Beth Copeland is the author of Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022);
Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental
Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass,
1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. She owns and
operates Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a retreat for writers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Purchase Information
Selfie with Cherry is available from:
Copeland’s chapbook reflects a lived life, from the perspective of real maturity and unstinting
self-examination. Her style is a delight; she employs acute imagery, slicing verbs, delicious lists,
but her poems stand out for her superlative endings, often featuring clever phrasing and the mu
sic of perfect rhyme or assonance. Her poems are investigative and incisive, unsparing in recon
noitering past relationships and testing new ones. Her voice has an ironic edge, and I admire it
immensely.
—Tina Barr, author of Green Target (Barrow Street Press)
Ecstasy does not come easy, we struggle with surrender, fierce love and betrayal. The human be
ing embracing nature is crushed by Eros and ironic revelation. Death and the clamor of silence
stir regret and discovery. Clarity, precision, a universe of broken glass hypnotizes and consumes.
We begin with dreams as we rebuild in search of purity, and ultimately we are left with the scars
of self-knowledge and tender acceptance. The journey of desire, the migration of butterflies and
lady bugs, wildflowers and totemic and chimeric surprise, finally welcome us to a home in exile.
The mountain is who we are, as we aspire to grace, as seasons shift in blessing and retribution,
leaving us with solitude and divine reflection. Beth Copeland is heart, she is the one that knows
these things. She gives us stunning details, strong and frail, saying so much, but never too much.
This is intimate poetry, Selfie with Cherry is soul, and we are left naked at a precise and enduring
precipice to go on.
Michael Rothenberg, author of In Memory of a Banyan Tree: Poems of the Outside World, 1985-
2022 (Lost Horse Press)
Selfie with Cherryis a delicious bite of fruit - forbidden and otherwise, bittersweet poems redo-
lent of the natural world, peppered with disillusionment and lovers lost. And yet, this sobering
sense of loss is beautifully juxtaposed with the freedom and joy that come with a solo flight,
“a woman becoming/ invisible and being/ reborn.” I loved this book!
— Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of EROTIC: New & Selected (NYQ Books), poetry editor,
Cultural Daily.
Glass Lyre Press
https://glass-lyre-press.myshopify.com/collections/chapbooks/products/selfie-with-cherry
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Selfie-Cherry-Beth-Copeland/dp/1941783902/ref=sr_1_3?
qid=1678833103&refinements=p_27%3ABeth+Copeland&s=books&sr=1-3
Blue Honey is available from;
The Blue Honey that flows through Copeland’s collection by that name, through her parents’
flurry of furious wings—that flows through Japan, her siblings, an Alaskan airport, and The
South, where a childhood was held by the ankles upside-down and slapped—that flows through
a marriage, torn and mended, flows through it all with a fearless and loving spirit, with personali
ty, humor, anger, and craft. Reader, I dare you to walk away from this elegy unmoved.
—Roger Weingarten, author of Ethan Benjamin Boldt (Knopf) Ghost-wrestling (Godine) and The
Four Gentlemen and Their Footmen (Longleaf, 2015).
Beth Copeland’s Blue Honey is a lyrical case study of loss and the ways in which it reverberates
through a family’s center… Copeland is a master storyteller; she weaves each of these narratives
seamlessly through the text, and her ear for language—not to mention her eye for the most deli-
cate of details—is a veritable honey trap for the reader.
—Destiny O. Birdsong, MFA, PhD recipient, Academy of American Poets Prize
The structure of Blue Honey … reenacts the circular journey that so many of us must make, from
being cared for by our parents to ushering them through the mysterious borderland known as old
age. Beth Copeland (writes) with breath-taking honesty … metaphorically fresh and formally
inventive … Bravo to Copeland for not shying away from poetry’s most arduous and important
task, which is to write about life in a way that makes us feel less alone.
—Sue Ellen Thompson, editor The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and recip-
ient of the 2010 Maryland Author Award.
Broadkill River Press
http://broadkillriverpress.com
Quail Ridge Books
https://www.quailridgebooks.com/book/9781940120768
Transcendental Telemarketer is available from:
Copeland’s Transcendental Telemarketer contains beautiful lyrics of emotion and meditation, but
it also contains rants against war and violence, and all the while it swings us from the U.S. to
Japan to Afghanistan, from Islam to Buddhism to Christianity. It’s compelling, playful, and well-
crafted.
—William Allegrezza, author of Fragile Replacements
Beth Copeland’s poems are music. She combines powerful alliteration (“following blue rivers
of blood / flowing back to the heart”) with unobtrusive rhyme (“silver wolves / howl, owls hoot”).
Occasional use of form seems to grow from the poem. Asia influences Copeland’s writing; as in
Japanese poetry, nature imagery becomes philosophy. Fresh juxtapositions “explode like poppies
from the barrels of guns.” Color commands our vision: “the violet wave of light around the Ja-
panese iris.” We hear, mystically, “the Earth’s vibrations / converge in a single note.” Read this
book several times—each visit will uncover a different layer.
—Anne-Adele Wight, author of Sidestep Catapult
Beth Copeland’s Transcendental Telemarketer lifts language beyond its typical meanings, lets it
“whirl like a spinning top set loose on the sidewalk,” until language and meaning split—the way
the “I” does in the poems—“I break in two; one girl stays on the bed while the other one floats to
the ceiling to watch.” With rare prowess, Copeland crafts these poems, delivering “the equator in
that Ouija world” as a “potent aphrodisiac.”
Debra Morkun, author of The Ida Pingala
BlazeVox Press
http://wp.blazevox.org/product/transcendental-telemarketer-by-beth-copeland/
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Transcendental-Telemarketer-Beth-Copeland/dp/1609640888
Traveling Through Glass is available from:
The poems in Traveling Through Glass are as crisply separate from each other as grains of bas-
mati rice. Each has its own personality, its own individuality whether is is about India or remem-
bering a wallpaper from childhood. But no matter if about India or a childhood memory, they are
woven with startlingly apt metaphors and similes. A widow’s oppressive sorrow is “like the scent
of gardenias in a closed room,….” In a triumphant elongated metaphor the Atlantic becomes a
“native ventriloquist, throws its voice into the clenched lips of an oyster, whispering in the tide-
slurred accent of a tired Southern girl.” Her images cause the poems to open and expand like a
Chinese paper flower bursting from its clam shell in a glass of water. Vargo brings to her work an
eye that can become Daliesque, as when she perceives the road as a skunk, but always she keeps
her excellent and able writing hand steadily on human relationships—their pain, their inevitable
alterations, their frail but most necessary buttressing against oblivion. Her wit and wisdom are
apparent throughout this unusual collection.
—Karen Swenson, Awards Judge
Beth Copeland Vargo explores the depths of a quiet life, the mysteries of love, and the certainty
of loss in the rich, sensitive poems of Traveling Through Glass. I have known her work for twenty-f
ive years, and I have been waiting for this book.
—Howard McCord
Each poem is a volume. Each poem is an intelligence far beyond the matter of interpretation.
One is there—and like it or not, intensely so. What intensities parallel for me? Bowles, Mishima,
James, Mann, Dickinson: yet this is new. What a striking voice!
—Ron Bayes
Bright Hill Press
https://brighthillpress.org/product/traveling-through-glass/
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Traveling-Through-Glass-Bright-Poetry/dp/1892471051