preeminent scholar of world philosophy and a Zen master, Tuệ Sỹ is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated ...

Four reincarnations

Reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising, Four Reincarnations is a debut collection of poems that introduces an exciting new voice in American letters.When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnatio...

Two of everything

An abundant and anticipatory collection of poems exploring the season of waiting that precedes adoption.From Guggenheim fellow and celebrated author Sally Keith comes an incantatory collection of poems on the transformative process of nurturing new life and the practical challenges of starting a ...

Rising

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTIONWINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARDHailed as “deeply felt” (New York Times), “a revelation” (Pacific Standard), and “the book on climate change and sea levels that was missing” (Chicago Tribune), Rising is both a highly original work of l...

North american odyssey

“Deep down, there is just something that draws us to the land, to wild places. We were there to listen to the land.”When National Geographic Adventurers of the Year Amy and Dave Freeman marry, they set out on an unusual honeymoon: a three-year, 12,000-mile journey across North America. From Alask...

Copper nickel (27)

Copper Nickel is a meeting place for multiple aesthetics, bringing work that engages with our social and historical context to the world with original pieces and dynamic translations.Issue 27 is particularly international—even for Copper Nickel—and features an expansive folio of younger and less-...

The tree of the doves

Composed in the key of terror, The Tree of the Doves offers an engaging account of Christopher Merrill’s travels to distant parts of the world. From jungle to desert to sea, from cities to ruins, he explores how history is shaped by ceremonies, expeditions, and wars. He observes the performance o...

Thirst

This acclaimed short story collection “veers between whimsical postmodern playfulness and a darker realism [with] sophisticated comic flare” (Publishers Weekly).Distinguished by black comedy and an international perspective, Ken Kalfus’ stories demonstrate the author’s chameleon-like ability to c...

Graceland, at last

“Like nothing else in the newspaper, [Renkl’s columns] burst with awareness of the things of nature. . . . All is written with an open, joyful, yet steady voice of wonder.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

The nine senses

In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous work—how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? W...

Sea summit

“Full of nuanced and subtle scene-making.” —WAYNE MILLERInfluenced by both the “gray, sinister sea” near the village where Yi Lu grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and the beauty of the sea in the books she read as a child, Sea Summit is a collection of paradox and questioning. The sea is an...

Dream wheels

Champion bull-rider Joe Willie Wolfchild is poised to win the most sought after title in rodeo when a devastating accident at the National Finals leaves his body and ambitions in tatters. Unsure of what else to do, he retires to the panoramic family ranch, Wolfcreek, to mend.Claire Hartley and he...

Glass armonica

“Glows like a magma vent underwater.” —G. C. WALDREPThe eighteenth-century glass armonica, a musical instrument whose sound emits from rotating, water-filled vessels, has long held the power to mesmerize with its hauntingly sorrowful tones. Just as its song—which was once thought to induce insani...

Atlas

This debut collection of poetry by Katrina Vandenberg draws on different meanings of the title, carrying lines from one poem to the next and capturing the reverberations of events across time and place. One poem links an image of the poet's sister — paused in housekeeping work — to a maid in a Ve...