Books
Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World
Milkweed Editions - March 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.”
Kathryn Cowles’s Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection that tracks how lived experience transforms into language, negotiating the unsettled distance between the actual world and its transcriptions.
“I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I place them hanging / on a wall back home? Something already slipping,” Cowles writes. These poems investigate a central question: how much of a place is captured by the mechanisms we use to describe it? How much of the shore, the birds, the feeling? In playful pursuit of an answer, Cowles leads readers through a sequence of distinct landscapes (islands, plains, mountains, oceans) not only by way of more traditional lyricism, but also through replicated documents, like recipes or field guides, and through the redefinitions and refrains of a speaker fixated on the dilemma of representation. “Holy photograph. Holy actual world. Equal sign equal sign equal sign.”
Cowles’s poems puzzle over and find pleasure in the slippage between a world and its maps. Along the way, her language is light but recursive, rotating around ordinary, but often beloved, places and things: a new house, a garden, a seemingly endless plane ride, a battery-operated spit of lamb, a photograph of a battery-operated spit of lamb, dogs, Sue, waves, Ohio. This collection defamiliarizes and refamiliarizes the actual world, always navigating toward the clear and substantial stuff of living.
Arresting on both visual and textual levels, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a bold philosophical adventure executed with the utmost intelligence, humility, and tenderness.
Additional praise for Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World:
“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