Poetry

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience.

With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba.

El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

Pushing the boundaries of Latinx literature and what constitutes a borderlands poetics.

Throughout Roberto Tejada’s body of work, the renowned poet and celebrated critic has explored themes of Latinx culture, politics, history, language, and ecologies. In his latest collection, Why the Assembly Disbanded, he presents a unique contribution to Latinx letters that reflects on the relations between the United States and Latin America, especially their real and symbolic borderlands.

Immersive, postmodern, and philosophical, Why the Assembly Disbanded provides an associative, critical Latinx aesthetic connecting the Mexico–United States borderlands to Latin America’s neo-baroque heritage. Migrants, settlers, tourists, and exiles moving across various hemispheric landscapes are featured in these exuberant, capacious, and self-reflexive poems. Tejada relates the ravages of white supremacy in our culture that, together with immigrant precarity, turn home into a place of foreboding and impending eviction, even as a dream-weather makes room at last for scenes of possibility and attainment in the account of human history.

The sweeping futuristic vistas open on to narratives of colonial extraction, human displacement, abuses of capitalism, mass media spectacle, the antagonism of language and technical images in the sensorium of urban and digital life-worlds, and the relations of desire encouraged by pictures and words in the economy of attention. Los Angeles and Mexico City figure prominently in poems committed to voicing modes of formation and community in an intersectional reckoning of personhoods prompted in work by artists Betye Saar, Amiri Baraka, Connie Samaras, and Rubén Ortiz Torres.

With language given to pageantry, tonal precision, and a hopeful lyric radiance that can accommodate ecstasy and justice, Roberto Tejada’s carnivalesque, borderland imagery pushes the boundaries of Latinx literature. World-building by way of reverie, speculation, and retro-futurist tableaux, and with vivid, sometimes violent particularity, his poems enact hallucinatory realities of the hemisphere: an imagination that triangulates history, lyricism, and art as social practice.

Selected Poems (1923) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Dedicated to Edward Thomas, a friend of Frost’s and an important English poet who died toward the end of the First World War, Selected Poems is a wonderful sampling of poems from Frost’s early collections, including A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Known for his plainspoken language and dedication to the images and rhythms of rural New England, Robert Frost is one of America’s most iconic poets, a voice to whom generations of readers have turned in search of beauty, music, and life.

“Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and simple music. In “After Apple-Picking,” as fall gives over to winter, the poet remembers in dreams how the “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end” as he climbs the ladder into the heart of the tree. Both a symbol for life and a metaphor for the poetic act, apple picking leaves the poet “overtired / Of the great harvest [he himself] desired”, awaiting sleep as he describes “its coming on,” wondering what, if anything, it will bring. “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, is a meditation on fate and free will that follows a traveler in an autumn landscape, unsure of which path to take, but certain he cannot stand still.

This edition of Robert Frost’s Selected Poems is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

The Emily Dickinson Collection (2021) compiles some of the best-known works of an icon of American poetry. Out of nearly two-thousand poems discovered after her death, less than a dozen appeared in print during Dickinson’s lifetime. Drawn from such influential posthumous volumes as Poems (1902) and The Single Hound (1914), The Emily Dickinson Collection captures the spiritual depths, celebratory heights, and impenetrable mystery of Dickinson’s poetic gift. “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate, / Whose table once a Guest, but not / The second time, is set.” Deeply aware of the fleeting nature of fame, Dickinson—whose reputation in life was as a lonely eccentric who rarely, if ever, left home—seems to provide some clarity as to why publication so often eluded her. Having published just ten poems in her lifetime, Dickinson continued to write in solitude until her final years. Her final word on fame is a warning, perhaps, for poets whose fate would differ from her own: “Men eat of it and die.” Despite her admonishing tone, she found space elsewhere to muse on the nature of literary achievement, recognizing that obscurity could incidentally produce the conditions for a poet to produce their most vital work: “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” Throughout her life, Emily Dickinson showed a profound respect for the mysteries of worldly existence. In her poems, this creates an atmosphere of prayer and contemplation, a search for something beyond the simple answers: “Some things that fly there be, — / Birds, hours, the bumble-bee: / Of these no elegy.” Amid such fleeting things, she catches a glimpse of eternity.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Essential poems devoted to the power of language to pull us closer to Nature and each other.

In her sixth poetry collection, award-winning writer Alison Hawthorne Deming extends her exploration of the meanings of nature into the tensions of our political and ecological moment. Whether traveling to a biological field station in the Canadian Maritimes, ruins of the Temple at Delphi, community gardens in Havana, the Sonoran Desert’s spring bloom, or eruptions of violence in America, she finds in art healing reciprocities between beauty and devastation. The title refers to crops that grow on farmland in North Dakota where our subterranean nuclear missiles await deployment in their silos. The image epitomizes the tensions that underlie our ordinary days. And yet in these poems she finds “light having an edge over darkness.” Poet and naturalist, celebrant and elegist, Deming’s poems pay homage to “every organism’s joy to thrive,” every poem an act of defiance against human cruelty.

Hurricane Sisters, award-winning poet Ginger Andrews’ second collection, contains poems of fierce candor and sharp, unique awareness from the perspective of Andrews herself, a cleaning woman in North Bend, Oregon. These Carver-esque insights into the everyday of the American working class balance grief, depression, lust, poverty, and, above all, faith; not in something beyond or higher than the living experience, but in a spirituality amidst the material truths of this world, even under the grimmest of circumstances. Hurricane Sisters stares into the holy, the barbaric, the beautiful and the hideous, the realities of blue-collar Americana, with the frankness and empathy of a survivor and a believer. It sees everything and never averts its eyes.

"The presiding spirit behind Ginger Andrews first book, An Honest Answer, must be William Carlos Williams. When he said he wrote in the speech of Polish mothers, he could have included the American working class anywhere. The sinewy resilience in Andrews’ individual poems honors the tradition of his free verse lyrics. She listens for the poetic measure in American speech and reproduces it in unique forms. I would venture to say that the poetry of Ginger Andrews is as close to the tradition of Williams as American free verse has ever been. . . . As for the voice speaking to us in these poems, it is as fresh as Ray Carver seemed twenty-five years ago. Another poet who comes to mind is her fellow Northwesterner Vern Rutsala, himself a descendent of Williams, who, like Williams, has kept his eye on the working poor throughout his career. Andrews is working class, born again in Sappho, an Ahkmatova who cleans houses and teaches Sunday school. These figures come to mind not for the sake of hyperbole, but to help understand the originality of this new and remarkable poet."
—Mark Jarman

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.     

Peripheral Vision, Susan Kinsolving’s fourth book of poems, explores the world from many points of view. She takes her readers to England, Hollywood, Wyoming, France, and Chile. She goes behind the scenes in a military hospital, an elementary school, and a disturbed family. Her poems were described in the New Yorker as “grand and almost terrifying.” In this new collection, she proves herself again. As a guest poet and lecturer, Kinsolving has performed at numerous venues, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale University, as well as Bad Robot in Santa Monica and Bread Loaf in Vermont.

The contributors to Both Sides Face East see a portion of their world that is often invisible. Translation across languages and cultures may bridge the gap between the seen and the unseen, the speakable and the unspeakable. Responding to the urgent demand for translation and understanding raises an important question: What will endure? This book answers with poetry, stories, documentation, and evidence of resilience from Ukraine and beyond.

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. 

Hand-traced poems that enact literary criticism atop historical writings of “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells.

Goose is a collection of hand-traced visual poems made using found text and images from the 1938 and 1956 editions of Northland Trails, a book of self-illustrated short stories, poems, and essays about the Athabasca region by “father of the tar sands” S. C. Ells (1878–1971). Goose takes Ells’s early work surveying, mining, and separating bituminous sand, along with his colonial, racist, and sexist attitudes and aesthetics, as the starting point for an inventive and biting critique of the oil-sands industry and our petromodern energy system.

Inverting found-poetry erasure and procedural techniques to explore themes of extraction, the trace, and the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the land, Goose enacts irreverent, deconstructive literary criticism. At turns cheeky, sharp-witted, and grave, Unrau's poems retrace Ells’s steps, pen strokes, and conscious and unconscious lines of thought and flight to write a new history of the oil sands.

Splendid and surprising prose poems from one of Norway's most imaginative poets

The sixty-one prose poems collected in The Mountains of Kong find magic in the little absurdities of everyday life and are populated by an unpredictable cast that includes kings and codfish and elephants, a couple looking for a surrogate for their tears, and a lemming on the run.

Presented here in both English translations and their original Nynorsk, and with an introduction by acclaimed poet Stuart Ross, Straumsvåg’s poems are a new kind of map that will deliver you to places you’ve never imagined.

Half of What They Carried Flew Away is a text that resists containment or categorization. Could it be called a book? Not exactly. It is, rather, a document. It is field notes toward phenomenological beings – an enigmatic and evermorphing They – that are something between human and non-human, somewhere between concept and place, sometime between primordial and the everyday. Or it is scripture, yet to be consecrated, telling of a group always at the margins, peripheral, transitory, and engaged in a migration one might sense abstractly – “a material that reorders the shape of a room” – but will never define absolutely. Even when Rexilius’s speaker discovers “official definitions of who they are,” the reader is no closer to any such conclusions.

It’s in these embodied contradictions that Andrea Rexilius’s text shines. Here is a difficult and disorienting record of characters, and the impossible facts of their existence. Here is a history, fractured and disparate. Here “is a landscape, it has a beginning. It fastens and unfastens from top to bottom.”

Jessica Laser’s debut full-length collection of poetry

There’s a scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace in which two people fall in love at a dinner party while the rest of the company makes small talk about the military general Sergei Kuzmich, who only appears in this scene. Kuzmich had repeatedly broken down in tears of joy in front of the state council, trying to read aloud a commendatory letter from the sovereign that began, “Sergei Kuzmich! From all sides rumors reach me…” Those not involved in falling in love at the party laugh, appearing involved in this gossip, but, as Tolstoy describes it, “no matter how indifferent or inattentive to them they seemed, the feeling for some reason was…that the anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich, and the laughter, and the food were all a pretense, and all the power of attention of the entire company was directed only at this couple.”

Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides takes a poem to be a kind of pretense, an “anecdote about Sergei Kuzmich,” the thing we say when we can’t talk about being in love. And we can never talk about being in love, because, as psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says, “it is not the kind of thing that can be known (it isn’t information).” These poems aim to reach beyond information—to speak from where Sergei Kuzmich leaves off—in order to give voice to the kinds of experience that, to become knowable, require the pretense of art.

Something for the Dark centres Indigenous knowledge to probe the limits of what we know, confront the unknown, and reckon with our place in the world.
Randy Lundy’s newest collection of poetry—the final in a trilogy that began with Blackbird Song and continued with Field Notes for the Self—turns his poems toward our relationships with the land, animals, and people, showing how our failures to see and live by the personhood of all other beings in the world, human and non-human, leads inevitably to heartbreak.
 
As Lundy’s poems accumulate like snow on cedar, his recounting of experiences that transcend language invites the reader to bend their understanding and notice what was once unseen—how a red-winged blackbird clings to a swaying reed, how mist rises after rainfall, how dogs keen and howl, how fingers taste bitter after lighting sage, how hunger smarts, how liquor burns, and how the pain survivors carry is not merely their own.

Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? This Isa Nice Neighborhood , Farid Matuk’s first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined.

This Isa Nice Neighborhood has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards, named a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America, and chosen by Geoffrey G. O’

This prose-poem sequence opens with the following sentence: “Scenes left on the cutting room floor flower into their own scenery.”

Such an auspiciously suggestive start functions as a distillation of the book’s prismatic echo chamber, where painterly lyricism and narrative probing converge within each musically astute sentence. This is a symphony of partial happenings, ghostly movements, and investigatory ruminations, a stroll through an exhibit of paintings that seem to stare back at the viewer: captivating, gorgeous, and just a little bit scary.

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, “Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace.” Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period : Notebooks, 1998–2007 would like to be something more interesting. Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes.
The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it. Kunin’s grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.

Clark Coolidge, in reference to his own poems, writes, “We are accustomed to regard words in only one way—as vehicle. My experiments invite you to regard words as an object—or more exactly, as an organism, with patterns of existing that are specific to itself, inexplicable and marvelous.”

More Radiant Signal, by Juliana Leslie, is a book of poems with patterns of existing, both inexplicable and marvelous. Like Coolidge, Leslie regards words as an object, as an organism, as structural units apart from their typical semantics. And in this way, Leslie builds, poem by poem, an alternative poetic literacy—idiosyncratic and highly self-aware—that prioritizes the tangible.

These poems exist in a category somewhere between mathematical proofs and textual sculpture. Either way, every page offers a unique composition: things to be figured, felt, weighed, measured, but never interpreted. (Interpretation is too removed, requires too many middlemen.) “You are the textual orange / between presence and absence” Leslie writes, interpolating radical sensation into a pair of familiar abstractions. Yet it’s the four preceding lines—of the poem “Unknown Quantity”—that mark the true engagement of this work: “How many ways to exist? / I don’t have a pencil / as if I could write this / I can’t even think.”

In Alphabetica, Juliet Mattila guides readers through a poetic journey that captures moments of clarity and introspection within the intricate landscapes of memory, art, and nature. Her deft language and keen observation bring to life the invisible spectrum of emotions and experiences that define human existence. Through carefully crafted lines and a reflective voice, Mattila examines themes both personal and universal, inviting readers to see the world anew. This collection resonates with a timeless legacy, blending tradition with insight and paying homage to poetic forms while exploring contemporary depths. Alphabetica is a work that challenges and rewards, inviting readers who seek meaning in layered expressions of language.

The 25th-Anniversary Edition of DEBT, the National Poetry Series Winner and debut poetry collection by Mark Levine. With a new introduction by Srikanth Reddy.

"The velocity of these poems will induce motion sickness in some readers, and exhilaration in others. But Levine's aerial acrobatics always return us, largely intact, to common ground. It might even be sacred ground. For all its existentialist pratfalls and murderous chicanery, Debt is a profoundly elegiac work, from its dedicatory epitaph to the final poem's darkling closure. Our heaviest debt, the most timeless poems remind us, is to the historical dead."--Srikanth Reddy, from the new introduction

In Contrapposto, Lori Lucas invites people into a world where art, music, and life converge in dazzling harmony. This follow-up to her celebrated debut, Chiaroscuro, is a collection rich in emotion and brimming with insight. Through vivid imagery and lyrical storytelling, Lucas takes you on an evocative journey across cities like Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Barcelona, weaving universal themes of love, friendship, and wonder into poems that resonate deeply.

From meditations on iconic paintings to melodies that linger long after the music ends, Contrapposto is a celebration of the beauty and complexity of the human experience. Perfect for art lovers, music enthusiasts, and poetry aficionados, this collection is an invitation to laugh, cry, and marvel at the world.

Whether one is seeking inspiration or a moment of quiet reflection, these poems speak to the heart, making Contrapposto a timeless companion for anyone who treasures the magic of words.

Siente cada palabra como un latido.

Hay dolores que se llevan en el corazón, aunque los demás no puedan verlos; heridas que permanecen abiertas en el alma porque el recuerdo no las deja cicatrizar. Para Gilraen Eärfalas, la mejor manera de sanarlas es a través de la poesía.

Esta nueva edición de su aclamado poemario Desfibrilador incluye más de una veintena de nuevos poemas en los que explora la esencia del desamor, afronta el vacío que deja y encuentra una forma de salvarse mediante la escritura.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Feel every word like a heartbeat.

There are pains carried in the heart, even if others cannot see them; wounds that remain open in the soul because memories prevent them from healing. For Gilraen Eärfalas, the best way to heal them is through poetry.

This new edition of her acclaimed poetry collection Desfibrilador includes over twenty new poems in which she explores the essence of heartbreak, confronts the void it leaves behind, and finds a way to save herself through writing.

Esta colección debut de poesía exige la abolición de la vigilancia policial y el encarcelamiento humano. En Diarios de Terrorista Christopher Soto usa el pronombre "nosotros" para enfatizar que la violencia policial no solo afecta a individuos, sino a comunidades enteras.

Su poética abre la imaginación hacia posibilidades de existencia más allá del status quo. Soto pregunta: "¿A quién llamamos terrorista y por qué?" Estos poemas, de surrealismo político, se mueven entre la vulnerabilidad desgarradora, el humor que hace reír a carcajadas y la irreverencia punk queer sin disculpas. Diarios de un Terrorista es innovador en su capacidad para hablar, desde una escala local hasta una global, sobre uno de los problemas más importantes de nuestro tiempo.

Poemas escritos entre 1983 y 1986. El poeta mira, imagina, evoca la profecía apocalíptica cumplida durante los dos grandes terremotos de 1985.

La desastrosa mañana de aquel septiembre de 1985 «la tierra que destruimos se hizo presente». Un fatídico terremoto demostró «hasta qué punto nos aborrece la tierra: / nos ve como insectos / torturadores que la roen por dentro». Su devastadora venganza puso en evidencia que «es el nombre profundo de la muerte». Los sobrevivientes «¿vamos a hacer / otra ciudad, otro país, otra vida? / De otra manera seguirá el derrumbe».

Renovador constante del quehacer poético, en Miro la Tierra —reunión de poemas escritos entre 1984 y 1986—, José Emilio Pacheco le otorgó un nuevo valor a la poesía al poner de manifiesto sus facultades de crónica y testimonio: acto de justicia histórica hacia quienes nos legaron la consigna de recordarlos.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Poems written between 1983 and 1986. The poet observes, imagines, and evokes the apocalyptic prophecy fulfilled during the two major earthquakes of 1985.

On that disastrous morning of September 1985, "the land we destroyed made itself present." A fateful earthquake revealed "to what extent the earth loathes us: / it sees us as insects / torturers gnawing it from the inside." Its devastating vengeance laid bare that it "is the profound name of death." The survivors ask, "Are we going to build / another city, another country, another life? / Otherwise, the collapse will continue."

A constant innovator of poetic practice, in Miro la Tierra—a collection of poems written between 1984 and 1986—José Emilio Pacheco bestowed new value upon poetry by highlighting its capacity as chronicle and testimony: a historical act of justice toward those who left us the mandate to remember them.

Poemas escritos entre 1979 y 1983, se trata de la bitácora de un sobreviviente de la tempestad que fue el siglo XX.

«Todo es efímero y jamás se repite», afirma José Emilio Pacheco para recordarnos la brevedad de nuestro tránsito por la tierra. Asumimos que «el mar se habrá cambiado en desierto / cuando ya no [estemos] aquí para mirarlo y amarlo», pero olvidamos que esa condición fugaz es la que le da un matiz extraordinario a la existencia: «todo es valioso porque todo es irrepetible».

Los trabajos del mar reúne poemas escritos entre 1979 y 1983. En ellos José Emilio Pacheco concilia la tradición grecolatina y oriental con la poesía norteamericana objetivista, en un libro entrañable que nos invita a aprehender el instante fugaz.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Poems written between 1979 and 1983, this is the journal of a survivor of the storm that was the 20th century.

"Everything is ephemeral and never repeats," states José Emilio Pacheco, reminding us of the brevity of our time on Earth. We assume that "the sea will have turned to desert / when we are no longer here to see and love it," but we forget that this fleeting condition is what gives existence its extraordinary hue: "everything is valuable because everything is unrepeatable."

Los trabajos del mar brings together poems written between 1979 and 1983. In them, José Emilio Pacheco reconciles the Greco-Latin and Eastern traditions with Objectivist North American poetry, in a heartfelt book that invites us to grasp the fleeting moment.

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)

———

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 memory of Wilson’s grandfather 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.

Using images of the great American West and the highways that connect it, she charts a path through landscapes of disenfranchisement toward self-determination and agency. Throughout the collection, self-driving redefines freedom as both a state and a mindset. In a bold declaration, Fagin writes: “I knew my rights / were all the rights, my freedoms all the freedoms,” embodying a call for expansive liberation. This collection is a powerful exploration of identity, impermanence, and the boundless possibilities of reimagined narratives.

“Jasmine Reid writes a shapeful, theoretical work involved in the rigorous attending to emergent selves and the languages made in calling them into being.” —aracelis girmay

Interlocutor Goddess explores the creation of a trans language for selfhood within an exilic state of "ecstatic grief."

Her poetry employs a trans-lyricism, weaving together dual meanings through homonyms, homophones, and portmanteaus to create a layered, fugitive language that resists rigid classifications. At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.