Katharine Coles was born and raised in Salt Lake City. After four years at school in Seattle and two in Houston, and a year in Washington, D.C. as Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School, she moved back to Salt Lake to pursue her PhD at the University of Utah. She taught for several years at Westminster College, then returned to the University of Utah, where she is now a Distinguished Professor in the English Department. Coles’ ten books include seven collections of poems, most recently Wayward (Red Hen Press, 2019). Her memoir, Look Both Ways, was released in 2018 by Turtle Point Press, which will also publish The Stranger I Become: essays in reckless poetics in 2021. 2018-19 Poet-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Salt Lake City Public Library for the Poets House FIELD WORK program, she also served from 2006-2012 as the third Poet Laureate of Utah, and in 2009-10 as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. She has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the international Digging Into Data Challenge, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems and essays have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Dutch.
Works
Lens
Lens
You Won't Find Consolation
YOU WON’T FIND CONSOLATION
or. The deer, nearly
Color blind, see blue
Better than we do, more
Blue than we know, a blue
I am not consoled
Lives beyond me. Imagine
Their sky, saturated, how
Do they bear it, and
The alpine lake where
They drink in summer, glacier-
Fed, reflecting back it all back
Plus. Consider
The glacier, blue at heart
deep-Frozen for millennia, blue
Its core and vanishing
In your lifetime. A rush,
A trickle, this is how
It goes? Around the lake,
Boulders harden themselves.
Green firs. And there, a perfect
Center, the lake’s clear,
Unreadable eye.
Sestina In Prose
SESTINA IN PROSE
It was like climbing a mountain to those of us who’d climbed one. To the others, it was like, I
suppose, something else. In other words, we let everybody find her own figure of speech.
Not that it – speech – lay thick on the ground, or mountain; it presented itself one word at a time,
far between. A body had to keep an eye out, like for firewood at dusk, or else
miss her chance. Nobody else, let’s face it, cared about metaphor, or even simile, the
like-it-or-not-ness of the mountain pretty much getting between a body and her musing, in its
going. One
step at a time, anyone could lose herself or someone else just staring at her feet. And if a body
meet a body is not mere speech but something that could happen, like hopping a bus – though on
the mountain
you’ll catch no rides, worse luck, the mountain requires to be climbed on foot, one after the
other, nothing else will get you up it. There’s nothing like such obduracy but in the wild, nobody
can tell you otherwise. No simple figure,
this struggle: just a crag, your burden, and your own two feet. Say otherwise, talk through your
hat, which I don’t care for.
Pantoum at Twilight
PANTOUM AT TWILIGHT
Because our windows look like sky
Outside, you can’t see in—only
Light reflecting blue, streaked white,
Only leaves flashing
Outside. You can’t see in, only
That there is an inside, not
Only leaves flashing
But among them a shadow showing
Inside. There is not
A body but a haunting, surfaces
And among them a shadow. I’ll show you
If you bring your eyes closer
A body haunting the surfaces
Of table and shelf, a curve of chair.
Bring your eyes closer:
There, sitting and reading, a man
Curves the chair. Table and shelf
Emerge as the sun sets here;
There, sitting and reading, the man
Turns on the light and suddenly
Emerges. Out here, the sun sets,
Light reflecting blue, streaked with red,
The light turning on us because
Suddenly the window looks like sky.
Originally published in Ocean City Review.
Seven (or so) Poses
SEVEN (or so) POSES
Who poses, the woman
Or the crane, the woman or
The buffalo looking as if he wears
A tiger for a skin. Two swans
Or the woman, the woman
Or history, the girl almost
Woman or her nearest
Attachment, also almost –
Or her dream. The dream
Dances, faint and whimsical,
Neither woman nor girl
Nor in between. He leads
A dog-sized cricket on a string,
The cricket also posing.
Hung Liu, National Museum of Women’s Art, June 2018
Originally published in Seneca Review.
Bibliography
Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother’s Far-flung Path, creative nonfiction/memoir. Turtle Point Press, November 2018.
Wayward, poems. Red Hen Press, forthcoming June 2019 (in press).
Flight, poems, Red Hen Press, March 2016.
Bewilder, poems (chapbook), International Poetry Studies Institute (Canberra, Australia), September, 2015.
The Earth Is Not Flat, poems, Red Hen Press, March 2013.
Fault, poems, Red Hen Press, June 2008.
Fire Season, novel, Juniper Press, September 2005.
The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension, poems. University of Nevada Press, August 2001.
A History of the Garden, poems. University of Nevada Press, 1997.
The Measurable World, novel. University of Nevada Press, 1995.
The One Right Touch, poems. Ahsahta Press, 1992.
Blueprints: Bringing Poetry to Communities, editor and co-author. University of Utah Press/The Poetry Foundation, February 8, 2011 (e-book); March 1, 2011 (print book).
Poetry and New Media: A Users Guide, co-author/facilitator. The Poetry Foundation, February 2010.
