Wayward

by Katharine Coles

Since her early poems, Katharine Coles has been known as a poet who isn’t afraid to tackle big subjects that occupy the intersections of art and science, including how we know what is true (if we do). Driven by her insatiable curiosity and relying on a use of form and elision so deft it amounts to sleight-of-hand, Coles brings these big questions into small spaces in her seventh book, Wayward, moving the reader at mind-speed through brief meditations on love, marriage, and family; the permeable boundaries of the self; death; and perception. Though her subjects are deeply serious, Coles’ primary tools for addressing them include her wry wit and agile intelligence, which, taking nothing for granted, she deploys to examine our basic assumptions about the world and our experience within it. As always, Coles here uses technical skill to move her thinking in new directions—many of them at once.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 25, 2019

About the author

Katharine Coles(born ) is an American poet and educator. She served from 2006-2012 as Utah's third poet laureate and currently serves as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute and the co-director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature.

Coles earned her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington. She later earned a master's degree from the University of Houston and her Ph.D from the University of Utah.

Coles received the PEN New Writer’s Award in 1992. Her 2001 poetry collection, The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, received the Utah Book Award. In 2012, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[birdbassador · Rating 4 out of 5]

i enjoy the attention paid to meter and rhyme here in ways that other contemporaries do not, but i must admit i was distracted through most of this because i once asked the poet a stupid question and received a very good answer and i could not remember either (i think it was about the inhumanity of quantification? it was not a very good question!)

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Away” is a favorite