This erotic urban mystery is set in Salt Lake City, Utah. Grace Stern, a botanist, is married to but separated from Pascal, a heart surgeon and soon-to-be murder victim. The murder touches off a series of events that threaten to overwhelm Grace as she struggles to make sense of her life. A cast of interesting characters and a provocative writing style make this first novel by Coles a compelling read.

The Measurable World (Western Literature Series)

Literature & Fiction

Coles, Katharine

United States

University of Nevada Press

A History Of The Garden: Poems (Western Literature Series)

Poetry

The Golden Years of the Fourth Dimension is the third poetry volume of Katharine Coles, whose work always exciting, has grown with each collection. Her poetry is erotic at the same time it is scientific, and seductively accessible while it is intellectually challenging. The variety and high intelligence of these poems will entertain and gratify while tweaking the reader's interest in the richness of the history Coles so skillfully weaves into her poetic tapestry. Love, the natural world, sensuality, and ideas intertwine irresistibly in this fine collection.

The Golden Years Of The Fourth Dimension: Poems (Western Literature Series)

This literary collection of creative writing includes well-known poets and writers from across the country, including memoirist Dinty W. Moore, poets Katharine Coles and William Trowbridge, and novelist Jack Remick, as well as published and previously unpublished writers who have shared their work at Helicon West, Logan Utah's premier featured readers/open readings series, from 2006 to 2016.

The Helicon West Anthology: A Ten-Year Celebration of Featured Readers

Carney, Rob

Dethier, Brock

Cokinos, Christopher

Keller, Tim

VanZanten, Chadd

Johnson, Kimberly

Coulbrooke, Star

Ballam, Shanan

Gunsberg, Ben

Literary

Helicon West Press

In 2010, poet Katharine Coles sailed across the Drake Passage to spend a month at a tiny Antarctic science station under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. The Earth Is Not Flat, the collection of poems written out of her adventure, invokes the vast land- and seascapes as well as the fauna—penguins, seals, whales, and scientists—she encountered along the way. Addressing not only the present reality of human habitation in Antarctica but also a rich history peopled by figures like Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, the poems bring Coles’ much-praised intelligence, passion, and humor to bear on subjects ranging from writing a grant proposal for scientists to heavy seas to the addictive potential of joy. Along the way, she continues her passionate meditation on reality and our place in it, using as her vehicles both the natural world and the human-created worlds of art, history, and science.

The Earth Is Not Flat

Red Hen Press

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.

Wayward

Self-Help

Relationships

Thoughtful and intelligent, the poems in Flight are still fully embodied, rooted entirely in the senses, and extending Coles's ongoing examination of the big questions: What is the relation of art and science? What are our different ways of knowing, and how do we participate in and understand them? What are the potentials and limitations of perception and intuition? What is the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived, and can the boundaries between them be broken down? And never least, What what does all this tell us about our capacity for love and pleasure, and how does love influence the ways we address the other questions? These poems are deeply engaged with the pleasures of the sensuous, treating thought itself as a sensual activity, as a kind of passion in its own right. William Carlos Williams said, "No ideas but in things"; Coles seems to want to assert that there is no thing—moon, bat, moth, dog, beloved husband—that will not give rise to ideas, and, very often, to pleasure at the same time. More than anything, pleasures are what the poems seek to create and enact—the pleasures of the flesh, yes; and of the mind that is also of the flesh, and that is so present in the poems.

Flight

Ghost Apples

"Tense, abundantly researched, and heartbreaking . . . Coles makes sense of the unique forces that shaped women in the twentieth century." ―Foreword Reviews Walter Link and Miriam Wollaeger, a young geologist couple in 1920s Wisconsin, set out to find oil to supply the surging U.S. demand. This exciting work will allow them to build their lives in South and Central America, Indonesia, and Cuba. But from the first posting in Columbia, they quickly discover that no women are working in the field in these places. While Walter faces the hardships and thrills of exploration in the jungles and mountains, and eventually becomes chief geologist for Standard Oil, Miriam is left behind in the colonial capitals during Walter’s often lengthy times away. She defines herself through the limited means left to a woman within their small societies: playing bridge or polo by day and dancing into the wee hours with early KLM pilots, diplomats, and the footloose sons of moneyed Americans and the European aristocracies. She also raises three children, has intimate involvements, learns the local languages, and takes up teaching. But she is not satisfied. And finally she does something about it. Following in her grandparents’ footsteps, author Katharine Coles looks backward and forward, through documents and imagination. She looks at their journeys and hers, and mingling their words with her own, examines the delicate balances that must exist in a successful marriage and a feminist life.

Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother's Far-Flung Path

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Turtle Point Press

"Coles is a true original." âe*Tom Sleigh The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Poet Katharine Coles begins her lyric essays with a meditation on "the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger,estranged." The essays travel, always on foot, from Coles's home with its kept and wild birds, into the canyon her home overlooks, itself populated with creatures ranging from voles to owls, moose, bobcats, and coyotes. From there, always looking, always walking, in the company of the words that move her, they traverse her neighborhood and distant places in this country and the world. All along, they consider the poetry that inhabits her: the winged creatures of Dickinson, Ashbery's "reflections," Keats's "irritable reaching," Anne Carson's ever-unreachable apples, and more. Taken together, they make up what Lance Olsen calls "a poetics of the vivid."

The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing (Joan Books)

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Coles, Katharine