Colby Cotton’s debut poetry collection, Steelhead, is a meditation on grief, loneliness, and the lasting impact of loss. Written in the aftermath of a childhood friend’s death by suicide, the collection moves through dreamlike landscapes where the boundaries between life and the afterlife blur, exploring the search for a home we can never truly return to.
Cotton is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Originally from New York, he now lives in Los Angeles.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Steelhead, designed by Alex Wolfe and featuring photography by Francisco Gonzalez Camacho. Below, Cotton discusses the rural landscapes that shaped his poems, the photograph that immediately resonated with him, and how a simple ripple in water captures the collection’s exploration of grief, memory, and mortality.
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