Steelhead - University of Pittsburgh Press

Steelhead

Poems

Colby Cotton’s Steelhead transports us to the kingdom of memory, where the poet opens his eyes ‘in a barn back home . . . Remembering a life I used to live / inside a life I live alone.’ These spare pastorals and haunted elegies announce an important new voice in his generation.

Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine and Song of the Closing Doors

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.

More Praise

Reading a Colby Cotton poem is like seeing hay through ice. Every image feels compressed by hand. Every memory is a struggle with beauty, like waiting in front of a corn field to piece together its foxes. Steelhead is devoted to lost friends. In it, we encounter the decades it takes a single feeling to thaw open. In the world of Cotton’s poetry, we see the terror of loving as hard as one can love. I have never read a book written with such precision of heart, and poems that feel so earnestly spoken toward the beloveds who inspired them.

T Bambrick, author of Intimacies, Received

88 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

February, 2027

isbn : 9780822968726

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

about the author

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.

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