Copper nickel issue 42

Remember the bees

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

Banbas/exile

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

North american stadiums

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

Tressing motions at the edge of mistakes

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

Good night, mr. wodehouse

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

Vestments

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

Metamorphosis

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

North to katahdin

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

An american child supreme

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

A little gaelic kingdom

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

I love information

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

Hope, human and wild

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

Wound from the mouth of a wound

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

Birthstones in the province of mercy

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

House of caravans

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

The tarball chronicles

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

The nature of college

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

Black observatory

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

Copper nickel

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

Fiction on a stick

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

The salt stones

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

Translations from bark beetle

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

The silenced

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

Aquaboogie

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

Winter stranger

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

Being esther

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

In winter's kitchen

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

Dreaming the mountain

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

Four reincarnations

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

Two of everything

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

Rising

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

North american odyssey

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

Copper nickel (27)

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

The tree of the doves

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

Thirst

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

Graceland, at last

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

The nine senses

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

Sea summit

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

Dream wheels

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

Glass armonica

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

Atlas

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

Orion you came and you took all my marbles

Immediately captivating, Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles introduces readers to Finley, an investigator of indiscernible origins and prowess who is assigned to a mysterious Professor Uppal and his puppets. The nature of the investigation isn’t clear, but Finley nonetheless forges ahead,...

To make room for the sea

“That’s the magic of this book—the way Adam Clay, line after line, enacts the mind on the page.” —MAGGIE SMITH

Cures for hunger

“A moving story of rebellion, lost love, criminal daring, and restless searching.”—Leonard Gardner, author of Fat City

Visiting hours at the color line

“I am incapable of succinctly praising this poet’s immense talent.” —TERRANCE HAYESOften the most recognized, even brutal, events in American history are segregated by a politicized, racially divided “Color Line.” But how do we privately experience the most troubling features of American civiliza...

Gardenias

It's 1942, just a month after the United States entered World War II. Lark, her mother Arlene, and Aunt Betty are in a station changing trains, leaving their lives in Harvester, Minnesota behind, and waiting for the train going to Los Angeles. Young men—soldiers—swarm the platform, heading off to...

Night unto night

“Luminous . . . Collins renders the most humbling, gorgeous, and inscrutable features of human existence as if they might be made legible.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Seeking the cave

Born and raised with the kind of expectations that often accompany privilege, Jim Lenfestey approached his thirtieth birthday in a state of acute anxiety. A young family and a demanding work life on one hand, and a burgeoning love for poetry on the other. When an independent bookseller discerns L...

I am death

Exploring the paranoia and bravura of the modern American male, these powerful novellas depict a realm marked by faltering blunders, misguided intentions, and the fear of failure. At once comical and terrifying, “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster” charts the slumped career of a muckraking journ...

The shame

“A delicious, important moral corrective of a novel for our moment of performance, obsessive witnessing, and self-doubt, written in gripping and beautiful prose.” —SHEILA HETI

The arriviste

A wealthy man’s bitter decline takes a sinister turn in this “slow-burn noir” of love, greed, and deceit in 1970s New York (Washington Post Book World).Neil Fox has made a fortune off the “head we win / tails you lose” venture capital deals negotiated by his brother, costing him almost everything...

Walking the ojibwe path

“A wonderful place to start if you’ve never read Wagamese, a must-read if you have, and an indispensable read for everyone.” —LITERARY HUB

Vandal love

An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centurie...

Short film starring my beloved’s red bronco

Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess for the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, is an aching tribute to the power and precarity of queer love. In small-town Mississippi, before the aughts, a child “assigned ‘woman’” and a boy “forced to call / himself a girl” l...

Discovering pig magic

Discovering Pig Magic follows the exploits of Mattie (or Miss M, or just M) and her friends Ariel and Nicki as they attempt to overcome the problems that plague their 13-year-old lives. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire...

Siege 13

These stories follow ordinary people caught between the pincers of aggressors, leading to actions at once deplorable, perplexing, and heroic.Built around the events of the Soviet Budapest Offensive at the end of World War II and its long shadow, the stories in Siege 13 are full of wit, irony, and...

Views from the loft

Founded nearly four decades ago by a group of young writers, the Loft has become our nation’s largest independent literary center. The dream animating its inception—to build a community of writers and readers—has borne remarkable fruit, and today the Loft’s community extends from its home in Minn...

Mamaskatch

“Powerful and overdue . . . The hard and brilliant life breathing on [these] pages brought me to tears, to joy, and to grace.” —TERESE MARIE MAILHOT, AUTHOR OF HEART BERRIES

The keening

Born into a family with artistry in their fingers, Lyza laments that her only talent is carving letters into wood. That is until her life is turned upside down when her mother succumbs to the influenza pandemic of 1918, which is devastating their small coastal town in Maine. With her mother gone,...

No place

Having no place to play in their run-down inner city neighborhood, twelve-year-old Arturo and the other children in his sixth-grade class decide to turn a vacant lot into a playground. At first even Arturo thinks his idea might be stupid. His brother and the other gang members in Los Vatos Locos ...

Return flight

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Te...

Coming home crazy

Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Writing about traditions that endure in rural areas as well as the bureaucratic absurdities an American teacher and traveler experiences in the 1980s...

Dangerous goods

WINNER OF THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDFrom the poet whose stunning debut was praised as “transcendent” by Kevin Young and “steadily confident” by Carl Phillips, Dangerous Goods tracks its speaker throughout North America and abroad, illuminating the ways in which home and place may inhabit one anothe...

[...]

Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry PrizeA Reading the West Book Award FinalistFrom one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, an urgent and essential collection of poems illuminating the visionary presence of Palestinians.Fady Joudah’s power...

Meltwater

National Book Foundation Science + Literature SelectionFinalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardFinalist for the 2024 Minnesota Book AwardLonglisted for the Julie Suk AwardA haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue ...

Real phonies and genuine fakes

What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?Nicky Beer’s latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its...

Soil and spirit

As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. A leader in the international Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement, he has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humbl...

The long-shining waters

MILKWEED NATIONAL FICTION PRIZE WINNERINDIE HEARTLAND BESTSELLERONE BOOK SOUTH DAKOTA SELECTIONMINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FINALISTMIDWEST BOOKSELLERS BOOK AWARD FINALISTGrey Rabbit, an Ojibwe woman living by Lake Superior in 1622, is a mother and wife whose dream-life has taken on fearful dimensions. A...

Wu wei

Tom Crawford's words paint familiar landscapes—Seattle's coastline, New York's public spaces, rural China, and Western mobile homes—in a new light. In poems as humorous as they are revelatory, sea birds careen off cliff walls "Then back/to the water to consider/where they went wrong," nudes are s...

Saga boy

“Singularly dazzling . . . A brilliant collage of the twenty-first century’s most incredible memoirs.” —KIESE LAYMON

Trudy

Trudy’s parents are older than other kids’ parents. As she enters middle school, Ma and Pop are in their sixties and seventies—so old, in fact, that most people mistake them for her grandparents. As if that isn’t complicated enough, Trudy’s also having a hard time at school. Math class isn’t goin...

Willow room, green door

In her highly anticipated new collection, Deborah Keenan sifts through inanimate objects and forgotten memories in search of personal validation. Her journal-like confessions create an instant bond with the reader, yet these seemingly simple poems daringly redefine common language. Keenan skillfu...

The book of kin

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

Stranger

“Heartbreakingly stunning.” —ADA LIMÓNElegant and contemplative, Adam Clay’s third collection of poems explores what it means for our lives to change—dwelling on the moments decisions are made, and the repercussions we grow with afterward.A move. A new job. The birth of a child. In these intimate...

The river you touch

“We are matter and long to be received by an Earth that conceived us, which accepts and reconstitutes us, its children, each of us, without exception, every one. The journey is long, and then we start homeward, fathomless as to what home might make of us.”When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the lite...

Besaydoo

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with “a story pulsing in every blood cell.” I...

Trace

Eric Pankey’s arresting ninth collection of poems, Trace, sits at the threshold between faith and doubt—between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical.In Trace, Pankey creates images of both stark beauty and stark truth. The skeleton of a b...

Cold pastoral

A searing, urgent collection of poems centered around the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Walking the high ridge

“Teaches us how to be the best kind of human beings.” —ECLECTICAAs a boy in Colorado, Robert Michael Pyle fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took Pyle across the globe—until he realized that...

Games for children

“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 SeriesRadiant with a tenderness that is only...

Copper nickel issue 39

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,...

Slant

Lauren, a Korean American adoptee, is best friends with the prettiest girl in school. Julie has an endless amount of confidence. Lauren doesn’t. It’s not that she wants to look like everyone else in her suburban Connecticut school—she’d just be happy if Sean, the cutest boy in her class, noticed ...

Skin

“A testament to watchfulness.” — NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The war on science

"Wherever the people are well informed," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "they can be trusted with their own government." But what happens when they are not? In every issue of modern society—from climate change to vaccinations, transportation to technology, health care to defense—we are in the midst of a...

The suspension of time

Completed in 1974, and standing over six feet tall and fourteen feet wide, The Fulbright Triptych is widely considered a masterpiece of contemporary art: a striking family tableau rendered in vivid detail on three wood panels, which has quietly inspired, exhorted, and challenged its viewers for y...

Losing music

“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 vertig...

Rinkeldekinkel

A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.

Feeld

“Irreplaceable and enticing . . . The future of American poetry.” —STEPHANIE BURT

Behind the bedroom wall

It is 1942. Korinna, a thirteen-year-old girl in Germany, is an active member of the local Jungmadel, a Nazi youth group, along with many of her friends. She believes that Hitler is helping Germany by dealing with what he calls the “Jewish problem,” a campaign that she witnesses as her Jewish nei...

The worlds we think we know

“A profound debut from a writer of great talent.”—Adam Johnson

All us beautiful monsters

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 t...

Into the sun

When a car explodes in a crowded part of Kabul ten years after 9/11, a Japanese-American journalist is shocked to discover that the passengers were acquaintances—three fellow ex-pats who had formed an unlikely love triangle.Alexandra was a human rights lawyer for imprisoned Afghan women. Justin w...

A small boat at the bottom of the sea

The perfect summer-reading adventure for boys, this contemporary novel features twelve-year-old Donovan, asked by his dad to spend the summer in Puget Sound with an aunt and uncle he barely knows. Aunt Hattie is ill with cancer, and she and Uncle Bix need some support. The trouble is, only Donova...