“Renaissance Man"  --North tama telegraph

“lusty" and "florid"  --LA Times 

“guerrilla prose pusher" --Highnote  

“funny with an edge" --KFAI Radio (Twin Cities)  

“powerfully resonant… takes center stage" 

                    --Nebraska Poetry Menu  

“colorful, idiosyncratic, sexy, introspective, witty and frightfully observant”                                                      --Static Magazine
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praise for Blood, Sex & Prayer…

Patricia Smith, National Book Award winner and author of Blood Dazzler

"Jim Coppoc is lectern pushed over, expectations rattled, and convention pushed aside.  And Blood, Sex & Prayer establishes him as a master of cynical lyricism and a wordsmith whose work is further proof that poetry never retreated to that dusty bookshelf it once called home--snarling and coiled, it was behind us all the time, just waiting to pounce."


Marc Smith, founder of Slam Poetry, co-editor of The Spoken Word Revolution

"Jim Coppoc's Blood, Sex & Prayer follows the zealous path of the slam troubador--wowing audiences from the stage and twisting their beliefs on the page.  Coppoc is one of the new breed giving poetry new breath."


Deborah Keenan, American Book Award winner, author of Good Heart

"Jim Coppoc's Blood, Sex & Prayer speaks up, cries out, laughs and rages, ponders and judges, and insists on a capital-R Romantic vision of how a life is to be adequately, insistently lived.  I finished this book imagining what angry, holy and joyful things he might be saying to us in the years and books to come."


Neal Bowers, author of Out of the South

"The poems in Blood, Sex & Prayer insist on being heard as well as read, because Jim Coppoc is working in the dynamic zone where performance poetry and the written word intersect.  What he produces is an invigorating hybrid--poems that play well in a crowded room and also earn their ink and paper.  The range of Coppoc's voice (as suggested by the title) is remarkable.  He can rant and descant, confess and profess, and yet he always makes the language resonate.  Listen!"

Jack McCarthy, author of Grace Notes

"Jim Coppoc writes poems about important stuff. Some of it's theological, some of it's political, some of it's personal; all of it is important.

This book has treasures in it, yet I come away with a sense that all I have seen is the tip of the Jim Coppoc iceberg. All you Titanics out there, think about a lifeboat drill."


Click here for a review of BS&P on Chicago Poetry

praise for reliquary…

Mary Swander, former Poet Laureate of Iowa, author of Girls on the Roof

"At once personal and political, Jim Coppoc's tender-tough voice moves us through this beautifully crafted collection with extraordinary authority and ease.  This book punches and punches back with surprise and risk, the poetry creating a context for the play.  Coppoc offers us a reliquary, a box that contains both memories of the best times, and a few pieces of broken glass and jagged metal.  Open the lid and enter a volume that both Ginsberg and Kerouac would have loved reading."


Jim Moore, Minnesota Book Award winner and author of Lightening at Dinner

"Reliquary is the perfect title for this book: in it rest the sacred remains of many kinds of love.  Above all, this is a book in which love matters more than anything, though this is a love that contains anger, grief, disappointment.  In an untitled piece Coppoc writes: "we will love and we will live, and this day will be ours forever.

Desperation and love are the signature mix that give Reliquary its authority and power, its tenderness and authenticity."


John Fenn, Playwright in Residence, St. Paul Historical Theater

"Coppoc breathes new life into the Beat genre with dramatic, original insights into love, death, and religion.  His rich artistry and empathy for the human condition are often funny, always moving, and harshly true.  Coppoc's verse and drama leap off the page to be etched into memory."

praise for manhattan beatitude, 1997…

Thom Dawkins, poet, critic, and poetry editor for Fourth River

…Beatitude shift[s] between the quai-religious, Ginsbergian chanting (think of the Holy Holy Holy being replaced by a Blessed Be) and a keen eye that knows the details of its New York surroundings. In other words, Coppoc is a poet whose example we need to follow, one who finds something enduringly sacred in street culture and in personal history. Coppoc is a poet whose redemption stems from a deep understanding of place, people, and the commonalities found between strangers.


Click here for a review by Tom Holmes, editor of Redactions: Poetry and Poetics

praise for Bearing the pall…

Sheryl St. Germain, author of Let it be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems

"Always startling and intimate, Coppoc croons his way through his poems in a voice worthy of Sinatra. This Ginsberg-haunted collection works like a jazz funeral, moaning, celebrating, provoking, and healing. Jim Coppoc reminds us how to sing from the gut about loss and desire."

Heather McNaugher, author of Panic and Joy

“Jim Coppoc's poems are the requisite anthem of the 1990s for which we've been waiting. These poems evoke the scrape of thin-skin on concrete, of needles jammed in the tender underbelly of our elbows. Coppoc's edgy grace lurks in this generation still growing up, glum and ferocious. He delivers the blow and the drug, and sets on fire the fizzing-out birthday candles of the endlessly pining and already done.”