Read to Restore: Leisure Books for Mental Wellness: Poetry

Paloma is faking it. On the outside, she's A-Okay: she's electrified at work; there is a cadence in her step as she walks her dog; she posts memes on Facebook; and she keeps up with most relationships. Looks can be deceiving, however: Inside, Paloma is just going through the motions, and she feels like things are spiraling out of control. But when things are at their darkest, dawn arrives with clarity and focus, and with it, healing. Paloma learns to value small glimmering moments of joy rather than searching for constant happiness, thus building hope for her future.

Robert Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes with this collection, published in 1923. It contains some of his most enduring and best-known poems, including "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "Fire and Ice," "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

A newly expanded career-spanning volume from one of our most valuable living American poets, offering poems that display an exquisite ear tuned to the natural world, to love and friendship, and to the continually renewable possibilities of language, and new poems that reflect a continued artistic interest in these subjects. Young's settings are at once local and universal-an adolescence in Omaha, late summer on Lake Erie, a sleepless night in the backyard during a meteor shower. He moves with dazzling ease between culture and nature, between the literary and the philosophical, microcosm and macrocosm.

A black British poet making her thrilling American debut explores the importance of "quiet" in producing forms of community, resistance, and love. These poems dwell on ideas of black interiority, intimacy, and selfhood, and they celebrate as fiercely as they mourn. With a metaphysical edge and a formal restlessness attuned to both the sonics and the inadequacies of language, Quiet navigates the tension between the impulse to guard one's inner life and the knowledge that, as Audre Lorde writes, "your silence will not protect you."

As the novel coronavirus and its devastating effects began to spread in the United States and around the world, Alice Quinn reached out to poets across the country to see if, and what, they were writing under quarantine. Moved and galvanized by the response, the onetime New Yorker poetry editor and recent former director of the Poetry Society of America began collecting the poems arriving in her inbox, assembling this various, intimate, and intricate portrait of our suddenly altered reality.

From Sappho and Li Bai to Sandra Cisneros and Ocean Vuong: a pocket-sized treasury of tiny, jewel-like poems from around the world and through the ages Short poems have been popular for centuries, from the famous fragments of Sappho in ancient Greece to the traditional haiku of Japan, from the Imagist poems of Ezra Pound and H. D. to the witty couplets of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash, from lyrical gems by Shakespeare and Rumi to modern classics by W. H. Auden and Margaret Atwood. This collection brings together brief poems--defined as fewer than fourteen lines--from a wide range of poetic traditions.

A politically urgent yet timeless collection that studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love. In Wind, Trees, John Freeman presents a meditation on power and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the wind, and cannot possibly carry all we've been handed?

More than 150 poems from her seven books of poetry written between 1963 and 1982.

In Black Swim, Nicholas Goodly casts a spell to transform darkness into perfect darkness. This stunning debut collection is at once "forged from the hurt parts of the ground," and "proof of a miracle," spinning ache and sweat and sweetness into a new model of feeling through language. Black people, queer/trans/nonbinary people, flamboyant people, lonely people, gaudy people, kind people, witches, artists, and angry people will meet themselves and each other in these pages. Amidst death and against injustice, Goodly's poems bear gifts for and from the ancestors--a necklace, a mirror, a form of offered prayer: "If there is a purpose in this life / let me wash my face in it."

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.

Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages--bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers--be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness.

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind’s nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea–pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis–have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed. This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin

The book is divided into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose. Deals with a different pain. Heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.