In her seventh collection, Wayward, Katharine Coles uses small poems to take on big questions, including love, aging, death, the permeable boundaries of self, and how we know what we know.

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.

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