Time and Chance, Katharine Coles’ plucky tenth collection of poems, offers riches to any reader. Elegant elegies to her late parents and a delightfully wicked one to an ex—“Sestina in Prose: Three Dreams” and “Degas Dancers”—and a superb breezy commentary on butterflies, “A Note on the Apparent Lowering of Moral Standards in the Lepidoptera,” are standouts.

But there’s so much more to spend an evening with: the creatures that inhabit Coles’ quarter-acre in the canyon; the moon as it rises and sets; her shrink-to-fit Levi’s and the shared realization that she won’t wear out another pair. “If I had a mess of red hair” is as charming and ironic as its title promises.

The book represents a thoughtful gathering of some of this poet’s finest work to date and is deserving of a place by your favorite chair or on your bedside table—you surely will pick it up frequently.

Tom Sleigh, author of The King’s Touch, says “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 public and private life . . . She is a true original.”

Coles toys with form but takes it über seriously. This may have something to do with her being a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah, where she teaches courses in creative writing, poetry, and poetics. She has received grants and awards from The Guggenheim Foundation, the US National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Time and Chance
Katharine Coles
Turtle Point Press
April 2025
$19.00
128 pages

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.