{"id":59915,"date":"2021-09-19T10:25:42","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T16:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=59915"},"modified":"2021-09-21T13:00:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T19:00:03","slug":"katharine-coles-the-stranger-i-become-is-poetry-in-motion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/katharine-coles-the-stranger-i-become-is-poetry-in-motion\/","title":{"rendered":"Katharine Coles’ “The Stranger I Become” is Poetry in Motion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A poet came to my door the other day, \u201cas poets are wont to do,\u201d quipped a friend on hearing of it. The poet who knocked, Katherine Indermauer, has published a fine chapbook,\u00a0Facing the Mirror,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0that I wanted after reading\u00a0a vibrant review in 15 Bytes<\/a> by Rebecca Pyle, a superb poet in her own right. Indermauer kindly delivered her book; currency changed hands; lively convo ensued.<\/h4>\n

I was at work on this review of Katharine Coles\u2019 The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing. <\/em>Indermauer, who had attended a reading by Coles the previous evening, and eagerly purchased a copy of the collection I was perusing, was startled to see the same book on my desk; I, too, was awed by the synchronicity. I said I planned to write that, while author Lance Larsen describes Coles\u2019 book beautifully, succinctly, even perfectly as, \u201ca poetic of the vivid,\u201d I had found the terminal chapter, about the \u201clong passing away\u201d of her beloved father, to be a sucker punch to the gut. Indermauer winced. “Probably because of unresolved issues I still have with my own father\u2019s death,\u201d I explained.<\/h4>\n

It was something I was trying to sort before writing further about the slim volume. Between the musings by Emily Dickinson \u2014 Coles scatters gems like \u201cDeath sets a Thing significant\u201d throughout her book \u2014 and the description of the careless distribution of the Utah poet\u2019s just-deceased father\u2019s \u2018Things\u2019 by her mother \u2014 \u201cWhat she didn\u2019t take with her to her new condo she offered to her children. What we didn\u2019t want, and a few things we did, she gave away or sold, more or less ruthlessly\u201d \u2014 I had been jolted, disturbed.<\/h4>\n

The book begins with essays of a different mood entirely: delicious observations on the difficulty of getting out of one\u2019s head when you are a genius (Coles never makes this claim but doesn\u2019t need to) and about the usefulness of walking as a remedy for a driven spirit. \u201cOf course, I prefer to walk outside, where it is harder to sink into myself,\u201d she writes.<\/h4>\n

And walk she does, typically seven miles or more most days, through her own wild, forested, and creature-inhabited hood (mountain lions and coyotes and voles, oh my!) or on a treadmill with a laptop mounted on it (for her work as an English professor). When not home, she might\u00a0 be strolling intently all about the world, including Antarctica (where she gamely walked a glacier daily), Frankfurt, Philadelphia, Montreal, Canberra, Paris. And London \u2014 where she spots \u201ca scarlet-painted door I don\u2019t remember noticing before though I have walked this Mayfair street a dozen times, each detail in its moment either committed to or lost to memory, often not for the first time.\u201d She is a poet with the eye of a visual artist, or perhaps the reflections are similar.<\/h4>\n
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Coles\u2019 essays, not just about her travels, explore her myopia and the extreme difficulties her husband, Chris, has with his eyes; the pain of hair; the poetry of Dickinson, Anne\u00a0 Carson and John Ashbery, among others; and the art of poetry in detail.<\/h4>\n

Katharine Coles\u2019 poetry is a delight to me and the lyric essays in this volume resemble poetry more closely than prose. Her work can be a stretch and I can find myself lost in her eloquent use of language \u2014 but contentedly, dreamily so. But if you do the work, set aside the necessary time, a vision is guaranteed. I have longed to know more about her; have greedily read all there is and still don\u2019t know enough. Here, she isn\u2019t at all stingy, and these personal details guarantee a vision as well.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t hold back on details about her husband\u2019s pet macaw, Merlin, who has adopted her (\u201csmall and tufted as I am, looking more like him than any other human he knows\u201d). And the placement of her \u201cwork\u201d treadmill before a canyon-overlook window is crucial and sums up much about this volume: “When I do raise my eyes from the screen and cast my gaze beyond the glass, I move not only out of my room, familiar and disorganized for my sole convenience, but out of myself.”<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, And Writing<\/em>
\nKatharine Coles<\/div>\n
Turtle Point Press<\/a>
\n2021
\n143 pp
\n$16<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A poet came to my door the other day, \u201cas poets are wont to do,\u201d quipped a friend on hearing of it. The poet who knocked, Katherine Indermauer, has published a fine chapbook,\u00a0Facing the Mirror,\u00a0\u00a0that I wanted after reading\u00a0a vibrant review in 15 Bytes by Rebecca Pyle, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":59916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1294],"class_list":["post-59915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-katharine-coles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/strangeribecome.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 18:42:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59915"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59919,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59915\/revisions\/59919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}