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Mining for Stardust
MINING FOR STARDUST is a fiery and tender witness, a poetic chronology of one of the greatest collective paradigm shifts of our lifetime. Coggin’s first poem in the collection was written on the first day of the COVID-19 lockdown. Each subsequent poem moves the reader through the pandemic, the summer of protests, the U.S. presidential election, and toward what seems like the other side of this darkest time in our memory. She does not shy away from the atrocities and the heartbreak, but leaves the reader in a space of healing. The book is intermittently filled also with nature, birds, and love poems for her wife, her safe inner world. MINING FOR STARDUST is an intentional practice in finding streaks of light in the shadows, “sifting flakes of space for gold/ amidst the dark matter/ surrounding us on all sides.” It is memorial, grief, joy, beauty, truth, resistance, reflection, love, and balm for the aching human heart. It is the work of a scribe who earnestly engraves this moment into our human history. This collection is something you can hold in your hands, point to, and say, “I lived through all of this, too. I survived. I made it to the other side.”
- GenresPoetry
152 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2021
29 people want to read
About the author
Kai Coggin
12 books48 followersKai Coggin (she/her) is the author of MINING FOR STARDUST (FlowerSong Press 2021), INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019), WINGSPAN (Golden Dragonfly Press 2016), and PERISCOPE HEART (Swimming with Elephants Publications 2014), as well as a spoken word album SILHOUETTE (2017). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.
Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, and 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, and 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 25, 2022
Meeting Kai irl was a wonderful treat 🥰. Thank you for sharing your heartsong, Kai.
November 29, 2021
I’ll read and reread Kai Coggin’s Mining for Stardust for the the open-hearted accessible poetry. Kai has given us a potent document of recall which returns me to that first year of the pandemic—the suffering we have collectively and individually endured, and also what we could make out of it. And what Kai has made out of dust is light.
January 13, 2022
This collection of poems is absolutely spectacular and helped me to process the difficult events of the last two years in a way that has long eluded me. It is a beautiful balance of sad and uplifting, with every page saturated with frustration and gratitude, mourning and hope. These contradictions build off of each other and not only allow for deep understandings of the complex moments of late, but also remind us of the nuance and contradictions in life and experience itself and the beauty and power of nature and our interconnectedness as creatures of the world. Kai Coggin crafts poignant neologisms and meaningful phrases that resonate both logically and emotionally, all brought to life with incredibly powerful rhythms.
I've read this book twice through already and I know it has become one of those precious collections that I will continue to turn to throughout my life because of its deep reflections on humanity. I am a poet myself, and had found myself unable to write anything about the pandemic, but Kai's work inspired me to craft my first poem on the topic and that experience was just as cathartic as reading her insightful words.
I've read this book twice through already and I know it has become one of those precious collections that I will continue to turn to throughout my life because of its deep reflections on humanity. I am a poet myself, and had found myself unable to write anything about the pandemic, but Kai's work inspired me to craft my first poem on the topic and that experience was just as cathartic as reading her insightful words.
January 17, 2022
Kai Coggin's latest collection is modern confessional poetry. Here you will find no symbolism or imagery for its own sake. Every poem is straightforward, literal, and usually long. It leaves nothing to the imagination. These are COVID pandemic poems, a nearly chronological journal of the poet's experience of 2020. Some are optimism in extremis, others are angry, others almost despairing. All of them are starkly honest.
The best poems are introverted rather than extroverted, self-reflecting rather than social and political. These poems tend to be a little shorter and leave the reader with more breathing room for interaction by filling the little blanks that are less literal and more suggestive within them. As in "When the Stars Fall":
the rain falls
hard heavy
on the white petals
of jasmine
that have entwined
their soft bodies to the steel
that holds our house
to the earth
swirling galaxy of stars
that affixes
us to the ground
and to the heavens combined
in the morning
a universe is scattered
under our bare feet
Some of these poems are too much of their moment to remain relevant 10 or 20 years from now. Some are truly sublime. In that sense, it's a potluck seeking to be comfort food. Its strongest argument for itself is that it will continue to be an honest, individual chronicle of a year which will surely be of interest to history.
In January 2020, I was completing an audiobook of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of Plague Year", which - although being fiction - is the nearest thing we have today to an actual journal of an individual living during the last substantial outbreak of bubonic plague in London just a year before the Great London Fire. I did not then know, of course, that I would immediately begin to live through a modern plague of different cause. I have often had occasion to think back on that book in the 2 years since listening to it and make comparisons and to be grateful for the differences that modernism makes in how humanity weathers such an event. (How fortunate we are to have refrigerators so that we do not have to go to market literally everyday for food! How wonderful is having the internet so as to stay in touch!) I imagine books like "Mining for Stardust" will serve a similar purpose for future generations in helping them to understand the human stories of this time.
The best poems are introverted rather than extroverted, self-reflecting rather than social and political. These poems tend to be a little shorter and leave the reader with more breathing room for interaction by filling the little blanks that are less literal and more suggestive within them. As in "When the Stars Fall":
the rain falls
hard heavy
on the white petals
of jasmine
that have entwined
their soft bodies to the steel
that holds our house
to the earth
swirling galaxy of stars
that affixes
us to the ground
and to the heavens combined
in the morning
a universe is scattered
under our bare feet
Some of these poems are too much of their moment to remain relevant 10 or 20 years from now. Some are truly sublime. In that sense, it's a potluck seeking to be comfort food. Its strongest argument for itself is that it will continue to be an honest, individual chronicle of a year which will surely be of interest to history.
In January 2020, I was completing an audiobook of Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of Plague Year", which - although being fiction - is the nearest thing we have today to an actual journal of an individual living during the last substantial outbreak of bubonic plague in London just a year before the Great London Fire. I did not then know, of course, that I would immediately begin to live through a modern plague of different cause. I have often had occasion to think back on that book in the 2 years since listening to it and make comparisons and to be grateful for the differences that modernism makes in how humanity weathers such an event. (How fortunate we are to have refrigerators so that we do not have to go to market literally everyday for food! How wonderful is having the internet so as to stay in touch!) I imagine books like "Mining for Stardust" will serve a similar purpose for future generations in helping them to understand the human stories of this time.
March 12, 2022
Such passion in these poems! Kai Coggin is certainly a poet of protest and social justice, which come through clearly in these poems that practically beg to be heard. Certainly poems of the air more than of the page.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews