“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
“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