Valentine’s Day Poet Feature: Katharine Coles

By Lizzy Young

On the last day of February, we are closing out our February Valentine’s series, where a Red Hen spring pub poet shares one love poem that inspires them and one poem they wrote, with Katharine Coles!

Katharine Coles’ eleven books include Wayward, poems from Red Hen Press; a memoir, Look Both Ways; and a collection of essays, The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking, and Writing. 2018–19 Poet-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Salt Lake Public Library for the Poets House FIELD WORK program, she has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and from the Guggenheim Foundation. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.

For a love poem that inspires her, Katharine chose the classic “673” by Emily Dickinson.

For a love poem that she wrote, Katharine chose “Whistler” from her forthcoming collection, Ghost Apples.

If you love this poem, check out Katharine’s upcoming poetry collection!

In her ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet. From her own pet parrot, Henri, to the birds her husband attracts to their feeders, to the wildlife who live just outside — and regularly cross — her property on the wild edge of Salt Lake City, she uses her capacity for intense observation and meditation to think her way into other lives and possible shared futures, both good and bad.

Preorder her collection here!

Thanks so much for following along on our Valentine’s Poet series. We hope you enjoyed reading love poems every week and got some new poetry books to read this spring!