World Has Need of You

“Poets feed us. They look where there seems to be nothing to see, and they see.” 

 — Alberto Ríos

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. We trust that, to weather any moment life brings, you will return to this collection to find the poets.

But they could sit you down

and tell you how poems are born in silence

and sometimes, in moments of great noise;

of how they arrive like the rain,

unexpectedly cracking open the sky.

 — Tishani Doshi, from “Find the Poets”