In Coggin's debut collection of poetry, the Heart is the lens through which she leads us in words. Every line is infused with beauty and light and a yearning that is inescapable, palpable. Her voice is precise and piercing, like a song you hum without knowing, because it is already inside you. Her poems carry the fluttering soul, with vivid imagery that is tangible and evocative. PERISCOPE HEART is the sound of wings opening.
"I first met Kai Coggin as a blazing fire of energy, a supernova educator in the Houston high schools. Now she is on her light path teaching through her own poetry. Her words are spells, chants, prayers, invocations. Thank you, Kai, for work of the spirit, for illuminations like desert thunder and a night sky of benedictions.” 
- Sandra Cisneros author of House on Mango Street
"Kai Coggin’s first full-length collection, Periscope Heart - as the title may suggest - overflows with intimate reflections on life and love that offer the reader heartfelt observations into places ordinarily beyond our range of vision. Through sensual chronicles that beautifully illuminate taboo subjects, Coggin’s poetry draws from nature and personal narratives to intimate us with her passion for justice, social change and spirituality, in dynamic, seductive strokes.” 
- Catherine Ghosh Editor of Journey of the Heart: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry by Women 
“Kai Coggin’s Periscope Heart is beauty mapping the dark, a canyon of becoming and letting go. It is a compass to a place where desire is no different than already-full. It beckons and peels open what is fierce in our softness. This book unleashes possibility, celebrates the wild and untethered, while slowing everything down to the heart’s pace.” 
- Andrea Gibson Spoken Word Artist and Author of The Madness Vase, Winner of 2008 Women of the World Poetry Slam
Periscope Heart is the first full length collection of poetry from Kai Coggin published by Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC.

Periscope Heart

Literature & Fiction

Coggin, Kai

Poetry

Swimming with Elephants Publications

Kai's wings are wide open and soaring in her second poetry collection, WINGSPAN. A catalog of fight and flight through life, Kai invites her readers into the innermost parts, where wing tuft meets flesh, where flesh meets bone. WINGSPAN is a book of spirit, movement, mirrors, activism, love, and the fluttering song of a woman who is coming into her own beauty and beingness. Coggin's poetic measurement in words, WINGSPAN holds earth and infinity between its feather tips.

Wingspan: Poems

Golden Dragonfly Press

Fire--its light and passion, is an apt metaphor for these rich, compelling, and deeply felt poems. It takes its form in many ways in these resonant, powerful, and completely riveting calls for justice, kindness, and attention to those parts of ourselves that illumine the dark we live in today. These are poems that activate every page, with guttural imagery and sure craft of the form. Whether limning the course of a deep love, providing a safe space to children learning poetry for the first time, shouting the proud acknowledgment of the body, or examining the ruins of terror's aftermath, Kai Coggin proposes--no, urges--that we use that inherent fire within us, to grow not only our own lives, but to illumine and help the lives of others. These are poems of protest and praise, poems of a unique and adamant voice, who shows us what we can hope for, as well as what we can truly achieve in loving one another." - Philip F. Clark, author of The Carnival of Affection

Incandescent

Arts & Photography

Sibling Rivalry Press, LLC

MINING FOR STARDUST is a fiery and tender witness, a poetic chronology of one of the greatest collective paradigm shifts of our lifetime. Coggin's first poem in the collection was written on the first day of the COVID-19 lockdown. Each subsequent poem moves the reader through the pandemic, the summer of protests, the U.S. presidential election, and toward what seems like the other side of this darkest time in our memory. She does not shy away from the atrocities and the heartbreak, but leaves the reader in a space of healing. The book is intermittently filled also with nature, birds, and love poems for her wife, her safe inner world. MINING FOR STARDUST is an intentional practice in finding streaks of light in the shadows, "sifting flakes of space for gold/ amidst the dark matter/ surrounding us on all sides." It is memorial, grief, joy, beauty, truth, resistance, reflection, love, and balm for the aching human heart. It is the work of a scribe who earnestly engraves this moment into our human history. This collection is something you can hold in your hands, point to, and say, "I lived through all of this, too. I survived. I made it to the other side."

Mining for Stardust

Flowersong Press

Mother of Other Kingdoms

Small Harbor Publishing

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Books by Coggin, Kai