Colby Cotton

Colby Cotton is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. A graduate of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he is a recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work appears in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, Gulf Coast and Best New Poets, among others. Originally from Adrian, New York, he lives in Los Angeles.

Steelhead

Poems

By Colby Cotton

Colby Cotton’s 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. “I have only seen you in unordinary ways,” Cotton writes, and it’s true. Through stark poems of emotional depth, lyrical concision, and surprising humor, Steelhead is a meditation on loss and loneliness that speaks to a life lived in the wake of tragedy—the home we spend our lives pursuing but can never return to.