Copper Canyon Press – förlag

“This may be the most anticipated poetry book of the last decade...expect it to haunt you.”—NPR.org

"Richard Siken writes about love, desire, violence, and eroticism with a cinematic brilliance and urgency."—Huffington Post

In reviewing Richard Siken''s first book, Crush, the New York Times wrote that "his territory is [where] passion and eloquence collide and fuse." In this long-awaited follow-up to Crush, Siken turns toward the problems of making and representation, in an unrelenting interrogation of our world of doublings. In this restless, swerving book simple questions—such as, Why paint a bird?—are immediately complicated by concerns of morality, human capacity, and the ways we look to art for meaning and purpose while participating in its—and our own—invention.

"Slippery, magnetic riffs on the arbitrary divisions made by the human mind in light of the mathematical abstractions that delete them; poetry lovers will want to read."—Library Journal, starred review

"[P]oems of passion, examining what it means to love, to be, and to create."—Vanity Fair

"Siken’s stark, startling collection focuses tightly on both the futility and the importance of creating art."—Booklist

“Poems primarily about painting and representation give way to images that become central characters in a sequence of fable-like pieces. Animals, landscapes, objects, and an array of characters serve as sites for big, human questions to play out in distilled form. Siken’s sense of line has become more uniform, this steadiness punctuated by moments of cinematic urgency.”—Publishers Weekly

"War of the Foxes builds upon the lush and frantic magic of Richard Siken’s first book, Crush. In this second book, Siken takes breathtaking control of the rich, varied material he has chosen...Siken paints and erases—the metaphor of painting with words allows him to leave those traces that mostly go unseen. He is the Trickster. If paint/then no paint. He does this with astonishing candor and passion."—The Rumpus

The Museum

Two lovers went to the museum and wandered the rooms.He saw a painting and stood in front of itfor too long. It was a few minutes before sherealized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck lookingat a painting. She stood next to him, looking at hisface and then the face in the painting. What do yousee? she asked. I don''t know, he said. He didn''tknow. She was disappointed, then bored. He waslooking at a face and she was looking at her watch.This is where everything changed . . .

Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and filmmaker. His first book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets'' prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

"In Young''s work, the big essential questions—mortality, identity, the meaning of life—aren''t simply food for thought; they''re grounds for entertainment."—Toronto Star

"Surrealism seldom seems as much like real life as in Young''s hilarious and cautionary poems."—Booklist

Bender gathers a generous selection of new work along with treasure from Dean Young''s twelve volumes. Strongly influenced by Surrealism, Dean Young''s poems flash with extravagant imagery, humorous speech, sly views of the quotidian, and the exposed nerves of heartache. As the American Academy of Arts and Letters raved, "Young''s poems are as entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch. He is one of the most inventive and satisfying poets writing today."

From "Even Funnnier Looking Now":

If someone had asked me then,Do you suffer from the umbrage of dawn''sdark race horses, is your heart a prisonerof raindrops? Hell yes! I would have saidor No way! Never would I have said,What could you possibly be talking about?I had just gotten to the twentieth centurylike a leftover girder from the Eiffel Tower.My Indian name was Pressure-Per-Square-Inch.I knew I was made of glass but I didn''tyet know what glass was made of: hot sandinside me like pee going all the wrongdirections, probably into my heartwhich I knew was made of gold foilglued to dust . . .

A politically urgent yet timeless collection that studiesthe devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.

“Poetry,” writes best-selling author Ellen Bass, “is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray. It’s the way I embody my love for the world.”

The Human Line, Bass’ seventh book of poems, startles with its precise detail, intimate images, and wild metaphors. Bass brings attention to life’s endearing absurdities, and many of the poems flash with a keen sense of humor. She also faces many of the crucial moral dilemmas of our time—genetic engineering, environmental issues, continuous war, heterosexism—and grounds her vision in the small, private workings of the heart.

 . . . When I get home,my son has a headache, and though he’salmost grown, asks me to sing him a song.We lie together on the lumpy couchand I warble out the old show tunes, Night and Day . . .They Can’t Take That Away from Me . . . A cheapsilver chain shimmers across his throatrising and falling with his pulse. There never wasanything else. Only these excruciatinglyinsignificant creatures we love.

Ellen Bass is co-author of the million-selling book Courage to Heal. She lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, California.

"Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."—Harvard Review

"One of our finest and most acclaimed poets."—Booklist

"Charged with making the darkness visible, Bell''s ''Dead Man'' sometimes glows with an eerily illuminating light."—Publishers Weekly

Marvin Bell is one of America''s great poets, and his legacy includes the invention of a startling poetic form called the "Dead Man" poems. The Dead Man is alive and dead at once: not a persona, but an overarching consciousness, embedded in poetics and philosophy. Vertigo is the latest from the Dead Man—a brilliant, enigmatic, wise, and wild book.

The dead man stands still, waiting for the boomerang to—you know.He hears the words of philosophers ricochet among chasms and     disappear in the far away.His scent goes forth, his old skin, hair and nails, and he spits, too.He leans forward to look backward, and the ancient world reappears.It is the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new,before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief.Anything he says now are souvenirs of the future…

Marvin Bell has published seventeen books of poetry and has received numerous honors, including the Lamont Award and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers'' Workshop, and was the first State Poet of Iowa. He lives in Iowa and Washington.

“Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.”—Harvard Review

In a recent interview Marvin Bell said, “I’ve been trying for thirty years to figure out how best to put the news into poems—what other people would call politics. But there are some hairy aesthetic questions connected to overtly political poems.”

Mars Being Red is the most political book of Bell’s storied career—and one of his most beautiful. Infuriated by our country’s military aggression and destructive politics, Bell asks, What shall we do, we who are at war but are asked / to pretend we are not? What Bell has done is craft a book of urgency and insight, anger and action:

. . . I am, like you, a witness to the coffins that were Viet Nam and Iraq, to a political machine that came up three lemons . . . I am the big ears and the wide eyes to whom time happened. I lived in stormy weather writing songs of love because, tell me if you know, who can help it?

Marvin Bell served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for over thirty years. He is the first and current poet laureate of Iowa.

"Budbill both informs and moves. He is, in short, a delight and a comfort."- Wendell Berry

"Budbill writes out of the real, contemporary, New England, not from the past, not from the cellar holes. He speaks from the New England which is Appalachia - poverty, exploitation, and good people."-Donald Hall

David Budbill is the author of numerous books of poetry, ?ction, and drama, and is an occasional commentator on NPR''s "All Things Considered." With bassist William Parker, Budbill performs a duet collaboration entitled "Zen Mountains / Zen Streets." He lives in rural Vermont.

"Budbill both informs and moves. He is, in short, a delight and a comfort."—Wendell Berry

"[Budbill] can be hilarious, as when he gripes, ''What good is my humility / when I am / stuck / in this obscurity?''"—Booklist, starred review

"His terse, epigrammatic lyrics are a lilting mirror of classical Chinese poetry."—The Wichita Eagle

David Budbill continues his popular poetic ruminations on life in remote New England—an outward survey of a forested mountain and an introspection of self-reliance, anonymity, and the creative life. Inspired by classical Chinese and Japanese poets, Budbill contemplates the seasons, ambition, his questionable desire for fame and fortune, and simple, focused contentment: "Weed the beans. Pick the peas."

"Out in the Woods"

The only time I''m really free is when I''m out in the woodscutting firewood, stacking brush, clearing trails.

Just the chain saw, the dog and me.Heave and groan, sweat and ache.

Work until I can''t stand it anymore.Take a break.

Sit on the needle-strewn ground up against a big pine tree,drink some water, stare out through the woods, pet the dog.

Stretch out on the ground, take a nap,dog''s head on my lap.

Ah, this would be the time and place and wayto die.

David Budbill is the author of poems, plays, essays, speeches, and book reviews. He has also served as a commentator on NPR''s All Things Considered. He lives in the mountains of northern Vermont where he tends his garden and website.

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

“Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance.”—Poetry

"[Kooser] brushes poems over ordinary objects, revealing metaphysical themes that way an investigator dusts for fingerprints. His language is so controlled and convincing that one can''t help but feel significant truths behind his lines." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Delights & Shadows raises the voice of the poet above everything else. Each short, vivid poem on the page reads as if it were being spoken aloud. Details about cemeteries, dictionaries, a doctor''s waiting room, and a jar of buttons bristle with sound and awareness. Kooser''s ability to use brief lyrics to compose a music of discovery and regeneration makes his work radiant and consuming." —Bloomsbury Review

Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a “haiku-like imagist” and his poems have been compared to Chekov’s short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman’s trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.

Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska.

“Davis is as good as DeLillo at playing off our internal hunger for meaning against surface senselessness. And Davis catches the surface brilliantly.”—American Book Review

Punctuated by subversive humor, verbal theatrics, and moments of strange, luminous beauty, Davis’ clear, unsentimental poems are meditations and mediations on contemporary existence and the unreliability of language, emotions, and the memory to gather it all in.

Jon Davis, author of five collections of poetry, earned his MFA from the University of Montana. He has received a Lannan Literary Award and currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

"Wagoner''s words are a living link to the world, enacting it so vitally that they feel like natural facts."—The Seattle Times

In his twenty-fourth book of poetry, David Wagoner reflects on youth, love, regret, and expectation versus reality. Here a master writes at top form, back-dropped by life''s curious moments and imagining Jesus as an untidy roommate or considering our final destination in "Beginner''s Guide to Death."

"After the Point of No Return"

After that moment when you''ve lost all reasonfor going back where you started, when going aheadis no longer a Yes or No, but a matter of fact,you''ll need to weigh, on the one hand, what will seem,on the other, almost nothing against somethingslightly more than nothing and must chooseagain and again, at points of fewer and fewerchances to guess, when and which way to turn.

That''s when you might stop thinking about starsand storm clouds, the direction of wind,the difference between rain and snow, the time of day or the lay of the land, about which treesmean water, which birds know what you needto know before it''s too late, or what''s right hereunder your feet, no longer able to tell youwhere it was you thought you had to go.

David Wagoner is the author of two dozen books of poetry and ten novels. A longtime teacher at University of Washington, he was the editor at Poetry Northwest. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

"Kasischke''s intelligence is most apparent in her syntactic control and pace, the way she gauges just when to make free verse speed up, or stop short, or slow down."—The New York Times Book Review

"Kasischke''s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."—Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke''s poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. And

also the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children''s laughter.

Laura Kasischke is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction. Her novel Her Life Before Her Eyes was adapted for the screen and starred Uma Thurman. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.