The Copper Canyon Press Catalog

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To find Copper Canyon books, broadsides, or event tickets, click on the browsing categories above. From there, you may click the book titles to reach our book detail pages, which include sample poems, author biographies, and excerpts from book reviews.

We hope you'll enjoy learning about our most recent titles and our extensive backlist of books in print.

Featured Item

Stephen Berg

New and Selected Poems

"Stephen Berg is a well-kept secret....Berg plies the reader's attention with simplicity and candor."
–American Bookseller

"In an age when it seems most poetry wants only to be 'user-friendly,' when straight-forward sincerity, elegance and 'niceness' abound, Berg has been fearless about putting on display some of the more complex and darkly subversive parts of human character. In doing this with compassion and luminescent beauty, he has honored Chekhov and William Carlos Williams."
–Passages North

"When you see it, you have the same shock you had 20 years ago on seeing Frank O'Hara's mammoth Collected: who would have thought he had written so many? But he has and they're good."
–The Antioch Review

“Berg plies the reader’s attention with simplicity and candor; most of the poems contained herein reflect those qualities.”
—American Bookseller

“To console is the noble aim of this poet, and this he does with a keen understanding and with grace.”
—Frederick Smock, American Book Review

“[New and Selected Poems] is big and beautiful…. We are fortunate that Copper Canyon has emerged as such a strong and steady source of the best and best-presented poems around.”
—Dan McGuiness, The Antioch Review

“This is a major assessment of a truly visionary poet who has been among the most passionate, vigorous, and original writers/translators of a gifted generation.”
—Bookpaper

“A masterful piece of writing. It is the human laid bare.”
—Hayden Carruth

“Berg is at ease with himself, uncommonly candid and attentive to detail…. This hefty volume collects work from four books and 20 years yet reads as though it were composed in a single sitting. The new poems included are a particular delight, especially those from a work-in-progress of prose pieces that are sharp, thoughtful, and wonderfully wild.”
—Library Journal

“New and Selected Poems eschews theatrics and doctrine in favor of concentrating on the basic roots of human existence. The result is a personally charged yet socially aware style that views a wondrous but oftentimes sad world.”
—City Pages [MN]

“Stephen Berg’s poems, for the most part, have a hard spareness that rides the narrow edge between the sufficient and the insufficient. The world he presents is stripped of pretense and illusion: a cold, unlikeable place full of rough spots. In such a place, the world of literature and the mind becomes a refuge…. We need poets like this. Mr. Berg relentlessly describes what we would often prefer to forget but can’t allow ourselves to forget. To forget our very nature means to repeat our many blunders over and over again.”
—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review

“Berg’s interest is in the life of the emotions, and in the particulars of a life that have been taken inside the self…. [Berg] is afraid of neither delicacy or harshness. If you are one of those readers who still thinks poetry should tell what it is like to be alive, then this is a book you should own.”
—David Rivard, Passages North

“Stephen Berg is, precisely, a mainline plain-style poet,…one of the defining voices of that style…. Berg is a poet who steeps himself in life, palps it with sadness and wonder…. What really characterizes him is the centrality of his vision…and the amplitude of his concerns.”
—Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash