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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.
Katharine Coles’s poems are made out of dark matter, intricate with gnarly thought, but bursting out in brilliant flashes, like sunlight streamed through the weave of a straw hat, the lamps of wayward fireflies, a new star illuminating, elsewhere, when an old one dies.
—Madison Smartt Bell, author of the Haiti Trilogy
In lines that augur the magic and power of her stunning new collection, Wayward, Katharine Coles likens how poets sing to “Riding / The backs of dragons.” By turns earthy, deliciously witty, and dazzling, Coles writes a smart, fierce song of a poem, crafting with consummate formal rigor a volume that undertakes profound inquiry into being and nothingness. “Am I an empty room?” one erasure poem hauntingly asks, but refrains from answering, for as Coles remarks, gnomic as Dickinson herself, “Who / can never say.”
—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
Pleasure in the mouth, pleasure in the swiftness and accuracy of perception, pleasure in observing a mind divided against itself interrogate its every assumption, pleasure in following the tough-minded investigations of self and the world through the lenses of physics, neurobiology, natural and human history—all these singular pleasures coalesce into poems rich with lyric feeling and a passionately precise syntax. Her use of rhyme shows why virtuosity coupled with psychological insight can get you closer to the heart of things in ten lines than in a pages-long narrative full of intimate details. Coles is a rarity in her generation or any generation: her understanding that poetry is a quintessentially formal art has allowed her to create her own conventions and explode the usual dichotomies between politics and private life, between tradition and the programmatically avant-garde. She is a true original.
—Tom Sleigh, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees