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Katharine Coles’s fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013), was written under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the journal Matrix. She has also published two novels. Recent poems and prose have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Seneca Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Image, Crazyhorse, Ascent, and Poetry. A professor at the University of Utah, in 2009–10 she served as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She has received grants and awards from the NEA, the NEH and, in 2012–13, the Guggenheim Foundation.
Whether she's contemplating the history of cosmology or the stern topography of western canyons, the touched wires that detonate the bomb that destroys a city square or the touched chords of married love, Katherine Coles writes with stirring passion and impeccable clarity. Again and again, with nimbleness and delicacy, she locates the precise register of consciousness, the precise figurative or affective cognate that allows us purchase on an abstract realm. Her rejuvenating explorations of inherited forms -- pantoums and ghazals, sonnets and quatrains, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, end-, embedded-, and metamorphic rhyme -- are revelatory: I know of no one writing in America today who uses these lovely instruments to richer effect, the auditory argument now countering, now corroborating the arguments of heart and mind. This wonderful new book is varied, engaging, and terrifically smart: it merits and lavishly rewards the most mindful of readings. -Linda Gregerson
