books

fence books - december 2025

winner of the modern poets book prize

Winner of the poetry Society of America’s Alice fay di castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress

From the PSA Award Citation: “The conceit of these witty and moving poems allows the poet/speaker to externalize obsession; what we read is a gallery of ways to view a pregnancy, a motherhood, a miscarriage. Each is a kind of self-portrait (‘I grew every which way. My pregnant belly had its own elbows.’), a description through negation (‘This painting has no moon to see in it … What of moon there is in this painting / one has to see some other way … and this painting has a baby in it, a baby / and a lake behind her that you can’t see’), an attempt at preservation (‘I suspend / the miniature package with red silk thread / over my side of the bed / so my miniature, miscarried baby / and everything I’ve wrapped around her / can haunt me properly’). This is poignant, captivating, often exquisite work.” —Elisa Gabbert

“In lyrics of unerring precision, we watch Cowles ‘stitch and double stitch’ the elusive outline of an artist's life. These inventive poems, arranged like exhibits in a surreal retrospective, ask important questions about women's creative production, giving us a detailed view of the intimate accoutrements of such work--hairpins, cardstock, layers of lacquer, and of course, poetic language. From these ‘various evidences’ and across the visual ‘poem-collages’ and other verse forms, Eleanor takes astonishing shape. This is a marvelous read.” —Kiki Petrosino

"Especially urgent now is an imagery that does not flicker, transient overcrowded in transience, but, rather, an imagery that flies and an impassioned language of ascent, like wings, that makes of imagery emblems of liberation and of a further, lovelier humanness. Kathryn Cowles has reinvented the ekphrastic principle and given it velocity. The results are visionary in the most immediate sense of that word." —Donald Revell

Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

Milkweed Editions - 2020

Where are you? Where do you think you are? How do you know? Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World will quite possibly change your mind, or that part of your mind that thinks it knows, or relies on anything in print. Come take a journey from an island in Greece—by boat and plane and step—to Ohio, only to walk out into a field of wildflowers you thought you knew, but didn’t. The luckiest readers will wind up in a rocking chair on a porch, seeing the world as if for the first time. —Mary Ruefle

“The careful measure of this world against all other versions, measured by birds, by boats, by the sea . . . Kathryn Cowles explores the ways that acute, engaged attention is, in itself, a unit of measure, delivering us up to a world the size of a world. She covers a lot of territory, and always with an intimacy that makes us present, in her images and in her imaginary, both always mapping the world as a way of participating it in more closely—a stunning text that sweeps the reader along on its travels.” —Cole Swensen

“Kathryn Cowles’s new book is an extraordinary exploration of the heart of human existence. Interrogating our relationship to place, the environment, religion, history, memory, love, and more, she employs a myriad of forms and approaches. The language here is a symphonic arc at once dissonant and harmonic, experimental and narrative, a perfect blend of opposites seeking always to open a road, a liminal zipper into possibility. Part alchemical formula, part cartographer’s process, part prophecy, part fairy tale, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World weaves spell after spell, poems and images spooling out as coordinates, compass points, leading into a lyric, playful but deep probing of what might be recovered and turned to a redemptive purpose."
—Chris Abani

“Kathryn Cowles's beautiful new work is threaded with sites of everyday transformation—where a landscape becomes an image or a bird song becomes a sequence of hyphenated phonemes or a flash of consciousness becomes a poem. In text and image, Cowles shows us how to see and hear through the interstitial spaces we've been so thoroughly trained to overlook. Tracking an intimate call-and- response between the poet and her surroundings, these poems reveal a practice of tender attention as generous and fully alive as the worlds they map.”
—Elizabeth Willis

Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name

Brunsman Poetry Prize Winner, Bear Star Press

"Here is a book addressed to origins: to first things; to first springs into the turbulence of real conversation. Cowles is a poet who knows where poetry comes from and whither it is bound. Hers is the adventure of tenderness brightly underway." —Donald Revell

"Kathryn Cowles here touches on everything that is important to me ... In these pages, language is the field and the ammunition, it is the seriousness of the human world and the arrows that pierce that veil with funny and tender precision." —Eleni Sikelianos