Search results for ""Author Katharine Coles""
Turtle Point Press Look Both Ways: A Double Journey Along My Grandmother's Far-Flung Path
"Tense, abundantly researched, and heartbreaking . . . Coles makes sense of the unique forces that shaped women in the twentieth century." —Foreword Reviews Walter Link and Miriam Wollaeger, a young geologist couple in 1920s Wisconsin, set out to find oil to supply the surging U.S. demand. This exciting work will allow them to build their lives in South and Central America, Indonesia, and Cuba. But from the first posting in Columbia, they quickly discover that no women are working in the field in these places. While Walter faces the hardships and thrills of exploration in the jungles and mountains, and eventually becomes chief geologist for Standard Oil, Miriam is left behind in the colonial capitals during Walter’s often lengthy times away. She defines herself through the limited means left to a woman within their small societies: playing bridge or polo by day and dancing into the wee hours with early KLM pilots, diplomats, and the footloose sons of moneyed Americans and the European aristocracies. She also raises three children, has intimate involvements, learns the local languages, and takes up teaching. But she is not satisfied. And finally she does something about it. Following in her grandparents’ footsteps, author Katharine Coles looks backward and forward, through documents and imagination. She looks at their journeys and hers, and mingling their words with her own, examines the delicate balances that must exist in a successful marriage and a feminist life.
£15.46
Turtle Point Press (Solve for) X
Coles’s eighth collection probes the X of the unknown and of gender chromosomes with provocative smarts and sensitivity.Katharine Coles’s (Solve for) X opens a window in a room we did not realize was stuffy. The rigidity of knowledge yields to the beauty of the search, which is both captivating and mysterious. Organized as an abecedarium, the poems are couched in spare, emotionally charged diction that plumbs consciousness and moral responsibility. Coles meditates on an imaginary sister, impositions of the body on the mind, and the human mess that remains despite death or disaster. The mastery of how Coles writes and what she knows is matched only by her ease with the uncertain X. In (Solve for) X, she breaks down contrary ideas and reassembles them, harmoniously redesigned.
£13.14
Red Hen Press Ghost Apples
In her ninth collection of poems, Ghost Apples, Katharine Coles interrogates and celebrates her relationship with the natural world and the various creatures who inhabit it, and in doing so asks what it means to be sentient and mortal on a fragile planet. From her own pet parrot, Henri, to the birds her husband attracts to their feeders, to the wildlife who live just outside—and regularly cross—her property on the wild edge of Salt Lake City, she uses her capacity for intense observation and meditation to think her way into other lives and possible shared futures, both good and bad.
£12.99
Red Hen Press Flight
Thoughtful and intelligent, the poems in Flight are still fully embodied, rooted entirely in the senses, and extending Coles's ongoing examination of the big questions: What is the relation of art and science? What are our different ways of knowing, and how do we participate in and understand them? What are the potentials and limitations of perception and intuition? What is the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived, and can the boundaries between them be broken down? And never least, What what does all this tell us about our capacity for love and pleasure, and how does love influence the ways we address the other questions? These poems are deeply engaged with the pleasures of the sensuous, treating thought itself as a sensual activity, as a kind of passion in its own right. William Carlos Williams said, "No ideas but in things"; Coles seems to want to assert that there is no thing—moon, bat, moth, dog, beloved husband—that will not give rise to ideas, and, very often, to pleasure at the same time. More than anything, pleasures are what the poems seek to create and enact—the pleasures of the flesh, yes; and of the mind that is also of the flesh, and that is so present in the poems.
£13.73
