Katharine Coles’ seventh collection of poems, Wayward, is due from Red Hen Press in 2019; her memoir, Look Both Ways, will be out in 2018. She is a Poet in Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and at the SLC Public Library for the Poets House program FIELD WORK, and was sent to Antarctica in 2010 to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (The Earth Is Not Flat, Red Hen 2012). She has received grants from the NEA and NEH and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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"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