Time and Chance

Majestic, playful, brainy, heart-wrenching, Katharine Coles’s tenth collection of poems at once celebrates and elegizes: her teachers and parents--both dead at ninety--who still issue advice (some good, some not) from beyond the grave; the creatures who pass through her canyon quarter-acre; the moon as it rises and sets; even her Levi’s shrink-to-fits, when she realizes she’ll never wear out another pair. The poems ＂guide us with their empathy, sometimes yoked with a wry irony, around the physics of interactions.＂ [John Kinsella] More than anything, this is a book about presence: haunted by the past yet firmly rooted in the also-haunting now, Coles keeps spinning, finding herself in words, in her body, in time.

Katharine Coles is the author of two novels, eight collections of poems, the essay collection The Stranger I Become, and the memoir Look Both Ways. The recipient of grants from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she has served as Poet Laureate of Utah and was inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Utah.