Created by Nicole Sealey, The Sealey Challenge encourages participants to read a book of poetry each day for the entire month of August. We love this annual challenge and how many readers choose Copper Canyon Press books for their #SealeyChallenge reading lists.
We offer below a selection of Copper Canyon Press poetry collections that have remained popular choices for Sealey Challenge readers over the years.
Oceanic by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
With inquisitive flair, Aimee Nezhukumatathil creates a thorough registry of the earth’s wonderful and terrible magic. In her fourth collection of poetry, she studies forms of love as diverse and abundant as the ocean itself. She brings to life a father penguin, a C-section scar, and Niagara Falls with a powerful force of reverence for life and living things. With an encyclopedic range of subjects and unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the earth, an extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong.
blud by Rachel McKibbens
blud is a bold, taboo-smashing collection in the lineage of Sylvia Plath, June Jordan, and Sharon Olds. Tightly crafted and explosive, these poems inherit, reject, and forgive the gifts and curses of a fraught bloodline. With incantatory rhythm, blud transforms the stigmas assigned to mental illness, abuse, and abandonment. What emerges from this poetic brujería is a fierce love: for chosen family, for the hard-won home, and for the surviving self. Rachel McKibbens is a force and a beacon—our “witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised” (Ploughshares).
A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok
In this staggering poetry debut, Monica Sok illuminates the experiences of Cambodian diaspora and reflects on America’s role in escalating the genocide in Cambodia. A Nail the Evening Hangs On travels from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, where Tuol Sleng and other war museums reshape the imagination of a child of refugees; to New York City and Lancaster, where the dailiness of intergenerational trauma persists on the subway or among the cornfields of a small hometown. Embracing collective memory, both real and imagined, these poems move across time to break familial silence. Sok pieces together voices and fragments—using persona, myth, and imagination—in a transformative work that builds towards wholeness.
Indigo by Ellen Bass
Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife’s return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own “succulent skin,” the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyper-focused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents’ lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.
Incorrect Merciful Impulses by Camille Rankine
A bold debut collection, Camille Rankine’s Incorrect Merciful Impulses reflects with perfect clarity the symptoms of and instructions for contemporary life, inquiring into history, politics, culture, identity, and mortality while always remaining attuned to wonder and curiosity.
World-wise and incisive, reverent and compassionate, Rankine confronts challenging questions with art that dares to inspire.
Come-Hither Honeycomb by Erin Belieu
In Come-Hither Honeycomb, Erin Belieu turns her signature wit and intellectual rigor inward for an unguarded exploration of human vulnerability. The poems meditate on the impact of large and small traumas: the lasting thumbprint of abuse, the collective specter of disease, the achingly sweet humility of parenting. The bodies in these poems are trapped, held hostage, bleeding. And yet there is agency—structural dynamism, texture, the color green—while a woman climbs a metal ladder to the diving board, a girl climbs high into the branches. The speaker grapples with a lifelong pattern of brutality, then painfully breaks free.
Sight Lines by Arthur Sze
In his National Book Award-winning tenth collection Sight Lines, Arthur Sze lends the reader his prismatic lens, rendering contemporary reality in stunning complexity. Moments of grace, eros, and beauty are braided with shudders of terror and threats of ecological destruction, as Sze moves nimbly through intersections of the disparate and divergent. Using formal disruption, legible erasure, and a diversity of voices—lichen on a ceiling, salt on the table, a man behind on his rent—each page transmutes simplicity into simultaneity, and chaos into compelling song. Sze is a Pulitzer finalist and a widely-revered poet, whose exquisite craft continues to expand our view: there are “so many / worlds to this world.”
Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall
Written during the trial for a close friend’s murder, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod exposes that the whimsical, horrible, and absurd all sit together. In this ambitious collection, Traci Brimhall corresponds with the urges of life and death within herself as she lives through a series of impossibilities: the sentencing of her friend’s murderers, the birth of her child, the death of her mother, divorce, a trip sailing through the Arctic. In lullaby, lyric essay, and always with brutal sincerity, Brimhall examines how beauty and terror live right alongside each other—much like how Nod is both a fictional dreamscape and the place where Cain is exiled for murdering Abel. By plucking at the tensions between life and death, love and hate, truth and obscurity, Brimhall finds what it is that ties opposing themes together; how love and loss are married in grief.