Steelhead

Colby Cotton’s haunting debut chronicles the aftermath of a childhood friend who dies by suicide and the community left in its wake. In dreamlike landscapes, Cotton estranges settings as varied as fields, rose gardens, snowy observatories, and a long line to enter the afterlife in poems that blur the boundary between this world and the next, and a collection that announces an exciting new voice in poetry. “I have only seen you in unordinary ways,” he writes, and it’s true: through stark poems of emotional depth, lyrical concision, and surprising humor, this meditation on loss and loneliness speaks to a life lived in the wake of tragedy— the home we spend our lives pursuing, but can never return to.