Star Coulbrooke is the inaugural poet laureate of Logan City, Utah. She was born in Preston, Idaho on February 22, 1951, to a farm family with acreage along the Bear River. She quit high school to marry a Logan boy, completed her GED in 1986, and enrolled at Utah State University where she earned a BA in Literary Studies (1996) and an MA in American Studies/Folklore (1998). She has lived in Smithfield for twenty-eight years.
Coulbrooke wrote her bachelors’ and master’s theses in poetry. She is the author of several chapbooks, notably Walking the Bear (Outlaw Artists Press, 2011) and three poetry collections, including Thin Spines of Memory (2017, Both Sides from the Middle (2018), and City of Poetry (2019), all from Helicon West Press. She is editor of the Helicon West Anthology: A Ten-Year Celebration of Featured Readers (2016), which won the League of Utah Writers Gold Quill Award.
During her laureateship (April 2015-August 2019), Coulbrooke organized 142 events throughout Logan, Cache Valley, and northern Utah. Her main project was to create a series of collaborative community poems, which she presented to the mayor and council members each year of her term. Contributors to the poems joined her on poetry walkabouts, in which they read poems on a theme, wrote from a prompt, and sent their lines to Coulbrooke for selection and inclusion in the final poem.
Coulbrooke also created poems for special events, such as “Sesquicentennial, City of Poetry.” She composed and presented a tribute poem, “Of Balance and Grace: The Public Face of Leadership,” for the inaugural celebration of Noelle Cockett, Utah State University’s first female president. These poems, along with others she composed for individuals and organizations, including the community collaborative poems, can be found in City of Poetry.
As co-founder and organizer of the Helicon West Featured Readers/Open Readings Series (2005), Coulbrooke coordinates twice-monthly events and oversees publication of the Helicon West Community Broadsides. Helicon West is an official partner of the Logan Library and winner of the 2013 Utah State University Robins Award Achievement of the Year.
In addition to her work with Helicon West, Coulbrooke has served as literary grants panelist for the Utah Arts Council, committee member for the selection of the first three Utah poets laureate, and judge for various contests and publications. She teaches workshops for organizations such as the League of Utah Writers, the Utah State Poetry Society, and the National Federation of the Blind, and gives dozens of public lectures and poetry readings throughout the West. She is director of the Utah State University Writing Center and a long-time activist for rivers, public lands, wildlife, domestic animals, and humans.
Works
Aerobics by God
Aerobics by God
It was a class for women-only,
women in the same church
honing their bodies for husbands
who told them God said
it was good to be fit,
and ever since birth control,
women could be.
So every Tuesday morning
they followed a church-approved leader
through ladylike routines
in new leotards and ballet shoes,
embarrassed at the sight of butts
and legs they’d never seen before,
their shapes always having been covered
in Sunday pleats and gathers.
Gradually, as confidence crept in
with dance steps mastered
to such easy routine they could have
walked it in their sleep, their thoughts
began to wander, endorphins
they hadn’t owned since puberty
pushing them into loving their muscles,
liking their new form–such energy!
A few of the ladies quit, went off
to the fitness center in town
and started working out with weights.
They bought cross-training shoes,
aerobics and lifting on alternate days.
Made excuses for not going out with
the family on weekends, went running
on Saturdays, hot-tubbing Sunday.
They were looking sharp, feeling
like they could conquer the world.
One ran for public office, two divorced.
I burned up a new pair of shoes
every six months, got so tight and sinewy
I stopped my cycle, no more monthly
bleeding, just energy, energy and power.
I could carry six bags of groceries
to the car myself, no cart, no sweat.
I could stay up until midnight baking,
doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom.
I’d fall into bed, sleep hard until five,
get up and go like hell. One day,
my man voiced his usual complaints,
and I decked him. All from a church-ladies
gentle aerobics class, ordered by God.
Published in Both Sides from the Middle, Helicon West Press, 2018,
Perspectives, Center for Women and Gender online magazine, Utah State University, Spring 2015,
and Logan Canyon Blend, Blue Scarab Press, Pocatello, Idaho, 2003.
Little Girls Farming in the Fifties
Little Girls Farming in the Fifties
We sit up high on rusted seats,
metal molded to fit a man’s bottom,
round holes for venting hot sweat
on long turns around fields
over hours of plowing and planting.
We don’t know the real work,
only this imaginary traveling
on relics of a family farm, wide rake
bearing rows of curved steel tines,
wagon-sized drill with disks mounted
for sowing, wooden seed boxes
lined up, sun-dried, lids curled.
We open them as if we’ll find treasure,
something that wasn’t here yesterday
or the day before when we played,
imagining we were Indians, pioneers,
farmers, some discovery we overlooked
and now see, there in the bottom corner
among small hard grains left over
from the last-ever planting,
little golden seeds amidst the chaff.
Published in Junction Magazine, Ogden, Utah, June 2002, in Small Farmer’s Journal, 27.4, Sisters, Oregon, Fall 2003 and in Walking the Bear, Outlaw Artists Press, Price, Utah, 2011
Students Who Cut
Students Who Cut
I wish they would cut classes,
get tattoos instead, skin stained
with tendrils of bright color,
shooting stars, orchids with skulls
looking out of their centers, anything
but slash scars under shirtsleeves.
They make my past come at me in ribbons,
shin scraped to the bone for a good inch
first time I shaved at eleven;
crucifix burned into my wrist at fifteen,
knife-slice-and-hot-oven accidents-on-purpose
for my lonely housewife longings at twenty,
surface-level scarring to hide the deeper cuts.
Now I take my next fix under the needle,
just the right amount of pain,
bloodletting on a minor scale,
soft ooze to the surface, smell of hot ink,
bloom of star and flower on my ankle,
the artist’s hand intent on design,
turning and pressing the gun.
Published in a different form in New Graffiti Broadsides, 2nd Edition, SLC, Utah, September 2010
Only Pears
Only Pears
In a past life
I gathered fruit
as it fell from branches
that grew up the slender
trunk, an inverted
umbrella weighted with
plump ripened gold.
Cows grazed in the pasture
by the orchard,
pears shining on their own
side of the fence.
Now the pears drop
every season
long before they
should, worm-holed
and limb-scarred
from bare spines.
But let’s not talk about
the fall, the trampled fruit,
an
early death.
Instead, picture pears,
bell-shaped and burnished,
lifted in a child’s hand
from orchard bed to lips,
deep gold, incredibly sweet.
Published in slightly different forms in Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian State University, Spring 2000 and Tertulia Magazine, Sunnyvale, California, October 2003.
Also published in Thin Spines of Memory, Helicon West Press, 2017.
Bibliography
- City of Poetry, Helicon West Press, Logan, Utah, 2019
- Both Sides from the Middle, Helicon West Press, Logan, Utah, 2018
- Thin Spines of Memory, Helicon West Press, Logan, Utah, 2017
- The Helicon West Anthology: A Ten-Year Celebration of Featured Readers, Editor, Helicon West Press, Logan, Utah, 2016
- Walking the Bear, Outlaw Artists Press, Price, Utah, 2011
- Logan Canyon Blend, co-authored with Kenneth W. Brewer, Blue Scarab Press, Pocatello, Idaho, 2003
Links
- Star Coulbrooke City of Poetry reading at Helicon West Oct. 10, 2019
- Bite-Size Poetry for February 2015
- Interview with Star Coulbrooke
- Star Coulbrooke at Logan Municipal Council
- Star Coulbrooke Reading Poetry
- LITerally - Star Coulbrooke, Logan City Poet
- In Final Reading, Logan Poet Laureate Coulbrooke 8/29/2019
- Remick and Ray Interview Star Coulbrooke | Bob and Jack's 5/7/2016
