The Iconoclast Women Starter Pack
Curated by Caroline (Publishing Intern, 2026)
Valentine’s death images, Shapero’s notions of the body, Rekdal’s iconography of the West, Wright’s representation of the South–these women poets are challenging narratives/traditional iconography through their writing.
Jean Valentine’s icons are dead, past dead, pre-dead, and are remade dying in Shirt in Heaven. Jean begs the question: “When shown a human head split in two, what can be made of what’s been severed?”
Deepstep Come Shining is a book-length avant-garde detail study on the iconography of the American South. It splits, jars, and creeps through its surroundings. Opening doors. Closing windows. Leaving it all behind in the end.
To name just a few of Shapero’s indulgences in the iconography of the body: In Stay Dead, she adopts the role of an actor in fervent pursuit of recreating one’s own death scene. She refers to herself as “an anthropomorphic iteration of the knowledge that the idiom CUT TO THE CHASE originated in film editing.” She likens herself to a dog repeatedly.
In 2018, Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. What arrived instead was a searing recount of the iconography of American westward expansion.
New Lives, New Words: The Immigrant Experience
Curated by Ernie (Publishing Intern, 2026)
Do you know what it feels like to long for home? Here’s a powerful collection that explores the themes of immigration, exile, toxic nationalism, and the realities of adapting to a new climate. Philip, writing from his experience of moving from Lebanon to Mexico to the U.S., captures both his personal and collective journeys of displacement and resilience.
This is more than a book. There is an absence, which the speaker witnesses, brought on by war, climate change, and forced migration. But most of all, there is a deep well of memory from which the speaker pulls to tell us about the absence/loss that they witness. Peñalosa M. holds a steady desire to name what has been lost and to endure what was meant to erase it, and the result is a bilingual book that shows how loss is never just one thing, but many things at once.
Borderlands. Language. Identity. Scenters-Zapico has given us a taste of the lived experiences of people who reside along the U.S.–Mexico border, and yet, within these lives, there remains a steady hope for a way of being that can hold more than one culture at once.
A necessary collection that reflects the Cambodian diaspora and intergenerational trauma. The author writes as the daughter of refugees, and the poems move across landscapes and between what was lived and what is remembered.
The Constellation Collection
Curated by Elizabeth (Communications and Publicity Assistant)
Ad astra! Through deft curation and deeply felt association, these collections uncover patterns and link images—not unlike like the invisible lines that tie stars into a singular, and astronomically meaningful, picture. Prepare to be transported by the ordinary, the minuscule, the familiar.
Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 2024 Science + Literature award, features over five decades of poems by the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Inside, you’ll find Sze’s signature sequences, which bridge the caverns between the personal and global, the immediate and the distant, the simple and the complex. You’ll leave this book more attentive to your individual experience and the infinite experiences of the world around you.
Keith S. Wilson’s poems are remarkable not only for their lyricism, but for the way they illuminate emotional and political realities through scientific truths. Whether he likens an act of racial violence to the behavior of dark matter or a lover’s absence to a collapsed star, Wilson suggests that poetry and science may share a fundamental law: No matter how much experience or evidence we gather, there is always more to understand.
Lovingly curated, this retrospective gathers fifty years of rare and award-winning poetry from Copper Canyon Press. Gathering heartfelt poem recommendations submitted by readers, photos of hand-written cards and letters mailed to the Press, and more, this anthology coalesces into a portrait of long-lasting literary fellowship. It is an invitation to connect with not just poetry, but poetry lovers, and it will remind you that reading and writing are never isolated acts.
(P.S. For even more poems and good-feeling, check out Come Shining‘s companion anthology, A House Called Tomorrow!)