Recent news featuring Copper Canyon Press poets.
“A Poet Who Embraced Recklessness, in Surreal Swerves and Zigzags,” A Review of Creature Feature in The New York Times
“In Young’s poems every new line bounds out of the brush, gazelle-like, with a reckless leap. The absurdity of his juxtapositions and the wildness of his enjambments can be funny, in a ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ sort of way, but . . . the randomness could suddenly yield to deep expressions of love and hurt.”—Jeff Gordinier, The New York Times
“A Conversation With Kelli Russell Agodon,” in The Missouri Review
“[Accidental Devotions] is definitely an obsessive book. I wanted to risk and stretch myself as a poet. I wanted to set aside shame and fear and just write the poems I needed to write. In 2020, so many poets were writing pandemic poems, while my poems often had me at parties—the opposite of quarantine. I felt like I was living as a French 1920s surrealist poet/artist in my own head. I am an escape artist, an escapist, a dreamer—so the pandemic brought me directly into my unhinged imagination already in progress. I didn’t write about our lonely reality, I wrote about love and desire and lust and joy and queerness and, of course, cemeteries, mortality, and grief. But I would not be who I am without bringing up death all the time. So maybe a book comes together by accident and also by devotion. I think this was a little of both.”—Kelli Russell Agodon for The Missouri Review
“Bright, Built World: A reflection on how the poets Richard Siken and Anne Carson responded to losing their language” in Los Angeles Review of Books
“I Do Know Some Things recounts not only his stroke, the horror of it, but also the recovery. . . . Siken rebuilds the word and world from nothing, and writes it down. A poet can make us see common words anew, challenging and breaking the language we are given. Siken’s book, then, extends this work of the poet, or undermines it. It asks what a poem by a body-mind being destroyed can give us. It asks whether words can describe, and hold, the loss of meaning. Words about losing words, language about losing language.”—Joseph Osmundsen, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Review: The Art of Translation,” Transient Worlds reviewed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Under the musicality of Neruda’s original with a propulsive momentum that builds to its startling conclusion, scintillating with sensory details and evocative imagery. At other times, it is the commentary that illuminates the reader’s experience—such as the story Sze tells about meeting Nanao Sakaki whose translation of three haikus by Kobayashi Issa are included in Transient Worlds. Or there is the detailed description of the intimate translation process between Danish poet Inger Christensen and her translator Susanna Nied. . . . Now more than ever, dismantling walls and cultural barriers will help to find the common ground that seems to be shifting and eroding underfoot. ‘Translation,’ Sze affirms, ‘builds bridges and makes connections.'”—Veronica Corpuz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The Mythologies of Life, Death, and Community: In Conversation with Kazim Ali” in ONLY POEMS
KK: “In ‘Qasida,’ you write, ‘For music only the velocity of a fly’s wings and the wind rushing / Through the canyon as if a voice is sounding.’ What’s the relationship between prayer and poetry in your work? Are they the same practice?”
KA: “I trust poetry more than prayer, at least the traditional way it is thought of and used. Prayer as communication, as description, as observation or ode—all, too, are the provinces of poetry. I always thought prayer was a form of panic—when we are pushed to the edge of what we can process, accept, or react as humans, prayer helps us to stay in the abyss. But couldn’t poetry be a better action in that moment: Rather than recite what was given for other peoples in other generations and geographies and worldly circumstances, the forms and lines and rhythms of our own lives—the poetry of the moment can respond.”
Kitchen Hymns named a finalist for the Lammy Award in Gay Poetry
Pádraig Ó Tuama‘s Kitchen Hymns was announced as one of five finalists for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. For over four decades, the Lammys have sought to increase visibility for LGBTQ+ books and celebrate LGBTQ+ authors across various genres, identities, and publishing journeys.
A study in lyric address, Kitchen Hymns trades belief for language, grounding philosophy in form and narrative. The collection speaks to a shifting “you”: an unknown you; the strange you; a lover, a hated other; the you of erotic desire; the you of creation and destruction. Read more about the collection and get your copy here.
A Celebration of Transient Worlds by U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
April 20, 2026 | 5:15 pm PDT | Virtual
Join U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and host Michael Wiegers as we celebrate the publication of Transient Worlds, Arthur Sze’s official Laureate project!
In this virtual reading and conversation, you will get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Transient Worlds; travel the inspirational pathways of meaning between a source poem and its translations; and discover how reading and writing translation can be a new entrance into your own creative writing practice.
Register for the Zoom webinar here.
Taking Off the Front of the House: The Power of Humor in Poetry
April 21, 2026 | 2:30 pm – 4:30 pm PDT | Virtual
Join Ellen Bass, award-winning poet and author of Indigo, for a special craft class on using humor as a poet. In this workshop, you’ll study Bass’s approach to pressing humor up against pain and survey a selection of poems by writers such as Mary Reufle, Nicole Sealy, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland and others. The class will be recorded and made available to all who register.
Poetry on the Wharf: With Dr. Katharine Wilkinson & Ellen Bass
April 22, 2026 | 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm PT | In-Person | Santa Cruz, CA
Join climate leader Dr. Katharine Wilkinson and poet Ellen Bass for a conversation about the role of imagination and poetry in navigating climate disruption and finding a way forward. This event is free to attend.
Christopher Kondrich in conversation with Taylor Johnson at People’s Book
April 24, 2026 | 6:0o pm – 7:00 pm ET | In-person | Takoma Park, MD
People’s Book presents a reading and conversation with Christopher Kondrich, author of Tread Upon, and Taylor Johnson, former Poet Laureate of Takoma Park.
April 30, 2026| 7:00 pm EST | In-person
U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze and U.K. Poet Laureate Simon Armitage will take the stage at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium. This historic gathering will celebrate Arthur Sze’s advocacy for poetry in translation during his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate. It will also commemorate the publication of two remarkable translation projects: Arthur’s Transient Worlds, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on April 14, and Simon Armitage’s new verse translation of the epic poem Gilgamesh. A book-signing with both authors will follow their conversation.
This event is free to the public, but registration is required.
New poetry from Christopher Kondrich, “Hummingbird in Oil” in The Nation