The World Has Need of You
Description
“Poets feed us. They look where there seems to be nothing to see, and they see."
— Alberto Ríos
In times of joy and sorrow, celebration and confusion, people turn to poetry. Amid the initial uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the staff and interns of Copper Canyon Press created The World Has Need of You, a response to our community's need for balm, for fuel, for a sense of connection.
Curated from our in-house catalogue of poems, this anthology is dedicated to our community of poets and readers with deep gratitude and awe: Your support and collaboration ensures that poetry will continue to flourish, bring comfort, and ignite change. We trust that, to weather any moment life brings, you will return to this collection to find the poets.
But they could sit you down
and tell you how poems are born in silence
and sometimes, in moments of great noise;
of how they arrive like the rain,
unexpectedly cracking open the sky.
— Tishani Doshi, from “Find the Poets"
More details
Persons
Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press's Executive Editor. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet's Child and This Art, and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he co-edited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative and regularly speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin.
Poet laureate of Arizona and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Alberto Ríos is the author of eleven books of poetry. He is a National Book Award finalist, as well as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Walt Whitman Award. His book The Theater of Night received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, Ríos has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border. Ríos teaches at Arizona State University and is the host of a PBS program "Books & Co." He lives in Chandler, Arizona.
Content
Introduction by Alberto Ríos
"You, Reader, as I Imagine You" by Chase Twichell
"All of Us All of Us" by Marianne Boruch
"Rain Light" by W.S. Merwin
"The Current Isolationism" by Camille Rankine
"Anxiety" by Olav Hauge; Robert Hedin, trans.
"Prayer" by Sarah Ruhl
"Unpacking a Globe" by Arthur Sze
"What Issa Heard" by David Budbill
"won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton
"letter from my heart to my brain" by Rachel McKibbens
"Who I Write For" by Vicente Aleixandre; Lewis Hyde, trans.
from 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
"There is a Light in Me" by Anna Swir
"Duplex" by Jericho Brown
from Lao-tzu's Taoteching by Lao-tzu; Red Pine (Bill Porter), trans.
"Fingers" by Ghassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah, trans.
"Urgent Care" by Dana Levin
"Concerning Necessity" by Hayden Carruth
"A Physics of Sudden Light" by Alberto Ríos
"Obscurity and Lockdown" by C.D. Wright
"Poema 18" by Pablo Neruda, Forrest Gander, trans.
from Soft Targets by Deborah Landau
"Often I Imagine the Earth" by Dan Gerber
"Visitor" by Brenda Shaugnessy
"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong
"'Not many of them, it's true'" by Gregory Orr
"The World Has Need of You" by Ellen Bass
"Meditation on Transmission" by Dean Rader
"Nobody Riding the Roads Today" by June Jordan
"Goshen" by Ruth Stone
from "A Poetics of Space" by Lisa Olstein
from Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays by James Richardson
"Country Scene" by Hô Xuân Huong; John Balaban, trans.
"In Praise of Noise" by James Arthur
"Masks" by Laura Kasischke
"Even all night long" by Jean Valentine
"On Visiting the Site of a Slave Massacre in Opelousas" by Roger Reeves
from "I Am a Miner. The Lights Burn Blue." by Victoria Chang
"Right Hand" by Ted Kooser
"Love in the Time of Swine Flu" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
"For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State" by Lucia Perillo
"Under construction" by Bob Hicok
"Waking after the Surgery" by Leila Chatti
"mer • cy" by Alison Rollins
"Geo-Bestiary: 34" by Jim Harrison
"Ceasing to Be" by Matthew Zapruder
"Spring" by Jenny George
"Rest." by Richard Jones
"Everybody Has a Fatal Disease" by Heather McHugh
"Not This" by Olena Kalytiak Davis
"Slow Song for Mark Rothko" by John Taggart
"Find the Poets" by Tishani Doshi