The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection

“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"

Michael Wiegers has been acquiring and editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press's Executive Editor. He has edited two retrospective volumes of the poetry of Frank Stanford, including What About This, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and received the Balcones Poetry Prize. He edited the anthologies The Poet's Child and This Art, and translated poems for Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry, which he co-edited with Mónica de la Torre. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative and regularly speaks about the art of publishing at universities and colleges around the world. He is currently at work on a book about the poet W.S. Merwin.

Poet laureate of Arizona and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Alberto Ríos is the author of eleven books of poetry. He is a National Book Award finalist, as well as a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Walt Whitman Award. His book The Theater of Night received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, Ríos has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border. Ríos teaches at Arizona State University and is the host of a PBS program "Books & Co." He lives in Chandler, Arizona.