FAULT

(Paperback)

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In Fault, Katharine Coles continues to explore her abiding interest in the intersections of science, culture, and history, but the book is perhaps best described as an extended meditation on love. Ranging across time and continents, Coles addresses such figures as Newton, Kepler, and Vesalius, not only with intellectual rigor but also with a

Reviews

Fault has all the inquisitive intelligence of Katharine Coles' earlier work, the thrill of scientific inquiry, the dazzling profusion of sensory delights. But these poems also soar into song--lament, hymn, jazz riff, ghazal. With the passion of one who knows both suffering and desire, Coles illuminates the miraculous accident of our survival, the mystery of eternity contained by fragile bodies. With fearless grace, she exposes the startling similarity between the tenderness of a lover's gaze and the patient precision of a terrorist touching wires. "Happiness must be simple, and enough." No matter how dangerous the world becomes, Katharine Coles lights every line with wonder, and with love.

Whether she's contemplating the history of cosmology or the stern

topography of western canyons, the "touched wires" that detonate the bomb

that destroys a city square or the touched chords of married love,

Katherine Coles writes with stirring passion and impeccable clarity. Again

and again, with nimbleness and delicacy, she locates the precise register

of consciousness, the precise figurative or affective cognate that allows

us purchase on an abstract realm. Her rejuvenating explorations of

inherited forms -- pantoums and ghazals, sonnets and quatrains, slant

rhyme, eye rhyme, end-, embedded-, and metamorphic rhyme -- are

revelatory: I know of no one writing in America today who uses these

lovely instruments to richer effect, the auditory argument now countering,

now corroborating the arguments of heart and mind. This wonderful new

book is varied, engaging, and terrifically smart: it merits and lavishly

rewards the most mindful of readings.

-Linda Gregerson

Author Bio

Katharine Coless fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013), was written under the auspices of the National Science Foundations Antarctic Artists and Writers Program; ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the summer 2014 issue of the journal Matrix. She has also published two novels. Recent poems and prose have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Seneca Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Image, Crazyhorse, Ascent, and Poetry. A professor at the University of Utah, in 200910 she served as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundations Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She has received grants and awards from the NEA, the NEH and, in 201213, the Guggenheim Foundation.