Reviews/Interviews
Reviews
“Kathryn Cowles is an especially adroit transcriber of our particularly fragile and unstable moment of being human; she is in a continual process of half-describing and half-creating a world she can love..”
Diagram - Mercador’s Way - A Review - Donald Revell
“Wallace Stevens was nearly right. Not death, but departure is the mother of beauty. The poet takes leave. The poet turns away. Entire worlds arise in her wake, each a perfect Mercator projection of itself and point of departure. This, Cowles' second collection, opens with a stride, setting foot upon an island she purposes to love and to abandon..”
“She wants to situate us, at last, ‘here’ – gazing at the map of the poem.”
Entropy Magazine - Kasey Jueds and Hannah VanderHart in conversation - “Attention to the Real: A Conversation”
“There’s this incredibly generous movement toward encompassing everything, and also toward respecting the impossibility of that (which also feels generous). The things of the world—clouds, oleander, goat cheese—don’t need poems to describe them. And yet it feels like an act of love for poems, these poems, to try.”
Colorado Review - Alyse Bensel
“The need to catalog, to document, and to mourn are all active forces in Cowles’s poems, which seek to both stay within and potentially alter a moment.”
“But this poetry speaks to our now and speaks to our future. This is the right book to read when we are asking the questions of, ‘How did we get here?’ A book that is a reminder of Audre Lorde’s famous proclamation, ‘Poetry is not a luxury.’ Cowles’ work is a testament to poetry as survival, as a way forward.”
Prompt Press - Review - Editor Nina Lohman
“Maps are stories. They portray how we shape, interact with, and label the earth. Kathryn Cowles’ Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World does this, too.”
Publisher’s Weekly - Maya Popa
“Cowles’s collages do not serve as mere illustrations, but rather complicate, call into question, and layer interpretations onto the poems proper.”
Ecotheo Review - Jacob Rivers - “Sound, Collage, and Hybridity as Lyric”
“I trust what the speaker can and cannot say in these poems—what is presented through image and through the sound of birds. Cowles has shown us a new kind of map, and I can’t stop listening to it.”
Vol. 1 Brooklyn - Dasha Bulatova - "‘I wrote that I wrote it’: A Review of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World”
“Kathryn Cowles’s second book, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, contends with the formalism of poem as object, in the sense that a poem holds a literal position in space and time. Her eminently accessible, readable collection belies a circular and circling complexity that questions the role of language as a deictic tool in making sense out of a reality that exists with or without us.”
Library Journal - Barbara Hoffert - Finding Self/Finding Home: Top Spring Poetry
“An intriguing, risk-taking work, with special appeal for millennials and crossover readers; poem-photograph collages throughout.”
Southern Indiana Review - Raena Shirali
“Mastery permeates this book, most notably in the form of a voice that balances conversational tenderness with metaphysical explorations of transliteration, transubstantiation, and the function of place in memory.”
interviews
Southeast Review - with Editor Zach Linge
“I also found that every poem would turn itself. There would be a moment where things shifted. The looking itself turned into a thinking: that looking can be a kind of thinking. That’s what happened with the poems. They would suddenly hinge, and I wasn't really in charge of it. I was just trying to follow it, to notice, to pay enough attention, to notice the hinge, and then continue through with it.”
Kenyon Review online - “Poetry Today” Series - Ruben Quesada
“And one thing poetry can do, and art more generally, is help people to think through catastrophe, to witness it, to process it, to look it in the eyes. Art helps us to continue to be human in the face of catastrophe.”
Poetry Society of America - "In Their Own Words” Series - Kathryn Cowles on “Boat Tour”
“I like to write in unfamiliar places, to wrap myself in unfamiliarity, to fall for a place in the writing of it, to catch a tiny actual shred of it in language on the page if I can, like a verbal photo album, a pressed flower made out of words. For me, unfamiliarity is generative. It makes my eye pay new attention.”
Frontier Poetry - How It’s Made Interview
“One thing I learned is that it is good for me to have no idea how to do the thing I want to do. Once I start writing poems I already know how to write, I end up just rewriting poems I’ve already written, only not quite as well. It’s only when I try something completely new, with the distinct possibly of profound failure, that I find I am able to write my way into a better kind of thinking.”
To-Read Pile, with Diana Arterian - Enclave at Entropy Magazine
A bunch of books I’m reading and teaching and getting ready to read. August 2020