Katharine Coles is currently director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Utah, Coles teaches poetry, prose writing, and literature and directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature. Recipient of both an Individual Writers Fellowship and a New Forms Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has published poetry and prose in such journals as Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, and The New Republic. Fault is her fourth collection of poems; she is also the author of two novels, most recently Fire Season.

Books by Katharine Coles:

Other poems on the web by Katharine Coles:
"The Double Leash"

About Fault:

"Fault has all the inquisitive intelligence of Katharine Coles' earlier work, the thrill of scientific inquiry, the dazzling profusion of sensory delights. But these poems also soar into song—lament, hymn, jazz riff, ghazal. With the passion of one who knows both suffering and desire, Coles illuminates the miraculous accident of our survival, the mystery of eternity contained by fragile bodies. With fearless grace, she exposes the startling similarity between the tenderness of a lover's gaze and the patient precision of a terrorist touching wires. 'Happiness must be simple, and enough.' No matter how dangerous the world becomes, Katharine Coles lights every line with wonder, and with love."
—Melanie Rae Thon

"Whether she's contemplating the history of cosmology or the stern topography of western canyons, the 'touched wires' that detonate the bomb that destroys a city square or the touched chords of married love, Katherine Coles writes with stirring passion and impeccable clarity. Again and again, with nimbleness and delicacy, she locates the precise register of consciousness, the precise figurative or affective cognate that allows us purchase on an abstract realm. Her rejuvenating explorations of inherited forms — pantoums and ghazals, sonnets and quatrains, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, end-, embedded-, and metamorphic rhyme — are revelatory: I know of no one writing in America today who uses these lovely instruments to richer effect, the auditory argument now countering, now corroborating the arguments of heart and mind. This wonderful new book is varied, engaging, and terrifically smart: it merits and lavishly rewards the most mindful of readings."
—Linda Gregerson