Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press - Softcover

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About the Editors

Michael Wiegers is the Executive Editor of Copper Canyon Press where, over the past three decades, he has edited and published more than five hundred titles. He additionally serves as poetry editor for Narrative. Wiegers edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, What About This (a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award) and Hidden Water (with Chet Weise), and he is also the editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (with Mónica de la Torre), The Poet's Child, and This Art: Poems about Poetry. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and is writing a book about W.S. Merwin.

Kaci X. Tavares is a bilingual poet and editor from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is currently Copper Canyon Press's Publishing Fellow, and was recently a writing mentor with the New York-based nonprofit Girls Write Now. With the University of East Anglia Publishing Project, she co-edited the 2020 Poetry MA Anthology (Egg Box Publishing), and offered English-language guidance to literary translators. She holds degrees in English and English Education from Boston University, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

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"I Could Touch It"

Ellen Bass

Indigo (2020)

"I adore this poem, and I’ve brought it to conferences before where I had to teach a beloved poem. I love all the tensions of opposites. Its vulnerability. Its tenderness. I might even have it memorized." ―Traci Brimhall, Copper Canyon Press poet

When she was breaking apart, our son was falling in love.

She lay on the couch with a heated sack of rice on her belly,
sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out the window at the olive tree

as it broke into tiny white blossoms, as it swelled into bitter black fruit.

At first, I wanted to spare him.
I wished he was still farming up north, tucking bulbs of green onions
into their beds and watering the lettuce,
his hands gritty, his head haloed in a straw hat.

But as the months deepened, I grew selfish.

I wanted him here with his new love.
When I passed the open bathroom door, I wanted
to see them brushing their teeth,

one perched on the toilet lid, one on the side of the tub,
laughing and talking through their foamy mouths,
toothbrushes rattling against their teeth.

As sage gives its scent when you crush it. As stone
is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.