Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems

By Erin Belieu

Wisecracking and fierce, Belieu's new & selected interrogates gender, inheritance, and the stories that teach us how to live.

Cocklebur: New & Selected Poems gathers decades of Erin Belieu's work alongside a generous selection of new poetry. Moving fluently between the personal and the mythic, the collection engages fairy tales, Catholic iconography, family history, and the body's unruly knowledge to examine how we are taught to survive, love, and desire. Poems and their speakers are attuned to the hidden labor of care, alongside the quiet brutality embedded in domestic life and national narratives. Whether addressing grief, sexuality, faith, or American identity, the poems resist sentimentality, instead offering precision, wise-cracking wit, and a fierce emotional intelligence. In this retrospective lives a sustained attention to stories and how those stories teach us to survive. 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556597371
• ISBN13: 9781556597374
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 200 Pages