Katharine Coles

Biography

Katharine Coles wrote her fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen, 2013), under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. From 2006 to 2011, she served as the Poet Laureate of Utah. In 2009–10, she served as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, and for 2012–13 she is a Guggenheim Foundation fellow.

See Work

POETRY / Fall 2012

Sailing to Antarctica

By Katharine Coles

The problem is the voices

I can’t get out of my head. On the bridge, the captain’s playing
“Break On Through”; he’s been

POETRY / Fall 2012

Tattoo

By Katharine Coles

All the beautiful young men,
Muscles etched with birds and names
That would be long-forgotten 

POETRY / Fall 2012

The Human Mind Did Not Create the Ice

By Katharine Coles

Nor its manifold mirages, billows and mountains
And mislaid islands shifting by the minute, which nonetheless

Do exist—as image, not as body

POETRY / Fall 2012

Terra Lab

By Katharine Coles

We are not allowed to take photographs.
Not allowed to tell you certain things
Or which things those are. The screens

POETRY / Fall 2012

Rumors of Topography

By Katharine Coles

First, decide where water stops
And ice begins. Then, where ice