For the second time in their history, Copper Canyon Press is pleased to announce that two books have been simultaneously nominated for the National Book Award in Poetry: James Richardson's "By the Numbers" and C.D. Wright's "One With Others"

For James Richardson, poetry is serious and speculative play for both intellect and imagination. "By the Numbers" is striking for its range of line and movement, for its microlyrics, crypto-quatrains, “ten-second essays,” and the twist and snap of aphorisms.

Drawing from myriad fables—Ovidian, Shakespearean, georgic, and scientific—Richardson makes familiar scenes strange enough to provoke new and startling insights.
  
Investigative journalism is the poet's realm as C.D. Wright, a former Port Townsend Writers' Conference faculty member, returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the civil rights movement.

Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially  those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.