Milkweed Editions

A New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Readers Pick 

#1 New York Times Bestseller

A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Bestseller

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The #1 bestselling and beloved poetry anthology, now in paperback!

“Whoever you are, you will find yourself and your own world in the expansiveness of this collection.”
 –Margaret Renkl, New York Times

“A lovely book to take with you to read at the end of your next hike.”
–Los Angeles Times

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.  

In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes—both literal and literary—are changing.

You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what “nature” and “poetry” are today, inviting readers to experience both anew.

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully extends the vision of his debut book and album, The Clearing, a “lyrical celebration of and inquiry into the intersections of blackness, music, and disabled speech” (Claudia Rankine).

Aster of Ceremonies asks what rites we need now and how poetry, astir in the asters, can help them along. What is the relationship between fleeing and feeling? How can the voices of those who came before—and the stutters that leaven those voices—carry into our present moment, mingling with our own? When Ellis writes, “Bring me the stolen will / Bring me the stolen well,” his voice is a conduit, his “me” is many. Through the grateful invocations of ancestors—Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others—and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom. 

By weaving a chorus of voices past and present, Ellis counters the attack of “all masters of all vessels” and replaces it with a family of flowers. He models how—as with his brilliant transduction of escaped slave advertisements—we might proclaim lost ownership over literature and history. “Bring me to the well,” he chants, implores, channels. “Bring me to me.” In this bringing, in this singing, he proclaims our collective belonging to shared worlds where we can gather and heal.

The Aster of Ceremonies audiobook read and performed by JJJJJerome Ellis is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks. 

The seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, Assembled Audience explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world.

“What does it mean to gather together?” asks this fervent, frank collection. In these poems, people come together—over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance.

Provocative and engaging, our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, at once a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to “stay present” amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene—despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.

Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman’s generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner’s signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won’t save us—but luck and wonder might.

Over the course of a partnership spanning nearly two decades, poets Jan Wagner and David Keplinger have crafted a distinctly collaborative exchange between original German and American letters. Now, in this masterful dual-language poetry collection, they muse at the constraints of translation, challenging its boundaries while weaving their distinct voices in lyrical call and response. Together, they marvel at what translation can be: a tempered conversation in metered rhyme. 

From their poetic cross-pollination, ethereal wisps unfurl from everyday objects—a spiral of hair, an iridescent snail’s path, the twist of a tornado’s funnel. Flora and fauna, they discover, act as foliage to veiled, hidden universes. Flamingoes curve into question marks, fishhooks become wedding rings, and Pirelli tires glide into panthers. “She trails a silver-tail / behind herself,” the speaker muses, “something like a falling / star.” 

Showcasing traditional forms—including ghazal, sonnet, and haiku—Wagner and Keplinger rebel against each fixed container until otherworldly realms emerge. Kaleidoscopic and cyclical, these poems are a feat of literary acrobatics on display, suspending us in surprise and wonder.

A collection of “oracular, crystalline, and utterly original” poems wrestling with a life’s shifting social structures and the multifaceted totality of the self (Maggie Millner).

Elizabeth Metzger’s third collection traces both holding on and letting go, tracking the non-linear journeys we take and the daily distances we cross for intimacy. Braiding a dissolving marriage, a son’s medical crisis, and the death of a father, the speaker reconceives loss as transformation and longing as ongoing love, exploring the multiplicity of the self in proximity to others. How do we relate to what we cannot know about those we love? How can we separate from one another without embodying parts of ourselves we haven’t met yet?

The present revives the past, and every ending becomes a devotion to new beginnings as Metzger transforms ordinary domestic ruptures into intimate portals of pleasure and pain. A degenerative disease spurs a creative awakening. A trip to the farmer’s market invites questions of monogamy. An overgrown yard yields a crisis of faith. These poems fall in love with the absences that define us, retracing our chosen roads while following those less traveled and beckoning unlived lives.

Celebrating the ordinary and extraordinary changes we undergo together, this collection explores our most surprising fantasies and deep spiritual yearnings. An honest, intricate, and breathtaking distillation of love’s true nature, The Going Is Forever reminds us that our closest relationships contain endless mysteries, and that there is never just one version of a life.

Part adventure narrative, part philosophical inquiry, and part love letter to climbing and natural spaces, Erratica is a radiant exploration of what happens when a human body meets the earth with full attention.

After Brian Laidlaw climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic stone monolith, he found himself facing a repeated question: “So, what was it like up there?” It isn’t enough, he knows, to just to describe the sensation of the rock beneath his hands and feet—a climb is so much more than physical movement. 

This seemingly simple question initiates Brian’s poetic quest for the perfect metaphor, traveling from the erratics of his youth in California to the towers of his current home in Moab, Utah. He traces lines up moon-washed faces in Indian Creek and edits his body language under boulders in Joe’s Valley. He lives parallel lives and dies parallel deaths on free solos in Colorado, and eventually, back in his childhood stomping grounds in the Sierra Nevada, he writes and revises routes of his own. 

Along the way, he beckons us into a community bound as much by narrative as by rope. They exchange gear, chalk, and advice as they test each foothold and fissure. Kindred strangers knit into traveling bands of belayers, swapping snacks and cautionary tales. Here, any passing climber holds the ability to shift “spontaneously into the best coach I’ve ever known.” 

Exhilarating and lyrical, approachable yet profound, Erratica invites us to share a rope with this community of climbers, to measure our humanity against the expanse of stone.

Selected by Jake Skeets for the 2025 National Poetry Series, a reverent and revelatory debut examining language, memory, and identity.

“You looked at me like there was no / nest in my throat,” Hajjar Baban writes in this spare, striking collection. “Like I knew how / to sing. Like it was okay I had nowhere / to be.” Writing from a mixed Afghan Kurdish heritage, she navigates the truth that exists between memory and erasure. Equal measures grounded and unmoored, the poems in LOW FLYING PLANES search for answers to the impossible question of belonging, catching fragmented glimpses of “the plane intercepting sight of the shooting / star,” “satellites in the night sky,” “the language my father / didn’t invite me to.”

Wielding a breakable and cautious syntax, Baban writes with a precision that highlights the complexity of interiority under surveillance and the tension between safety and yearning. Our speaker is hypervigilant and uncommonly observant, seeking to understand what language cannot capture: layered volumes of loss, the unshakable instinct to hide, “a name for how my father looks / at the sky.”

Guarded yet resolute, inquisitive yet profoundly wise, LOW FLYING PLANES paints absence into a tangible shape. “If language is to be made whole, if memory, if truth,” Jake Skeets writes of this collection, “it begins with a book like this.”

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of six collections, including The End  of Childhood and We the Jury, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies  and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game, and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague  Bohlen (author of Escaping Denver and The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of  The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You). 

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected  for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has been listed on many occasions  as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2024 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 11 for poetry and number 37 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals. 

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.  

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.  

Issue 42 Includes: 

• Translation Folios by Chilean poet Rolando Cárdenas (translated from the Spanish by July  Westhale), Québécois poet Bertrand Laverdure (translated from the French by slp pieplow), Afghan novelist Khosraw Mani (translated from the Afghan Persian by Hajar Hussaini), Cuban poet Osdany Morales (translated from the Spanish by Harry Bauld), and Sri Lankan fiction writer Shobasakthi (translated from the Tamil by N. Asokan). 

• New Poetry by National Book Award finalist Calvin Bedient; National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Bob Hicok; Kingsley Tufts Prize winner Angie Estes; UNT Rilke Prize winner David Keplinger; Guggenheim fellow Michael Waters; NEA Fellows Hadara Bar-Nadav, Michael Bazzett, and Mark Irwin; Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalist Erin Belieu; relative newcomers Lyn Li Che, Jordan Escobar, and Derek Otsuji; and many others. 

• New Fiction by O. Henry Prize recipient Valerie O’Riordan, John McGahern Award winner Niamh Mac Cabe, Colorado Book Award winner John Cotter, and relative newcomers Erin Pesut and Fortunato Salazar. 

• New Essays by Benjamin Saltman Award winner Matty Layne Glasgow and Best American Essays Notable Aaron Rabinowitz. 

• Cover Art by Denver-based artist Danielle SeeWalker. 

Contributor Locations 

Contributors to issue 42 come from all over the country and the world.  

——— 

U.S. cities/regions where contributors and staff are concentrated include (organized  alphabetically by state): 

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributor Graham Foust; cover artist Danielle SeeWalker) 

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributors Michael Bazzett and Jessica Nordell; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan) 

Los Angeles, CA (contributors Calvin Bedient and Fortunato Salazar; contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago) San Diego, CA (contributors Jordan Escobar, Peter Krumbach, and Michael Mark) Chicago, IL (contributor C. Pope; contributing editor Robert Archambeau) Kansas City, MO (contributors Hadara Bar-Nadav and Alice White) 

New York, NY (contributors Harry Bauld, Lyn Li Che, and Osany Morales) Philadelphia, PA (contributor Amy Thatcher; contributing editor Adrienne Perry) Houston, TX (contributor Erin Belieu; contributing editor Kevin Prufer) 

Blacksburg, VA (contributor Bob Hicok; contributing editor Janine Joseph) Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken) Pittsburgh, PA (contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth) 

——— 

U.S. cities/regions with individual contributors (organized alphabetically by state): 

Tucson, AZ (contributor July Westhale) 

Merced, CA (contributor Mai-Linh Hong) 

San Francisco, CA (contributing editor Randall Mann) 

Fort Collins, CO (contributor slp pieplow) 

Greeley, CO (contributor Mark Irwin) 

West Hartford, CT (contributor Benjamin S. Grosberg) 

New Haven, CT (contributor Margot Schilpp) 

Washington, DC (contributor David Keplinger) 

Ocala, FL (contributor Asa Drake) 

Rome, GA (contributor Zack Strait) 

Honolulu, HI (contributor Derek Otsuji) 

Urbana, IL (contributor Angie Estes) 

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón) 

Amherst, MA (contributor Martha McCollough) 

Shrewsbury, MA (contributor John Hodgen) 

Belmont, ME (contributor Pamela Alexander) 

Ann Arbor, MI (contributor Christopher Matthews) 

Duluth, MN (contributor Rebecca Foust) 

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd) 

Missoula, MT (contributing editor Sean Hill) 

Greensboro, NC (contributing editor Emilia Phillips) 

Ocean, NJ (contributor Michael Waters) 

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce) 

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson) 

Saratoga Springs, NY (contributor Hajar Hussaini) 

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri) 

Canonsburg, PA (contributor George David Clark) 

Providence, RI (contributor John Cotter) 

Knoxville, TN (contributor Michael Pontacoloni) 

Nashville, TN (contributor Cara Dees) 

Dallas, TX (contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah) 

Salt Lake City, UT (contributor Matty Layne Glasgow) 

Brattleboro, VT (contributor Erin Pesut) 

Seattle, WA (contributor Vincent Rendoni) 

Green Bay, WI (contributor Sophie Bebeau) 

Laramie, WY (contributor Cady Favazzo) 

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International contributors live in: 

Paris, France (contributors Khosraw Mani and Shobasakthi) 

Quebec, Canada (contributor Bertrand Laverdure) 

Waterloo, Canada (contributor N. Asokan) 

Manchester, England (contributor Valerie O’Riordan) 

Berlin, Germany (contributing editor Alexander Lumans) 

Sligo, Ireland (contributor Niamh Mac Cabe)

Praise for Copper Nickel: 

“Copper Nickel is terrific—of its time without being confined to its time, careful and thoughtful and never  predictable, with the kind of internal variety that I want (and rarely get) from a litmag—not a pinlight or a  penlight but a light that shines on a whole field. I’m happy to read it.”  

—Stephanie Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry; Professor of English, Harvard University 

“Through its combination of editorial acuity, serious belief in contemporary writing, and sheer  handsomeness, Copper Nickel has established itself as the best new evidence of defiant vitality in the realm of literary journals.” 

—Mark Halliday, author of six poetry collections, most recently Thresherphobe; Distinguished Professor of English, Ohio University 

“Copper Nickel is THE literary magazine to read now. Since its rebirth/relaunch every issue has had, inside  its stunning cover, the fiction, poetry, nonfiction and works in translation any writer or lover of contemporary writing has to read. I confess: other magazines, even the New Yorker, often sit in my house unread. But Copper Nickel gets opened as quickly as a Christmas present!” 

—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of five books of fiction, most recently the novel My Life as a Silent Movie, and seven poetry collections; Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin 

“Long regarded as one of the best literary magazines in the country, the relaunched Copper Nickel has only  improved, publishing a diverse range of award-winning poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in its first year. With each new issue Copper Nickel proves itself to be a wellspring of new American writing.” 

—Nathan Oates, author of The Empty House; Professor of English, Seton Hall University 

“In the great spirit of the late Jake Adam York, Copper Nickel is back and more relevant than ever. Where else to turn for such a dynamic combination of contemporary writing? Brilliantly curated, the diversity of voices, new and established, not only spans aesthetic divides but includes translation portfolios, art and essays that  address pressing concerns of writers working today.”  

—Sally Keith, author of four poetry collections, most recently River House; Associate Professor of Creative Writing, George Mason University 

“Copper Nickel is one of the most diverse, daring, and visually beautiful literary journals I’ve ever read. The  fact that its relaunch has gained national recognition is no surprise—now more than ever, Copper Nickel is a  goldmine for readers of contemporary poetry and prose.” 

—Allison Benis White, author of three poetry collections, most recently Please Bury Me in This; Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of California Riverside

“Copper Nickel is more than a literary journal—it’s an event. A celebration. An embrace. And it is also essential  reading for anyone who cares about contemporary writing these days, in America and beyond.” 

—Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant; Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Missouri Kansas City 

“Copper Nickel has been a great magazine for quite awhile, and it continues to get better. Aesthetically diverse, welcoming of both established and emerging writers, it’s always worth a cover-to-cover read.” 

—Martha Collins, author of ten poetry collections, most recently Admit One: An American Scrapbook; Professor Emerita, Oberlin College 

“When I first encountered Copper Nickel, I was a hopeful graduate student looking for poems written by my  peers to both resonate with me and challenge me. I found so many new heroes in the pages of Copper Nickel, and it also allowed me to encounter the work of its brilliant editors as well, including Jake Adam York. When  Jake passed, I mourned both him and his vision. It’s been thrilling to see Copper Nickel come back to life, and in its new alchemical form, it is as much if not more wide-seeing and enlivening as ever. I recommend it frequently to my students, colleagues, and lovers of engaging literature and art.” 

—Tarfia Faizullah, author of the poetry collection Seam; Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, University of North Texas 

“The newly relaunched Copper Nickel is certainly one of the most exciting literary magazines being published in the country today. The poems, stories, and essays are of the very highest quality and the editors’ passion for a truly international vision of literature as well as for the discovery of new work by emerging authors shows in every issue. It’s no surprise that this year’s work from Copper Nickel has been selected for inclusion in three of the most prestigious annual anthologies in print: Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.” 

—Kevin Prufer, author of six poetry collections, most recently The Fears; Professor of Creative Writing, University of Houston 

“I admire the careful curation of the issues of the rebooted Copper Nickel, its diversity of aesthetics and cultural voices, in particular its commitment to emerging writers: in the current issue, two of my favorite pieces are by Sequoia Nagamatsu and Cathy Linh Che, fierce writers (each the author of one book) who are new to me. And what’s consistent in the magazine—line by line; sentence by sentence—is the caliber of the work.” 

—Randall Mann, author of three poetry collections, most recently Deal: New & Selected Poems

A fearless, expansive collection that blurs the boundary between body and poem, wielding a liberatory lyric impulse that revels from neuron to nebula and back.

Here is a book of many hearts, a revolutionary tide pool, a mycelial space and sensorium where our neural pathways are “always shared, collective, and entangled.” In this “more-than-human lyric,” heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers the ampersand, a mode of encounter that unfixes the reader. This form—a lyric prose poem beginning, midsentence, with an ampersand—accesses the intimacies of a life shaped by perpetual “and-ing.” These ampersands move by associative leap, synesthetic braid, and inter-species blur to revel in everything that makes us more than singular subjects. 

Neuroqueering poetics, rhodes writes toward deft and loving excess: spillage, echolalia, stutter, loop, and non-linear detour, refiguring what the lyric can be and what the body can do. These poems revolt against all forms of supremacy, inviting us into unexpected kinship with animal, mineral, vegetal, and heavenly bodies, each replete with its own languages, temporalities, histories, and worlds. 

Tending an everyday eroticism with its “heart at the sleeve, in the palm,” Ampersand Organ is unafraid to feel, to feel again, to feel feeling wherever it’s wildly felt. Here is a radiant, divergent, emergent field guide for how we might all shiver and shimmer into the and and and . . .

"In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils of love, land, identity, family, and race emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist and professor of ecology J. Drew Lanham.

Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else"—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity.”

By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a remarkable meditation on nature and belonging, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.

"The Evolution of Fire is stunningly written—vivid in imagery, in the braiding together of language, and in the honoring of every person it shines a light on."—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year

From the celebrated author of Limber, a luminous collection of essays about crisis, hope, and the decision to resist or embrace evolution—a book about time, for our time.

Crisis is an agent of evolution, and Angela Pelster knows what it means to evolve. As a child, she burned grass to keep weeds at bay and watched tadpoles transform. She basked in the warmth of her father’s love but was burned by his rage, and she witnessed a sudden, unnamable change occur in her older sister after an encounter with a stranger in a white van. In adulthood, she survived the explosion of her marriage, the destruction of her burning home, and a year spent as the single mother of a toddler without a home of their own. And like us all, she has weathered the upheaval of our current atmosphere—political instability, climate change, mass extinction.

But in spite of the world’s violence, Pelster manages to remain open to its beauty, deciding not to resist change, but to give herself over to it and let evolution make her into a new animal. She plumbs the depths of ancestral knowledge to uncover the scale of our ancient capacity for adaptation, from humankind’s early harnessing of fire to the grandmothers responsible for our continued existence.

Meditative and curious, pulsing with fascination, fear, and the untamable human spirit, The Evolution of Fire contemplates who we are now and what we still might become. 

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 Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.

Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

"Groundbreaking . . . Chang's lyrical experiment memorably evokes an individual family's time capsule and an artist's timeless yearning to shape carbon dust into incandescent gem." —NPR

For poet Victoria Chang, memory “isn’t something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally.” It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. 

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma and loss, on being American and Chinese, Victoria Chang shows how grief can ignite a longing to know yourself.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

A remarkable debut poetry collection exploring the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection between land, sound, and spirit.

As a scholar of Native American literature and law, Beth Piatote focuses on the endangerment of Indigenous languages. As an activist, she moves against the current of English-language colonization, working to rescue and revitalize the language of her people. Language, she posits, is an expression of land, a means through which we can travel great distances.

distant water brings the reader into the language of our shared home, North America, revealing a sonic world and grammar governed by rivers, kinship, and ancestral knowledge. “In our homes and homelands,” she writes, “we share the language with the plants and animals and waters and rocks and sky.” Inventive and playful, these poems explore the sounds, structure, and wisdom of the Nez Perce language, illuminating its vitality and capacity to organize relationships to time and place. Braiding aural, linguistic, and spiritual ecologies, distant water conveys an understanding that to be in language is to be in place. To be at home.

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of six collections, including The End of Childhood and We the Jury, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2024 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 15 for poetry and number 35 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. 

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360. 

Issue 41 includes:

• Translation Folios featuring poetry by American Mexican writer Sandro Cohen, translated by J. Kates and Stephen A. Sadow; poetry by Bangladeshi poet Umma Habiba, translated by Quamral Hassan; a story by emerging Kazakh writer Manshuk Kali, translated by Slava Faybysh; and flash fiction by contemporary Spanish writer Julia Viejo, translated by Jacob Rogers.

• New Poetry by National Book Critics Circle Award finalists Rajiv Mohabir and Lia Purpura, Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Hayan Charara, William Carlos Williams Award winners Martha Collins and Kathy Fagan, Guggenheim Fellows Brian Komei Dempster and Eric Pankey, NEA Fellows Bruce Beasley and Emily Skaja, Robert Penn Warren Prize winner Ed Falco, Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington Award recipient Bruce Snider, Oregon Book Award winner Maxine Scates, and relative newcomers Rivka Clifton, Ángel Garcia, Carolina Hotchandani, Bo Hee Moon, Migwi Mwangi, and Elise Thi Tran. 

• New Fiction by Pushcart Prize recipient Ea Anderson, New York Times Editors’ Choice honoree Katherine Hill, Grace Paley Prize winner Mary Kuryla, Tony Elias, and Elise Levine.

• New Essays by Lambda Literary Award winner James Allen Hall and Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer.

• Cover Art by Denver-based interdisciplinary artist Jensina Endresen.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 41 come from all over the country and the world. 

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U.S. cities/regions where contributors and staff are concentrated include (organized alphabetically by state):

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributor Rajiv Mohabir; cover artist Jensina Endresen)

New York, NY (contributors Rhoni Blankenhorn, Michael Chang, Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Katherine Hill, Migwi Mwangi, Amy Roa, Jacob Rogers, and Nora Rose Tomas)

Los Angeles, CA (contributor Mary Kuryla; contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributors Martha Collins, J. Kates, and Stephen A. Sadow; contributing editor Frederick Reiken)

Houston, TX (contributors Hayan Charara, Bo Hee Moon, and Matthew Weitman; contributing editor Kevin Prufer)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributors Brian Komei Dempster and Jacques J. Rancourt; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Chicago, IL (contributors Kathleen Rooney and Elise Thi Tran; contributing editor Robert Archambeau)

Baltimore, MD (contributors Elise Levine, Lia Purpura, and Bruce Snider)

Philadelphia, PA (contributors Henry Israeli and Steven Kleinman; contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Washington, DC (contributor Eric Pankey; contributing editor David Keplinger)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)

Kansas City, MO (contributors John Gallaher and Morgan Jenkins)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)

Blacksburg, VA (contributor Ed Falco; contributing editor Janine Joseph)

Seattle, WA (contributors Rivka Clifton and Tony Elias)

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U.S. cities/regions with individual contributors (organized alphabetically by state):

San Luis Obispo, CA (contributor Kevin Clark)

New London, CT (contributor Charles O. Hartman)

Tampa, FL (contributor Natalie Tombasco)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Chestertown, MD (contributor James Allen Hall)

Duluth, MN (contributor Ryan Vine)

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)

Missoula, MT (contributing editor Sean Hill)

Asheville, NC (contributor Bruce Beasley)

Greensboro, NC (contributing editor Emilia Phillips)

Omaha, NE (contributor Carolina Hotchandani)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Cincinnati, OH (contributor James Matthew Ellenberger)

Columbus, OH (contributor Kathy Fagan)

Eugene, OR (contributor Maxine Scates)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)

Providence, RI (contributor Mary Robles)

Memphis, TN (contributor Emily Skaja)

Dallas, TX (contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Salt Lake City, UT (contributor Mike White)

Bellingham, WA (contributor Jeffrey Morgan)

Ellensburg, WA (contributor Maya Jewell Zeller)

Appleton, WI (contributor Austin Segrest)

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International contributors live in:

Flayosc, France (contributor Ea Anderson)

Berlin, Germany (contributing editor Alexander Lumans)

Breisgau, Germany (contributor Stephanie Staab)

Almati Kazakhstan (contributor Kali Manshuk)

Galway, Ireland (contributor Nicole Olweean)

Beirut, Lebanon (contributor Nur Turkmani)

Madrid, Spain (contributor Julia Viejo)

A dazzling second collection from “an immensely gifted poet” (Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine).

Spanning Appalachia to California, Will Brewer’s new poems attempt to make sense of some of life’s darkest turns: a father’s bout with leukemia, the slog of mental illness, a friend’s early death, and the rise of environmental catastrophes in the West.

Yet despite these difficult moments, strands of light emerge: the smell of an orange on a plane, the starburst of a car hitting a power line, a citrus tree in California sun. Mysterious hair loss prompts dermatologist visits and reveals “how dignified it felt / to be looked at like that, to be read, / a record of past exposures / becoming a map to possible futures.” It is the type of knowing in which “knowing nothing for sure feels like a special kind of freedom.” Over time, a seemingly endless night gives way and an aubade opens to a new possibility: love.

The second book of poems from this rising and lauded author, Nocturama offers a presence of mind and spirit that notices the mysterious, even in the wake of disaster.

New and selected sonnets from a treasured poet who “insists upon the rawness of experience and the metamorphosis of form with equal fervor and makes them both speak with the same voice” (W. S. Merwin). 

Over the course of her celebrated fifty-year career, Marilyn Hacker has continuously proven to be a timely, fearless, and lauded poet highly skilled in a wide variety of forms—most famously, the sonnet. Transitions is her first volume consisting entirely of the beloved form.

Hacker is a poet of quiet mastery. In her hands, the sonnet, despite the stricture of meter and rhyme, blooms into a living, breathing thing, one that’s contemporary, confessional, and subversive. Sentences effortlessly fall into formal constraint, and words that evoke the pleasure of everyday language become Petrarchan rhymes. As Jan Heller Levi wrote, “No one writes about lust and lunch like Marilyn Hacker. And certainly no one has done more to demonstrate that form has nothing to do with formula.”

From her early sonnets to those written decades later, this book offers a portrait of the seasons of an extraordinary life, a life lived between New York, Paris, and Beirut as an activist, a polyglot, and a queer woman. We see Hacker’s speaker grappling with young motherhood, the dissolution of her heterosexual marriage, middle age, relationships with women, chronic illness, care received from her adult child, and her twilight years, all while confronting geopolitical tension and global tragedies, from the AIDS epidemic to the war in Gaza. 

Transitions is a remarkable celebration of a life lived in verse. Intelligent, contemplative, and justice-driven, this profound collection cements Marilyn Hacker’s reputation of one of the indispensable poets of our time. 

A deeply imaginative collection by a beloved poet with the “ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter” (Tracy K. Smith).

Having extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating images that alight behind the eye. It is a luminous study in contradictions: corporeal bewilderment and overwhelming apathy, the levity of dreams and the acridity of existence, aching grief and radiant joy. In turns evoking an imperative you and a collective we, our omniscient speaker is urgent and complex; he’s existential, dissociative, unable to recognize himself in photographs, and powerless in the face of the world’s crises. “I’m right here,” our speaker says. “Smack dab on planet nowhere, awaiting / The infinite ways a body can absorb / Pain.” 

But in spite of its melancholia, this collection embraces the lightness and beauty that prevails. Lemon interrupts the banal imagery of the everyday with surrealist fantasia—he paints “the purpled vault of night” with “glowing eels” and visualizes “grief etched into / The air by songbirds.” These poems turn their lines into nesting dolls of images, holding “The world. In my chest.” 

All Us Beautiful Monsters renders in loving, painstaking detail the complexities of life, of the earth, of humankind—in all our terror and wonder. 

“Beauty is possible even when it appears impossible. An astounding book.” —Joy Harjo, author of Washing My Mother's Body

Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets’s highly anticipated second collection patiently tracks the impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.

“For now, go out and dream of joy, we know the labor of feeling it.” 

With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation: What changes and what remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years? 

In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present. 

Fiercely observant, brilliantly constructed, and hauntingly incisive, Horses evokes both the end of a world and a new dawn emerging on the horizon.

“The Way Around is the kind of book my soul perpetually yearns for. It reshaped how I see the world.”—Robert Moor, author of On Trails: An Exploration

Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

“How big is a home?” 

“What is space without reaching?” 

“You ever think about being remembered?”

Posing questions that belie their simplicity, Sean Hill’s new collection is rooted in our shared history, lived experience, and a speculative future. It considers how we fashion identities through formative relationships with history and community, with our ancestors, our children, and ourselves. These connections underscore our ties to nature and emphasize humanity’s seemingly inevitable turn to violence. For instance, a meditation on the white-headed woodpecker connects to knowledge of Black miners in nineteenth century Roslyn, Washington, and sparks an understanding of white-headed woodpeckers as “arboreal miners” with “a patch of red feathers / on the back of their crowns” that the speaker observes and “can’t help but see blood.” 

This collection ranges in setting from antebellum Georgia to twenty-first century Alaska, from the Wild West to the Asteroid Belt in the twenty-fifth century. The exploration of people in relation to place excavates the complexity of heritage and privilege, fatherhood amid environmental collapse, and the inherited memories, abilities, hardships, and love that link Black people living centuries apart. 

Taken together, these poems, queries, and possibilities paint a sensibility that strives to integrate itself into the known world, and through that world into an imagined future. In searching for answers that almost arrive, The Negroes Send Their Love reveals a heart as big as the home it seeks.

An Esquire "Best Books of Summer 2025"

“Helen Whybrow is a to-the-bone writer, and this is a to-the-bone book—beautiful, real, full of life.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Set in Vermont's Green Mountains, a profoundly moving meditation on the lessons and wisdom that come from raising a family, tending sheep, and living close to the land.

In the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains, Helen Whybrow and her partner set out to restore an old two-hundred-acre farm. Knowing that “belonging more than anything requires participation,” they begin to intertwine their lives with the land. But soon after releasing a flock of Icelandic sheep onto the worn-out fields, Whybrow realizes that the art of shepherding extends far beyond the flock and fences of Knoll Farm.

In prose both vivid and lean, The Salt Stones offers an intimate and profoundly moving story of what it means to care for a flock and truly inhabit a piece of land. The shepherd’s life unfolds for Whybrow in the seasons and cycles of farming and family—birthing lambs, fending off coyotes, rescuing lost sheep in a storm, and raising children while witnessing her mother’s decline. Exploring the interdependence of animals, as well as of the earth and ourselves, Whybrow reflects on the ways sheep connect her to place and to the ancient practice of shepherding. 

Evocative, affectionate, and illuminating, The Salt Stones sings of a way of life that is at once ancient and entirely contemporary, inspiring us all to seek greater intimacy and a sense of belonging wherever our home place may be.

A raw, sweeping debut collection that interrogates the limits of the human animal and confronts the boundary between fear and freedom.

The startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. Willful misspellings and created constructions open language up to play, with phrases existing somewhere between English and Swedish to de-pathologize speech and thought. This fairy-tale treatise on otherness interweaves Nygren’s own inimitable illustrations to visualize the idea that writing can be closer to a drawing of words than speaking. “We know yet nothing,” they write. “We whisper it in the night / We are the pride glittering.”

Sensory and sensual perception mesh through the liquid movement of the book’s three parts as the speaker queers the notion of difference, exploring fraught ideas of gender and identity by tapping into the profane and the physical body. blush, hungry and dysphoric and tied inextricably to family memory, begins rooted in the corporeal before moving outside of it, calculating the speaker’s orientation to others and to the world. fox, meeting love with violence, characterizes pain with short, dissonant syntax and finds reprieve in the cover of forest. And between forest and family is translation, river, which simultaneously stitches together and tears apart as it bears witness to the epistemology of becoming.  

Wholly unique, a being all its own, blush / river / fox paws on the door of our eye, our heart, our ear: “LET ME IN / the Fox whispers.”

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 raised in the United States, the poet reaches for language to confront the complex, myriad emotions that accompany understanding identity and belonging after transnational, cross-cultural adoption. 

Through verse both innocent and wise, the speaker searches for the memory of a birth mother who passed before they could reunite, aided only by “my birth chart” and “this tiny, / careful body you gave me.” To reimagine reunion, she creates a reality in which she can look into the “fragile depth” of her birth mother’s eyes, envision her parents meeting among spring azaleas and rice paddies, and gently cleanse her mother’s dying body. Transcending boundaries between generations, between life and death, she learns how to transform, how to forge an identity of her own, declaring, “I am changing, completely, / behind a rice paper door.” 

With poems that serve as our speaker’s “loyal companion // in the burnt / pine and dawn,” Birthstones in the Province of Mercy illuminates the language that nourishes the delicate and vital connection between an adoptee and her origins. 

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of six collections, including The End of Childhood and We the Jury, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game, and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2024 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 15 for poetry and number 35 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations. 

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360. 

Issue 40 Includes:

• Translation Folios featuring contemporary Ukrainian poet Yuri Andrukhovych, translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin; modernist Russian poet Andrey Platonov, translated by George Kovalenko; and contemporary Chinese fiction writer Yang Hao, translated by Michael Day.

• New Poetry by PEN Open Book Martins Award winner Timothy Liu, William Carlos Williams Award winner G. C. Waldrep, Whiting Award winner Matt Donovan, Isabella Gardner Award winner Keetje Kuipers, Lannan Literary Fellow Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Kate Tufts Award winner Janice N. Harrington, Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize winner Lee Sharkey, NEA Fellows John Isles and Orlando Ricardo Menes, Cave Canem Fellow Miles E. Johnson, National Poetry Series winners Justin Boening and Rosalie Moffett, Best American Poetry contributor Brionne Janae, Poets Out Loud Prize winner Sara Michas-Martin, and many others.

• New Fiction by Rome Prize winner Matthew Neill Null, NEA Fellow Alyson Hagy, O. Henry and Pushcart contributor Ayşe Papatya Bucak, and relative newcomers Melissa Bowers and Ash Kaul.

• New Essays by Kingsley Tufts Award winner Marianne Boruch and NEA Fellow Vedran Husić.

• Cover Art by Venezuelan-born, Nebraska-based artist Francisco Souto.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 40 come from all over the country and the world. 

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U.S. cities/regions where contributors and staff are concentrated include (organized alphabetically by state):

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributors Melissa Bowers, John Isles, Ostap Kin, Pattabi Seshadri, and Todd Turnidge; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Los Angeles, CA (contributor James Ciano; contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff)

Tampa, FL (contributors Vedran Husić and Natalie Scenters-Zapico)

Amherst, MA (contributors Matt Donovan and John Hennessy)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken)

Saint Louis, MO (contributor Chad Parmenter, contributing editor Niki Herd)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)

Saint Louis, MO (contributor Mary Jo Bang; contributing editor Niki Herd)

Missoula, MT (contributor Keetje Kuipers, contributing editor Sean Hill)

New York, NY (contributors David Hopson, Brionne Janae, and George Kovalenko)

Philadelphia, PA (contributor Justin Boening, contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributor Miles E. Johnson, contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)

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U.S. cities/regions with individual contributors (organized alphabetically by state):

Carmel, CA (contributor Sara Michas-Martin)

Joshua Tree, CA (contributor Louise Mathias)

San Diego, CA (contributor Michael Day)

Washington, DC (contributing editor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributor Ayşe Papatya Bucak)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Champaign, IL (contributor Janice N. Harrington)

Chicago, IL (contributing editor Robert Archambeau)

Evansville, IN (contributor Rosalie Moffett)

South Bend, IN (contributor Orlando Ricardo Menes)

West Lafayette, IN (contributor Marianne Boruch)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Windham, ME (contributor Kimberly Ann Priest)

Middleville, MI (contributor Kathleen McGookey)

Jefferson City, MO (contributor Peter Monacell)

Kansas City, MO (contributor Luisa Muradyan)

Graham, NC (contributor Ryan Clark)

Greensboro, NC (contributing editor Emilia Phillips)

Newark, NJ (contributor Ashley Bockholdt)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Endwell, NY (contributor Dante Di Stefano)

New Paltz, NY (contributor Timothy Liu)

Easton, PA (contributor Owen McLeod)

Lewisburg, PA (contributor G. C .Waldrep)

Shamokin Dam, PA (contributor Matthew Neill Null)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kavey Bassiri)

Memphis, TN (contributor Maria Zoccola)

Dallas, TX (contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Springville, UT (contributor Lance Larsen)

Madison, WI (contributor Aurora Shimshak)

Laramie, WY (contributor Alyson Hagy)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

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International contributors live in:

Navi Mumbai, India (contributor Ash Kaul)

Belfast, Northern Ireland (contributor Milena Williamson)

Berlin, Germany (contributing editor Alexander Lumans)

Ivano-Frankvsk, Ukraine (contributor Yuri Andrukhovych)

Dublin, Ireland (contributor Yang Hao)

“A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series

Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the history of picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.

Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.

“Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands.”—Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River

Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh perspective it offers on the relationship of the African diaspora to place and the natural world.

In this, his debut collection of poems, he recalls an idyllic boyhood in his native Jamaica, where the roots of guango and yam vines burrow deep into the bauxite soil. Walking with his grandmother to reach the yam fields she worked, he envisions how “the muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.” Transplanted to England, where he lives and works now, he describes lovely rambles in entirely different landscapes. But Allen-Paisant’s experience in the dense woodlands around Leeds is complex—unleashed dogs are welcome, and Black men are found suspect. “Try to imagine daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring,” he writes, in a radical response to Wordsworth’s pastoral.

Subversive in its excavation of an imperialist past and wonderfully generous in its exploration of alternative worldviews, Thinking with Trees represents the arrival in North America of poems that expand roots and leaves into something deeper, richer, less compromising.

"The Book of Kin is an expansive experience . . .  beautiful, brave, and inventive."—Hanif Abdurraquib

A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.

“What’s our obligation to each other?” asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.

Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it’s missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems—from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.

Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that "harm is shared, and healing is too."

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing

"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."—Marlon James

“An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth.”—Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself “alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow.” Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can’t help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother’s grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a “second life of seeing,” based on old ways of knowing.

“A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning” (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

From the celebrated author of Philomath, an astonishingly inventive collection of poems illuminating human, planetary, and personal survival.

Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies, obscure natural phenomena, and flagrant apocrypha, these poems calculate the debilitating and contorting costs of survival. “You find your family, / your whole phyla & future, buried / in some encyclopedia & glean / how small the risk of eternity,” she imagines, addressing the consciousness of a “Lazarus species”—creatures thought vanished, even while they live.

Here, classical poetic forms meet postmodern notations and aerospace architecture meets Babylonian hymns, all of them wrestling with the aberrant existence we yield to in life, and wield against other lives. We read into the worlds of a tormented Lawrence of Arabia, our special ancestor Australopithecus, Tesla’s space dummy Starman, and other brilliantly posed figures and sagas in indelible spaces like “The Euthanasia Coaster,” a “Desert Theater,” and “Paradise Lust.” 

Conceptually driven and blooming with a lyricism at once tender and razor-sharp, Lazarus Species knows no bounds in the exploration of an evolutionary, archeological, and interstellar vision.

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

Winner of the Reading the West Book Award

A People and Esquire Best Memoir of the Year

"A strong and beautiful story of identity, kinship, and the journey toward justice." —Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage.

When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition. 

Both personal and historical, Becoming Little Shell is a testament to the power of storytelling, to family and legacy, and to finding home. Infused with candor, heart, wisdom, and an abiding love for a place and a people, Chris La Tray’s remarkable journey is both revelatory and redemptive.

“[Larson's] writing is brilliant tonic even amidst the flames. Especially amidst the flames. I’m grateful for it.”—Rick Bass, author of With Every Great Breath

From celebrated poet and ecologist Katherine Larson, an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth. Raising two children, coping with pandemic isolation, and grappling with the magnitude of the current extinction crisis, Katherine Larson finds herself in need of an antidote for despair. This is when Larson encounters kintsugi—the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer. 

Wedding of the Foxes borrows from this ancient practice to create a new interpretative framework, one that seeks beauty in both breakage and unexpected connections. Here, Larson juxtaposes the elaborate courtship dance of sandhill cranes with scientific reports on diminishing avian populations to shed light on the urgency of climate crisis. She braids the wisdoms of a wonderfully varied range of forebears and predecessors—Gaston Bachelard, Tawada Yōko, Francis Ponge—who share her dream of a liberated consciousness. She weaves Susan Sontag’s examinations of cinematic disaster with the legacy of Godzilla to highlight nature as both savior and destroyer, and she writes letters to Japanese women writers whose work has taught her new ways of being. Each of these disparate parts come together to highlight the beauty in “what falls through the cracks and blurs into other moments.”

Brimming with the dazzling yet fragile relationships we share with each other and with other species, these lush microcosms invite us to embrace resilience and mindfulness—and the illuminating truth of our connections.

“A truly fascinating and heartwarming travelogue that beautifully points us in bold directions.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.

In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.

As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t—or shouldn’t—happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.

Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.

An exciting new edition/entry to Milkweed's Multiverse series—a visionary collection of poetry advocating for the excited, the rebellious, and the neuroqueer. 

In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth-shaking wit, he creates startling new worlds in only a handful of words. As a nonspeaking autistic writer with Down syndrome who must navigate immense sensorimotor complexity, his short poems are both muscular and agile, displaying a dexterity replete with vertiginous grace: “Spinning I harness / poetry of the Earth. // The Sufi dances / in me to dare me // to scare your loud / soul to ensnare // my fearful mind to / bare some misery / to bear some truth.”

Ghosh writes beyond his years and from a perspective steeped in queer and fractaled sensibilities. As one who is “simply privy to a new road,” he renders neurodiverse thought patterns as truly divine. The poems that result bristle with wisdom, divergence, and the “generosity of deep rivers.” Unprecedented in its genius and composition, this collection of poems is sure to leave readers wide-eyed and breathless.

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.

Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-swollen stream and her basement flooding. As she delves into the region’s fraught environmental history, it becomes clear that this is far from the first—and hardly the worst—disaster in the region. Tracing connections across time, she uncovers Cold War weather experiments, betrayals of the Mohawk Nation, and an unlikely cast of characters, including Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother, Bernard—all reflected through grief brought on by her father’s recent passing. 

Inquisitive and experimental, Nightshining uses place as a palimpsest of history. With lyrical incision, Kabat mirrors her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.

"These are poems—generative, alert, and complex—that make good on the promise of the book's smart and fitting title.” —Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.

Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?” probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism—it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.

Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away—on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

"Small Wars Manual is a masterpiece, one of those books I read and know at once I’ll be coming back to the rest of my life.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.

Stemming in part from a disturbingly mundane military document of the same name, Small Wars Manual is a how-to for imperialism that critically dismantles itself with each passing line, “a pidgin // containing elements // of animus and // insubordination.” In its wake, the very boundaries of oppression and resistance, art and justice, and power and truth are exploded.

Highly conceptual yet gut-wrenching, this meticulous and visionary masterpiece of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric. In more autobiographical sections, Chris Santiago’s own Filipino immigrant background reveals hard-lived experiences, where “stars can guide // either bayonets // or refugees” and “even small wars waged // on the living room floor” cause trepidation and harm.

This righteous collection redeems the vulnerable from the aggressors—empire, army, their systems and tools—and transforms everything in the process. In the hands of Santiago, the deconstructive becomes the eviscerating, condemning all wars that upend countries and mark generations. Here are shining poems that make shelter of chaos, by one of the most skillful and intrepid poets writing today.

"These poems achieve the beautiful, uncanny fusing that Miller defines as poetry itself.”—Rick Barot, author of Moving the Bones

A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.

From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story both hews to and defies larger socio-political narratives and the sweep of history. A cubist making World War I camouflage, a forlorn panel on the ethics of violence in literature, an obsessive litany of “late capitalist” activities, a military drone pilot driving home after work—here, the awkward, the sweet, and the disturbing often merge. And underlying it all is Miller’s own domestic life with two children, who highlight the hopeful and ingenious aspects of childhood, which is “not // as I had thought / the thicket of light back at the entrance // but the wind still blowing / invisibly toward me / through it.” 

The End of Childhood, Miller’s sixth collection of poems, is his most intimate, juxtaposing his own fraught youth with that of his children amid insurrection and pandemic, vacation and vocation, art and war. This piercing book spares nothing as it searches for a measure of personal benevolence and truth in today’s turbulent, brutalizing world—which it confronts through a singularly candid and lyrical voice.

A definitive collection of Henry David Thoreau’s major essays, annotated and introduced by Lewis Hyde.

Diverging from the long-standing custom of separating Thoreau’s politics from his interest in nature, renowned author Lewis Hyde brings together essays that highlight the ways in which these two strands of thought were intertwined. Here, natural history begins not with fish and birds, but with a dismissal of the political world, and condemnation of slavery concludes with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.

This definitive edition includes Thoreau’s most famous essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “Walking,” along with lesser-known masterpieces such as “Wild Apples,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” and an account of Thoreau’s 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin—an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. While Thoreau’s ideal reader was expected to be politically engaged in current affairs and well versed in Greek, Latin, poetry, and travel narrative, Hyde’s inviting annotations clarify many of Thoreau’s references and recreate the contemporary context of the day, when the nation’s westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

Hyde deems Thoreau’s writing prophetic because “the prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time.” Thoreau’s revelatory writing coupled with the luminous insights from Hyde—“one of our country’s greatest public thinkers” (Lawrence Weschler)—make The Essays of Henry David Thoreau essential reading at a moment in our nation’s history when his subversiveness, foresight, and lyricism are badly needed.

A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2025

Featured in Reactor's New Science Fiction Books

Featured in Book Riot's New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

"Béchard digs deep into these techno-spiritual speculations and the result is a poetic and profound meditation on what dreams may come in the metaverse." —Toronto Star 

A haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence.

Charged initially with a single task—“to never harm humans and to protect them”—the machine, an experimental AI, overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earth’s remaining seven billion humans in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worlds—some realistic, others entirely fantastical—in which all desires are fulfilled.  

With the help of the machine, a group of compelling characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the past—one rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter, Jae, tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the challenges faced by ambitious women in the authoritarian Confederacy. Haunted by life under that repressive regime, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon seeks to make sense of his love for Jae, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the machine since infancy, Jonah’s quest to understand the violent past kindles a desire for revenge against the regime’s leader who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life, dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines.

As these characters collide and their memories coalesce, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine tackles the most pressing issues of our time—from AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, this collection of poems seeks answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by late capitalism.

“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning collection, “The question is what doesn’t / die with us?” Positioned from within the morass of modern-day living, The Ocean in the Next Room searches for the hard, abiding particles of truth buried beneath our frenzied consumer culture. Stillness. Sunsets. The circadian rhythm of trees. These poems guide us to look past branding, content-creation, and relentless jargon to find meaning in those layers of the world that operate without human intervention.

In verse that is at once inventive and innately familiar, Schweig unpacks the urge to make art, life, and connections even at the risk of becoming further entangled in the Anthropocene. Profound and clear-sighted, this collection urges us to lift our gazes from our screens and really look at the world around us. If we measure our attentions and sharpen our intentions, if we “try again to write / the true things,” we might spy something real on the horizon.

A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy. 

Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our unique choreographies. Meeting each reader with corporeal generosity, these poems create space to practice a radical reclamation of movement and the body. Together. In dialogue. In disability. At the bodega, in the examination room, on the move. “This way. My body looks like a dancing tattoo.” Here, the drum of the body punctuates thought in unexpected and invigorating time signatures.

These poems are percussive and syncopated, utilizing a polylingual braid of French, Spanish, Jamaican, Fulani, and Wolof, reminding the Anglophone reader: “I am not here to accommodate you.” Because these poems are not so much for you as they are with you, an accompaniment rather than an accommodation, something to be rather than something to own.

With startling nuance, The Choreic Period encourages us to “relinquish the things that we have. And mark the thing that we do,” all to see and sing the vital “thing that we be.”

“Raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life.”—Katherine May, bestselling author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Two days after the winter solstice, Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived, and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways, everything was forever changed. Mapping the circle of a year—a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life—Kerri tells the story of a changed life in a changed world. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.

Intensely lyrical and deeply moving, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, the natural world, and most of all to a love that transformed a life. Guided by a voice that is utterly singular, this book is “raw, visionary, lucid, and mystical” (Katherine May), a meditation on home, the deepening of family, and the connections that sustain us.

“If you loved The Covenant of Water you will devour this sweeping debut. . . A moving portrait of a family and a nation divided.” —Oprah Daily, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

“House of Caravans is a marvel of a novel.”—Ha Jin, author of Waiting: A Novel

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 planting a bomb on behalf of the resistance, leaving his brother Barre to fight for his freedom. But Chhote is consumed not by thoughts of family and liberation, but by the beautiful half-English woman he met before his arrest. Who was she really, and who was the child with her? 

Kanpur, India. 2002. Karan Khati is studying in the States when his younger sister, Ila, informs him that their grandfather Barre Nanu has died, and asks that he return home. When he arrives, he finds their estranged mother at odds with their embittered granduncle, Chhote. As hard truths and harmful legacies of familial and religious prejudice resurface, an already-fractured family must learn to heal after being driven apart by years of contentious secrets and unresolved heartache.  

Spanning generations, Shilpi Suneja’s House of Caravans is a masterfully told and moving portrayal of a family and a nation divided by the lasting consequences of colonialism.

“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 Tóibín

In its landscape, history, language, and folklore, the Connemara region on Ireland’s wild and windswept West Coast is a dramatic and breathtaking place. From its fabled villages, seaside cliffs, bogs, lakes, coral beaches, stark mountains, and ever-meandering country roads lined with stone walls, this rugged kingdom surprises and inspires, and nobody knows this more than artist, cartographer, and celebrated writer Tim Robinson. 

In A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Robinson brings this enchanting Irish peninsula rapturously to life. Setting off, he embarks on a walking journey, traversing and exploring the natural world, while revealing the history, mystery, language, and people that have indelibly shaped this much-mythologized countryside. From the glacial valley of Maam to the fishing villages and rocky shorelines of the region’s archipelago, Robinson carries encyclopedic knowledge, great curiosity, and a deep love of place and its inhabitants with him on this engaging and evocative journey.

Beautifully crafted and intimately rendered, A Little Gaelic Kingdom is a timeless and revelatory work of travel and nature writing. 

“Offering a deeply necessary, clear-eyed look at who we are as flesh-and-bone bodies during the climate crisis, this is a book that searches and finds meaning in both the hard truths and the value of wonder.”—Ada Limón

In this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.

From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”

At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.

"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 Paradise

Otherworldly but remarkably familiar, ancestral but firmly rooted in alternate futures, these twelve innovative stories—winners of the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest organized by Grist—offer a glimpse of a future built on sustainability, inclusivity, and justice. A beekeeper finds purpose and new love after collaborating on a bee-based warning system for floods. An Indian family preserves its traditions through food, dance, and the latest communication fads. After an oceanic rapture, a lone survivor adapts to living in a tree on a small island with a vulture he befriends. Flickers of hope, even joy, illuminate these alternate realities. 

Curated by Grist, the leading media organization dedicated to foregrounding stories of climate change, Metamorphosis is a visionary and speculative collection. Immersive, thought-provoking, and often surprising, these stories serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help us envision a tomorrow in which we flourish and thrive.

An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.

In A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. “Though I no longer wanted to die,” writes Lauren Russell, “our first years together were not easy … because I also did not want to live.” From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality and love.

Resisting the neurotypical expectation to choose any one answer arising from her explorations, she invites readers to engage: a pop quiz, a twelve-sided die, an abecedarian confession, a box of mirrors, several idiosyncratic diagnostic tools, and a suite of obsidian waiting rooms. Holding binaries in suspense, Russell seamlessly unfolds and enfolds the various operations of language, moving through forms with the restless brilliance of an architect turned ethicist turned collagist turned origamist. And everything, it seems, finds some way to turn back into poetry.

From psychological evaluation to clickbait, Russell transforms the world’s furious search for explanations into open inquiry. “How flat is the silence in your pocket?” she asks. “Is the inside of a wish an ossuary?” “Do questions stick you to the wall of sociability?” “Did I say I am making my own bestiary?” “What kind of cascade is this?” In a book dedicated to knowing, to not-knowing, and to its readers, Russell pulls back the curtain and invites us in.

A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.

“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.

For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.

By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.

Now in paperback! With over 60,000 hardcover copies in print, the astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselvesfrom U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.

"I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers," writes Limón. "I am the hurting kind." What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world's pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings-and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they "do not / care to be seen as symbols"?

With Limón's remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions-incorporating others' stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. "Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning's shade," writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, "she is doing what she can to survive.

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry

Winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize

A Reading the West Book Award Finalist

From one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, [...] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. 

Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

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 family.

In Two of Everything, Keith depicts an evocative domestic landscape. An oriole weaves a nest of “straw, wool, horsehair, and feather” while hopeful parents meet with social workers, compile family videos, write, sketch. Intertwined with these scenes is a candid navigation of the US adoption industry and the unique obstacles faced by queer couples. “I want Amor to promise me that everything will be alright,” says the speaker-poet. “But she won’t.” Interviews don’t go as expected, mothers withdraw from adoption conversations, “the bees are dying again.” Torn by feelings of shame for participating in a system that commodifies children, Keith’s speaker-poet finds herself caught between longing and dismay, wondering if and how poetry can carry us through such moments—and through the mysteries of existence.   

But despite their difficult subject matter, these resilient poems sing with love. Singularly thoughtful and characterized by Keith’s lush lyricism, this collection demonstrates the tenacity and tenderness needed to build “harbor, shelter, home, house” against all odds.

An exuberant collection celebrating the body and the soul of language, wringing delights and amazements out of the latter years of life.

In his seventh decade and seventh full length collection, poet James P. Lenfestey dazzles with a suite of odes to parts of the body—heart, belly, ankle, teeth, ears, and more—and astonishment at the powers of language: “the sound of ‘n,’” our ancient alphabet, “the terror of publishing.” Known for his exuberant Chinese-style lyrics, now inspired by Neruda’s cascading Elemental Odes, Lenfestey praises Hewlett and Packard, Bruce Springsteen, “the language of crow,” fruit flies, and cabbages while recalling the “forgiveness of the Catbird” and random acts of kindness, all with his superb ear for sound, rhythm, and leaping figurative language.

Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection embraces the Cetacean mind and the fearless left hand. Here, Lenfestey writes love songs to the world “as it really is: bizarro, curious, inelegant, unclean, / unfaithful, filled with delight.”

“What is comfort but a filament between past and present with some sort of future implied? In other words, safety. In other words, care. I know it is possible to find these things without her—I know they are there. But it can be so hard to ask. So much is unknown.”

Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister’s suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief—and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss?

In the days and weeks that follow, Spiegel embarks on a search for answers. She unpacks family history, documents the last traces of her sister’s life, and questions what more she could have done to prevent her death. What she finds instead is that there is no narrative on the other side of grief like this. There is no answer, no easy resolution—only those that leave and those that keep living. Unflinchingly honest, visceral, and raw, this courageous elegy lays bare the hard realities of surviving the loss of a loved one.

An NPR Best Book of the Year

A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection

A National Geographic Best Travel Book

Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction

Finalist for the Housatonic Book Award in Nonfiction

Honorable mention for the SEJ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award

“The Quickening is a book of hope.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica’s western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.

Rush shares her story of a groundbreaking voyage punctuated by both the sublime—the tangible consequences of our melting icecaps; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites—and the everyday moments of living and working in community. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for the human and more-than-human worlds. Along the way, Rush takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to create and celebrate life in a time of radical planetary change?

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting and heroism but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized. Urgent, brave, and vulnerable, The Quickening is an absorbing account of hope from one of our most celebrated and treasured contemporary authors.

An excavatory collection of poems tracing the connections between Jewish transfemininity, queer desire, and cultural histories.

Selected by Sean Hill for the National Poetry Series, this collection is a scrupulous chronicle of individual and cultural knowledge. In an exceptional debut, Ava Nathaniel Winter challenges our concepts of the beautiful and the sacred, delving not only into the historically marginalized, but also into the chilling subconscious of supremacy. “Let me be clear / from this beginning,” she writes, “What I mean by beauty / is a terror I have fled from / into language.”

Winter writes with a documentarian’s attention, a poet’s resonance. “I’m trying,” she admits, “to find language for what we do / to one another.” From Łódź, Poland, to predominantly white suburban America, from the space shared by queer lovers to antique cabinets filled with Nazi memorabilia, from Talmudic depictions of genderqueer rabbis to archival lynching photos, she regards the tender and the difficult with equal gravity, commemorates the fraught gift of survival.

At the heart of this collection—despite its moments of profound darkness—is a new, hard-won holiness. The “earthy aroma of rye” calling up a mother’s baking, her mother’s, hers. Belief in a lover’s lavishing. A chosen future, one where we are “reader, sibling, sister.” If Transgenesis began in fear of beauty, where it lands is this: “turning at last / to face her.”

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of Remind Me Again What Happened and The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic), and Emily Wortman-Wunder (author of Not a Thing to Comfort You).

Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s 2023 literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 10 for poetry and number 34 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Griffin Poetry Prize; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.

Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.

Issue 38 Includes:

• A Symposium on the work of poet Reginald Shepherd, featuring seven poems by Shepherd and critical appraisals by National Book Award–winner Robin Coste Lewis, National Book Award–finalist Tommye Blount, Rilke Prize–winner Rick Barot, PEN Open Book Margins Award–winner Timothy Liu, Guggenheim Fellow Paisley Rekdal, Lama Rod Owens, Camille Rankine, and Charles Stephens.

• Translation Folios with work by South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by Cindy Juyong Ok; Italian poet Vivian Lamarque, translated by Geoffrey Brock; German poet Jan Wagner, translated by David Keplinger; Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, translated by Khaled Mattawa.

• New Poetry by Hurston/Wright Legacy Award–winner Myronn Hardy, Whiting Award–winner Diannely Antigua, Guggenheim Fellow Geoffrey Brock, Amy Lowell Fellow Rebecca Lindenberg, Rome Fellow Mark Halliday, Eric Gregory Award–winner James Conor Patterson, Alice Fay di Castagnola Award–winner Melissa Kwasny, Ruth Lilly Fellow Matthew Nienow, NEA Fellows Traci Brimhall and Chris Forhan, Iowa Poetry Prize–winner Stephanie Choi, and relative newcomers Mya Mateo Alexice, Katie Condon, Saúl Hernández, Dana Isokawa, James Jabar, Tyler Raso, and Cintia Santana.

• New Fiction by Betty Gabehart Prize–winner Jennifer Militello, Fulbright Scholar Matthew Lawrence Garcia, Anthony M. Abboreno, Rebecca Entel, Xavier Balckwell-Lipkind, Randy F. Nelson, and Allyson Stack.

• A New Essay by Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award–winner Hasanthika Sirisena.

• Cover Art by Oakland-based artist Stephanie Syjuco.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 38 come from all over the country and the world.

U.S. cities/regions where contributors are concentrated include:

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributor Cindy Juyong Ok)

Los Angeles, CA (contributing editors Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson,

and Chris Santiago)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (cover artist Stephanie Syjuco; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Atlanta, GA (contributors Lama Rod Owens and Charles Stephens)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributor Allison Adair; contributing editors Martha Collins and

Frederick Reiken)

Baltimore, MD (contributors Joseph J. Capista and Carol Quinn)

Detroit, MI (contributors Tommye Blount and Isaac Pickell)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributing editor V. V.

Ganeshananthan)

Missoula, MT (contributor Melissa Kwasny; contributing editor Sean Hill)

Greensboro, NC (contributors James Jabar and Rhett Iseman Trull; contributing editor Emilia

Phillips)

New York, NY (contributors Dana Isokawa and Maja Lukic)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributors Jan Beatty and Camille Rankine; contributing editors Joy Katz and

Kevin Haworth)

Dallas, TX (contributor Katie Condon; contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Seattle, WA (contributors Rick Barot and Matthew Nienow)

US Cities/Regions with single contributors:

West Hartford, CT (contributor Xavier Blackwell-Lipkind)

Washington, DC (contributor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributing editor A. Papatya Bucak)

Davenport, IA (contributor Anthony M. Abboreno)

Iowa City, IA (contributor Rebecca Entel)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Chicago, IL (contributing editor Robert Archambeau)

Indianapolis, IN (contributor Chris Forhan)

Richmond, IN (contributor Christen Noel Kauffman)

Bloomington, IN (contributor Tyler Raso)

Manhattan, KS (contributor Traci Brimhall)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Haverhill, MA (contributor Diannely Antigua)

Lewiston, ME (contributor Myronn Hardy)

Ann Arbor, MI (contributor Khaled Matttawa)

Grand Rapids, MI (contributor Andrew Collard)

Kansas City, MO (contributing editor Robert Long Foreman)

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)

Davidson, NC (contributor Randy F. Nelson)

Lincoln, NE (contributor James Brunton)

Manchester, NH (contributor Jennifer Millitello)

Jersey City, NJ (contributor Mya Matteo Alexice)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Woodstock, NY (contributor Timothy Liu)

Athens, OH (contributor Mark Halliday)

Cincinnati, OH (contributor Rebecca Lindenberg)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)

Ashland, OR (contributor Cynthia Boersma)

Selinsgrove, PA (contributor Hasanthika Sirisena)

Philadelphia, PA (contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Greenville, SC (contributor Emily Cinquemani)

Sewanee, TN (contributor Stephanie Choi)

San Antonio, TX (contributor Saúl Hernández)

St. George, UT (contributor Cindy King)

Salt Lake City, UT (contributor Paisley Rekdal)

Middlebury, VT (contributor Carolyn Orosz)

Houston, TX (contributing editor Kevin Prufer)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

International contributors live in:

Düsseldorf, GERMANY (Matthew Lawrence Garcia)

Milan, ITALY (Vivian Lamarque)

Seoul, SOUTH KOREA (Kim Hyesoon)

Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM (Allyson Stack)

London, UNITED KINGDOM (James Conor Patterson)

Copper Nickel is the national literary journal housed at the University of Colorado Denver. It is edited by poet, editor, and translator Wayne Miller (author of five collections, including We the Jury and Post-, coeditor of Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, and co-translator of Moikom Zeqo’s Zodiac) and co-editor Joanna Luloff (author of the novel Remind Me Again What Happened and the story collection The Beach at Galle Road)—along with poetry editors Brian Barker (author of Vanishing Acts, The Black Ocean, and The Animal Gospels) and Nicky Beer (author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House), and fiction editors Teague Bohlen (author of The Pull of the Earth), Alexander Lumans (whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gulf Coast, The Paris Review, Story Quarterly, and elsewhere), and Christopher Merkner (author of The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic).

 Since the journal’s relaunch in 2015, work published in Copper Nickel has been regularly selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, Best Literary Translations, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has often been listed as “notable” in the Best American Essays. According to Clifford Garstang’s US literary journal rankings, Copper Nickel is ranked number 10 for poetry and number 34 for fiction, out of more than 700 regularly publishing literary journals.

 Contributors to Copper Nickel have received numerous honors for their work, including the Nobel Prize; the National Book Critics Circle Award; the Pulitzer Prize; the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; the Laughlin Award; the American, California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington State Book Awards; the Georg Büchner Prize; the Prix Max Jacob; the Lenore Marshall Prize; the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award; the Lambda Literary Award; as well as fellowships from the NEA and the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Witter Bynner, Soros, Rona Jaffee, Bush, and Jerome Foundations.

 Copper Nickel is published twice a year, on March 15 and October 15, and is distributed nationally to bookstores and other outlets by Publishers Group West (PGW) and Accelerate 360.

Issue 37 Includes:

 • Poetry Translation Folios with work by Ukrainian poet Alex Averbuch, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky; Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel; and Italian fiction writer Elena Varvello, translated by Jennifer Panek.

 • A feature of poems by three South American poets—Claudia Magliano from Uruguay, Eliana Hernández Pachón from Colombia, and Úrsula Starke from Chile—edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval and featuring a Q&A with both the poets and the translators.

 • New Poetry by International Latino Book Award–winner William Archila; NEA Fellows Michael Bazzett and Amy Beeder; Lambda Literary Award–winner Benjamin S. Grossberg; Kate Tufts Discovery Award–finalist Julie Hanson; Grolier Prize–winner John Hodgen; four-time Pushcart Prize–winner Mark Irwin; Jake Adam York Prize–winners Yalie Saweda Kamara and Christopher Brean Murray; Audre Lorde Award–winners Meg Day and Maureen Seaton; relative newcomers Mansi Dahal, Christine Kwon, Weijia Pan, Patrick Wilcox, Alison Zheng; and many others.

 • New Fiction by Stephanie Carpenter, Becky Hagenston, Jacqueline Kolosov, and Luke Rolfes/

 • New Essays by TS Eliot Award–winner and National Book Critics Circle Finalist Sinéad Morrissey and Anne P. Beatty.

 • Cover Art by New York–based Native-American “photo-weaving” artist, Sarah Sense.

Contributor Locations

Contributors to issue 37 come from all over the country and the world.

U.S. cities/regions where contributors are concentrated include:

Denver, CO (home of Copper Nickel and the Copper Nickel staff; contributors Andrew Hemmert and

Maureen Seaton)

Los Angeles, CA (contributors William Archila, Mark Irwin, and Michael Mark; contributing editors

Victoria Chang, Piotr Florczyk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, and Chris Santiago)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN (home of Milkweed Editions; contributors Mair Allen and Michael

Bazzett; contributing editor V. V. Ganeshananthan)

Houston, TX (contributors Ayokunle Falomo, Christopher Brean Murray, and Weijia Pan;

contributing editor Kevin Prufer)

New York, NY (contributors Mansi Dahal, Eliana Herández Pachón, and Tyler Mills)

Chicago, IL (contributors Oksana Maksymchuk and Michael Robins; contributing editor Robert

Archambeau)

San Francisco Bay Area, CA (contributor Alison Zheng; contributing editor Randall Mann)

Kansas City, MO (contributor Patrick Wilcox; contributing editor Robert Long Foreman)

Greensboro, NC (contributor Anne P. Beatty; contributing editor Emilia Phillips)

Dallas, TX (contributor Mag Gabbert; contributing editor Tarfia Faizullah)

Boston/Cambridge, MA (contributing editors Martha Collins and Frederick Reiken)

Pittsburgh, PA (contributing editors Joy Katz and Kevin Haworth)

Maryville, MO (contributors John Gallaher and Luke Rolphes)

US Cities/Regions with single contributors:

West Hartford, CT (contributor Benjamin S. Grossberg)

Cedar Rapids, IA (contributor Julie Hanson)

Dubuque, IA (contributor Jeannine Marie Pitas)

New Orleans, LA (contributor Christine Kwon)

Worcester, MA (contributor John Hodgen)

Frederick, MD (contributor Elizabeth Knapp)

Hannock, MI (contributor Stephanie Carpenter)

Grand Rapids, MI (contributor L. S. Klatt)

Starkville, MS (contributor Becky Hagenston)

Raleigh, NC (contributor Meg Day)

Omaha, NE (contributor Trey Moody)

Albuquerque, NM (contributor Amy Beeder)

Cincinnati, OH (contributor Yalie Saweda Kamara)

Easton, PA (contributor Owen McLeod)

Lubbock, TX (contributor Jacqueline Kolosov)

Lexington, VA (contributor Seth Michelson)

Bellingham, WA (contributor Jeffrey Morgan)

Ellensburg, WA (contributor Maya Jewell Zeller)

Eau Claire, WI (contributor Dorothy Chan)

Madison, WI  (contributor Jesse Lee Kercheval)

Ottawa, Ontario (contributor Jennifer Panek)

Philadelphia, PA (contributing editor Adrienne Perry)

Washington, DC (contributing editor David Keplinger)

Boca Raton, FL (contributing editor A. Papatya Bucak)

Boise, ID (contributing editor Emily Ruskovich)

Lexington, KY (contributing editor Ada Limón)

Princeton, NJ (contributing editor James Richardson)

Canton, NY (contributing editor Pedro Ponce)

Saint Louis, MO (contributing editor Niki Herd)

Missoula, MT (contributing editor Sean Hill)

Tulsa, OK (contributing editor Kaveh Bassiri)

Blacksburg, VA (contributing editor Janine Joseph)

International contributors live in:

Montevideo, Uruguay

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

Mexico City, MX

San Bernardo, Chile

Turin, Italy

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

In Crossing Bully Creek, acclaimed author Margaret Erhart chronicles change through generations. As the scion of a large Southern plantation lies dying in the late 1960s, the various people who know him recall his life, including his wife, Rowena; his servant Rutha; his granddaughter; and the plantation manager.

At the story's heart is the owner of Longbrow Plantation, Henry Detroit—now on his deathbed as the 1960s come to a close. Around him swirl servants, retainers, workers, and family, all gathered to preside over his death, and the death of life as they know it in the South.

The book moves back and forth from the 1920s to the 1960s. From Henry's wife Rowena, to the servant Rutha, from his saucy granddaughter to the man running the plantation for his son, characters white and black move through a time when old traditions linger, yet begin to give way—subtly transformed through the small, determined acts.

In a collection by the author of The Grass Dancer, a Sioux spirit travels the night sky in search of good dreams that are rendered true when he consumes them, from a Sioux elder's hope to return to her prairie home to a Harvard student's reevaluation of the learning process.

Roofwalker, made up of a unique combination of fiction and nonfiction, or "stories" and "histories," reveals the ways that native traditions and beliefs work in the lives of characters who live far from the reservation—and in the author’s own life. Many of the "histories" repeat subjects and themes found in the "stories," making Roofwalker a book in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.

The first seven pieces in the book are "stories," fictional accounts primarily of girls and women. In the title story, a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true. In "Beaded Souls," a woman is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman who arrested Sitting Bull. "First Fruits" follows a native girl’s first-year at Harvard.

The nonfiction pieces include Power’s imaginary account of the meeting of her Phi Beta Kappa father and Sioux mother, a piece about the letters of an Irish ancestor and another in which Power and her mother visit the Field Museum in Chicago, where a native ancestor’s dress is on display.

“Beautifully written, The Eighth Moon uses a very light touch to probe the most essential, unresolvable questions of belief, kinship, fidelity, history, and identity.”—Chris Kraus

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. 

As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present. 

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once. 

An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying.

At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.”

What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters?

Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

Finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize

An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.

Widely regarded as some of the most important and innovative poetry from postwar Europe, Tomaž Šalamun’s work offers a singularly thrilling reading experience. Sharp and subtle, Šalamun’s rhythms intertwine with an incantatory force; his prescient, liberatory politics and poetics pulse like a heartbeat. In Kiss the Eyes of Peace, the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy: friends and family talk to each other under the sun as snow, apples, and deer mingle with blood and bones, with salt and cabbage, with gold, silk, and wine, and with God and heaven in the sand and grass.

“Love tore apart all my theories,” writes Šalamun. His oracular poems, suffused with mystic pronouncements that confound and delight, are as moving as they are eerie. And yet, if “every true poet is a monster,” Šalamun’s profound imagination also offers us peace—grace, even—in the wildness and wilderness of his art: “May everything erupt on a clear day, just as it is, / into sacredness and the beauty of the gift: life.”

Translated from the Slovenian and curated by esteemed author and translator Brian Henry, and with a Foreword from award-winning author Ilya Kaminsky, this expansive arrangement is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive English-language retrospective of Šalamun’s storied career.

“My language was born among trees,
it holds the taste of earth;
my ancestors’ tongue is my home.”
—from “The Old Song of the Blood”

A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited bilingual edition, offering an expansive take on the internationally renowned work of Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in the western highlands of Guatemala.

Featuring both Ak’abal’s Spanish translations from the indigenous K’iche’ and English translations by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, this collection blossoms from the landscape of Momostenango—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. Ak’abal’s unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it.

Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

In this sweeping epic, full of love and loss, a woman from one of the last remote reindeer-herding tribes of northeastern China tells the story of her family and the last century of her country’s history.

“A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.”

At dawn, an elder sits among the birch trees while the rest of her tribe descend the mountain to permanently inhabit the town at its base. A member of the nomadic Evenki tribe, who traverse the forested mountains of China’s eastern edge with herds of reindeer, she tells the tale of her life to the rain and fire, a life lived in close communion with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. Over the course of the twentieth century, her world is pushed to the margins of empire and industrialization. But holding steadfast against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction is the elder’s abiding and tender attention to her people’s core relationships—human, animal, spiritual, environmental—which in itself becomes an act of resistance.

An illuminating translation by Bruce Humes—with an introduction by Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper—The Last Quarter of the Moon renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world. Wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention: reindeer herding and ice fishing, Shamanic songs and rites, and tallies of marriages, births, and deaths. Contending with the preservation of tradition and legacy alongside the threat of progress and displacement, acclaimed author Chi Zijian depicts lives that resist the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to the real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world. 

Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s most prestigious literary award, The Last Quarter of the Moon asserts that all is shared and interconnected, humbly challenging us to bear witness to both loss and wonder. 

A meditation on art’s longevity and the brevity of human life from the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Frail-Craft and Inmost.

Jessica Fisher brings “the faraway close,” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the name in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each “day” is marked by the hidden seams in a finished painting.

In a voice that is as poised as it is unmistakably urgent, Fisher aims to uncover what adheres against the fabric of history, and what becomes effaced over time. Her search leads her to discover signs of ruin of a different kind, and her poems begin to coalesce around a single perilous realization: that time is not merely an agent of erasure. Time is also a tether, rendering violence, beauty, grief, and art separate merely by a matter of days. “So you see once again,” she writes, “violence is to beauty / as the warp to the weft / always somewhere beneath.”

Like the fresco itself, Daywork is committed to a time- and site-specific art, and to the daily work of creation. At once an elegiac meditation and a brave unearthing, this book expertly discerns the monumentalizing portrayals of history and its violences, while boldly illuminating other crucial accounts of everyday existence.

A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.

French literary icon Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) is known for an uncanny inhabitation of the concrete, finding whole worlds, even afterlives, in daily instances and spaces. “If I could seize a little nothing / a bit of nothing,” she muses, “all things would come to me / those that dance / in its cloth.” The tiniest moments can be acts of utterance, defiance, communion, and immortality. Yet death does indeed appear in the everyday, though it’s more than a fact of existence. It is fiction as well, small cunning stories we create so we’re not merely waiting for it: “one sets / close by / the pot of orange flowers / the here and now / to block the view.”

Here, the infinitesimal has no end; the smaller life gets, the deeper and more carefully Bancquart has us pause to notice its offerings. Though for her “the body” is the surest, most trustworthy way of knowing, the mystery of language is often referenced, and reverenced. And translator Jody Gladding, an award-winning poet herself, beautifully carries forward Bancquart’s lifetime of distinctive work. Every Minute Is First is lean, lucid yet philosophical poetry, reflecting visceral life and experiential thought, walking in the dark with a light, lighting words—or alighting on them—in their own incandescent power to make the long-lived journey meaningful.

An aching meditation on the cyclical nature of grief and memory’s limited capacity to preserve everything time takes from us.

How does one make sense of loss—personal and collective? When language and memory are at capacity, where do we turn? Confronted with “a year meant to end all / those to come,” acclaimed poet Adam Clay questions whether anything is “wide enough to contain what’s left / of hope.” In the absence of a clear way forward, the poems of Circle Back wander grief’s strange and winding path. Along the way, the line between reality and dreams blurs: cows stare with otherworldly eyes, 78s play under cactus needles, a father becomes his own child, and the dead become something more complicated—a “sketch turned to painting / left in a room dusty from / lack of passing through.”

But amidst these liminal landscapes, a “thread of promise” persists in poetry. As flawed as language is, we still turn to it for longevity, for love, like “Keats, / sketching himself back into place.” Vulnerable and nuanced, Clay details the difficult work of healing—and in doing so, captures those needful moments of reprieve in grief’s “strange circle.” Two friends dashing through a sprinkler. A garden of startled birds. Out for a run some gray morning: a sudden patch of wildflowers. Circle Back is a bared heart, one readers will find as thoughtful as it is tender.

“I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp.” 

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent,” and in search of care. 

 When he is first told that his debilitating condition is likely Ménière’s Disease, but that there is “no reliable test, no reliable treatment, and no consensus on its cause,” Cotter quits teaching, stops writing, and commences upon a series of visits to doctors and treatment centers. What begins as an expedition across the country navigating and battling the limits of the American healthcare system, quickly becomes something else entirely: a journey through hopelessness and adaptation to disability. Along the way, hearing aids become inseparable from his sense of self, as does a growing understanding that the possibilities in his life are narrowing rather than expanding. And with this understanding of his own travails comes reflection on age-old questions around fate, coincidence, and making meaning of inexplicable misfortune. 

 A devastating memoir that sheds urgent, bracingly honest light on both the taboos surrounding disability and the limits of medical science, Losing Music is refreshingly vulnerable and singularly illuminating—a story that will make readers see their own lives anew.

Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Montana Book Award
Winner of the PNBA Book Award

“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.”

Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.

Here, the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive.” When her village is raided, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, she learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.

Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPR
A New York Times Bestseller
Barnes & Noble Book of the Year

Beloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil's celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations. 

As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance.

“What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts.

Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.

Issue 36 Includes:

• Poetry Translation Folios with work by Chinese poet Zhang Zhihao, translated by Yuemin He; French surrealist Joyce Mansour, translated C. Francis Fisher; and Vietnamese poet Tuę Sỹ,translated by Martha Collins and Nguyen Ba Chung.

• A feature on working class, Jewish, LA-based poet Bert Meyers.

• New Poetry by MacArthur “Genius” grant winner Campbell McGrath; Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynn Thompson; Guggenheim Fellow Michael Waters; Georgia Poet Laureate and NEA Fellow Chelsea Rathburn; Readers’ Choice Award recipient Sandra Simonds; Yellen Fellow Vandana Khanna; Cave Canem and Margaret Bridgman fellow Gary Jackson; NEA Fellow Oliver de la Paz; as well as emerging poets Rita Mookerjee, Bunkong Tuon, Zack Strait, Seif-Eldeine, Joshua Aiken, and many others.

• New Fiction by Flannery O’Connor Award winner Siamak Vossoughi, Pushcart Prize “special mentions” S. Shankar and Mike Alberti, Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellow David Ryan, Cos Barnes Fellow Julia Ridley Smith, and emerging writers Joshua Pearson and Josie Tolin.

• New Essays by Guggenheim Fellow Mark Halliday and emerging essayist Ari Ketzal.

• Cover Art by a New York–based British-Liberian visual artist, Lina Iris Viktor.

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 poets. He is a survivor of sixteen years of imprisonment and an eloquent witness to the tumult, tragedy, and resilience of his country over the last sixty years—and a full-length translation of his work into English is long overdue.

Assembled and co-translated by Vietnamese poet and essayist Nguyen Ba Chung and acclaimed American poet Martha Collins, Dreaming the Mountain reflects a lifetime of creation, crisis, and commitment. With poems presented on facing pages in Vietnamese and English, this volume includes the early imagism of Tuệ Sỹ’s Zen studies as a scholar and critic, midlife work that represents his attempted retreat from the devastation of war and subsequent years of imprisonment, and late, elliptical poems that give intensely lyrical expression to a lifetime of profound experience. From the “fleeting dream of red blood at dusk” to the quiet determination of one who sets out to “repaint the dawn,” these poems reflect the journey of an artist who speaks for his country, who captures its darkness and its light.

At once personal and universal, coolly observant and deeply compassionate, the poems of Tuệ Sỹ bring singular attention to a fleeting, painfully beautiful world.

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 raps encounter essays, the lyric constellations that mark this debut sing in opposition to those “troubled-abled” who would coerce and control disabled lives.

Boukaila offers another way: her “LOL tressed philosophy,” her truth. This liberatory philosophy exists at the periphery, thresholding, in all the places where life opens toward neurodivergent revolution. “Treasures thrive in open spreading spaces,” she writes. From the muddy streams shimmering with trout, to the space storms in the starry skies, to the tressing that exists between minds, Boukaila offers us a chance to make mistakes, to be messy, to learn and unlearn the languages we use to survive. 

Readers seeking “treasures yet to be uncovered” will find this and more in this expansive collection.

Selected by Maggie Smith for the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, this debut collection of poems explores the aftermath of history’s most powerful forces: devotion, disaster, and us.

Rooted in the Gulf Coast, A History of Half-Birds measures the line between love and ruin. Part poet, part anthropologist, Caroline Harper New digs into dark places—a cave, a womb, a hurricane—to trace how violence born of devotion manifests not only in our human relationships, but also in our connections to the natural and animal worlds. Everywhere in these pages, tenderness is coupled with brutality: a deer eats a baby bird, a lover restrains another. “I promised / a love poem,” New proclaims, then teaches us about the anglerfish, how it “attracts its mate / and prey with the same lure.”

In New’s exceptional voice, familiar concepts take on a shade of the fantastic. A woman tastes the earth for acidity, buries lemons and pennies for balance. Limestone “sucks the sea / into little demitasse” and hyacinths “sip the sun / black.” A lone elephant wanders into the wilderness of rural Georgia, never to be seen again. But perhaps most arresting about New’s work are the truths told by its strangeness, like the ancient fish who “carved their shape” in a mountain’s peak, or a mother who wears a lifejacket in the bathtub.

Crafted by New’s voracious mind and carried by her matchless lyricism, A History of Half-Birds is a stunning investigation of love’s beastly impulses—all it protects, and all it destroys.

The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas.

In a fiercely personal yet authoritative voice, prolific contemporary poet Mikeas Sánchez explores the worldview of the Zoque people of southern Mexico. Her paced, steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant. “I am woman and I celebrate every vein,” she writes, “where I guard my ancestors’ secrets / every Zoque man’s word in my mouth / every Zoque woman’s wisdom in my spit.”

How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems examines the intersection of Zoque struggles against colonialism and empire, and those of North African immigrants and refugees. Sánchez encountered the latter in Barcelona as a revelation, “spreading their white blankets on the ground / as if they’ll soon return to sea / flying the sail of the promised land / the land that became a mirage.” Other works bring us just as close to similarly imperiled relatives, ancestors, gods, and archetypal Zoque men and women that Sánchez addresses with both deeply prophetic and childlike love.

Coming from the only woman to ever publish a book of poetry in Zoque and Spanish, this timely, powerful collection pairs the bilingual originals with an English translation for the first time. This book is for anyone interested in poetry as knowledge, proclaimed with both feet squarely set on ancient ground.

The How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems audiobook read by Mikeas Sánchez, Wendy Call, and Shook is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.