Cocklebur (New and Selected Poems)

A career-spanning collection from an unflinching poet of extraordinary emotional precision.

In celebration of a major voice in American letters, Erin Belieu’s Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of work alongside a generous selection of new poems. Wide ranging in style, subject and structure, this collection confronts with unsentimental clarity both tender intimacies and grief, as well as the absurdities of what it is to be a human. Belieu considers with fierce emotional intelligence and intellectual rigor the power dynamics and quiet brutality often embedded in our domestic lives and national narratives. Whether addressing sexuality, the sustainability of faith in one’s self or others, or American identity, the poems are penetrating and precise. Cocklebur is a portrait of a poet unafraid to look directly at our personal and collective histories—what they permit, what they erase, and what they ask us to carry.