Give the gift of poetry this holiday season! Now through December 12th, Copper Canyon Press has recommendations to help you find the perfect poetry collection for every cherished reader on your gift list!
Stay tuned here and follow us on social media for our latest recs as the month unfolds! All of us at Copper Canyon Press thank you for supporting indie Press in this season of generosity, and we wish you health and happiness in the year-end!
For the reader who makes a playlist for every occasion . . .
We recommend Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins
In this award-winning collection, poems travel across time and space, between the eighteenth century and futuristic fabulations, vibrating with fugitive frequencies, sounds of survival, and nerve-racking notes tuned toward love and liberation. Black Bell navigates what it means to be both invisible and spectacle, hidden and on display, allowing lyric language to become the material for fashioning wearable sculptures akin to Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits.” Integrating performance art practices, metalwork, and sonics, Black Bell becomes a multimedia meditation on freedom seeking, furthering the possibilities of the canvas of the page as well as the poet’s body.
Gift Black Bell Here!
For the reader who has found an unexpected home in language . . .
We recommend My Perfect Cognate by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
My Perfect Cognate interrogates the connections and contrasts at the sharp edges of her in-betweens: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico, where the author and her mother were often stopped, interrogated. Written from the depths of severe post-partum depression, Natalie Scenters-Zapico searches for a language that can hold both personal and communal pain. When Spanish and English seem insufficient, she leans on the connection between the two languages: the cognate.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico mines the depths of linguistic cognate theory to write poems that go beyond translation and mistranslation. Here, we find hope in a translingual landscape that breaks open borders.
Gift My Perfect Cognate Here!
For the lucid dreamer—the fan of imagery so vibrant you could live inside of it . . .
We recommend Chronicle of Drifting by Yuki Tanaka
Yuki Tanaka’s stunning debut, Chronicle of Drifting, explores rootlessness, its beauty and perils. Tanaka’s restless imagination roams among places and personae—a village mermaid, a geisha in the Midwest, a flâneur in Tokyo—searching for a permanent self and a sense of community. In the feverish world of these poems, inspired by the Japanese tradition of tanka and haiku, as well as by timeless surrealism, one meets a light-lashed horse, an imaginary chauffeur, an out-of-business psychic, a girl who skewers a fish with a flower stalk. In poems ranging from lyric to prose, Tanaka creates a poignant dreamlike realm where the inner and outer worlds, the self and others, merge—like the train passenger who, looking out the window and seeing the sky through his reflection, feels “empty, a blue outline.”
Gift Chronicle of Drifting Here!
For the reader who wants a book that makes time—and the world—slow down . . .
We recommend Into the Hush by U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
Through an earned and profound simplicity, these poems move with imaginative power and emotional force and gather a startling array of contrasts—from wildfires to a sprig of sunrise, from gunshots to a spirit evoked by swaying candles—to address the challenges of our nuclear age. Written at the height of Sze’s powers, Into the Hush is a landmark publication, with Sze enacting a thrilling journey from silence into sound, from emptiness into the rich panoply of existence.
Gift Into the Hush Here!
For the archival adventurer . . .
We recommend Distinguished Office of Echoes by Lisa Olstein
A collection of three collage-, cutout, and erasure-based poems, Distinguished Office of Echoes leans into the intersection of word and image, exploring the revelatory language they make together. Charged with the magnetic pull of material fascination, each poem enters into and reinvents the realm of its source, undertaking a practice of excavation, collaboration, and transformation to reimagine the field of the page while reconsidering what it means to examine and to be examined.
Gift Distinguished Office of Echoes here!
For the fan of classic stories retold from the female perspective . . .
We recommend Bloodmercy by I.S. Jones
In I.S. Jones’s stunning and evocative debut collection, Cain and Abel are reimagined as sisters whose care for each other becomes increasingly fraught–the siblings vicious as they vie for the attention of a negligent father. Parallel to this, their bodies budding within and against the still-forming landscape, the girls navigate the shame of Eve’s sin while coming into their own sexuality. Found in the space between the Old Testament and the modern world, the girls gaze heavenward and pose enduring questions to God.
Gift Bloodmercy Here!
Check back here now through December 12th for our latest recommendations! And before you go, explore our 2025 season, featuring National Book Award finalists, new work from U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, and cutting-edge collections from debut poets! You won’t want to leave these books behind in 2025!
P.S. Shopping for a reader whose home library is . . . overflowing? We offer e-books for every bibliophile—no bookshelf required! Visit any of our book pages to learn more.