In her seventh collection, Wayward, Katharine Coles uses small poems to take on big questions, including love, aging, death, the permeable boundaries of self, and how we know what we know.

In lines that augur the magic and power of her stunning new collection, Wayward, Katharine Coles likens how poets sing to “Riding / The backs of dragons.” By turns earthy, deliciously witty, and dazzling, Coles writes a smart, fierce song of a poem, crafting with consummate formal rigor a volume that undertakes profound inquiry into being and nothingness. “Am I an empty room?” one erasure poem hauntingly asks, but refrains from answering, for as Coles remarks, gnomic as Dickinson herself, “Who / can never say.”
—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth