Kateri Kosek is the author of American Eclipse, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize, and a chapbook, Vernal (Split Rock Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared in Orion, Terrain, Catamaran, Rosebud, Southern Poetry Review, and Northern Woodlands Magazine, and have won prizes at Creative Nonfiction and Briar Cliff Review. She teaches college English and freelances in and around the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. She has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas.

Other poems on the web by Kateri Kosek:
"Watching the eclipse without him (moon)"
"A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red Hills"
"Wreck of the Michigan: An Inquiry"
"Disappointment: A New Year's Quartet"

Kateri Kosek's Website.

Kateri Kosek on Twitter.

About American Eclipse:

"From celestial eclipses to the phases of a love affair always and inevitably ending in darkness, Kosek's American Eclipse is an occluded landscape where wildlife collides with humanity, the country's politics is as out of balance as the climate and the ecosystem is losing its rhythms. Amidst the real and metaphorical darkness, the poet seeks the visceral experience of watching the sun consumed: 'Everyone,/apparently, ... packing their bags for the path of totality—' Despite, or perhaps because of, this shadowy landscape, the poems stand out for their vibrancy and texture: 'the soft dark flanks of mountains,' 'autumn so perfect/it might go up in flames,' 'Juniper berries popping on lush/ green grass,' and 'the eyes of a bird,/ retinas pooling with oil.' Kosek's poems succeed at combining beauty and waste, celebrating the world's lushness and simultaneously knowing the part we play in its devastation. These poems mark the seasons of nature and out-of-season anomalies. In recording the small, recognizable moments, they act as a center of gravity to an off-kilter existence. American Eclipse takes us well past anything as simple as hope; like birdsong in the dark, 'The last white sliver stuck. No one knows what happens next."
—Sarah Sousa

"What is an eclipse? A strange darkening, an exceptional shadow. But also a strange light, a moment that startles us into new awareness of larger forces we don't usually notice in our daily lives, new questionings of what we thought we saw and knew. 'And when I looked up, the mountains—jagged, / too imposing, I'd thought, to lose—had vanished again,' writes Kateri Kosek. The poems of American Eclipse consider the world thrown into strange light: by politics, pandemic, intimate sorrow, and climate grief. These poems examine the world, 'how it looks so harmless, / so under control,' slowing to consider trees, bees, and more with a naturalist's accuracy, detailed and backed by history, ecology, and years of wonderment. Kosek's unflinching eye includes the speaker's own culpability, not asking for forgiveness or approval but, rather, seeking truth's messier, stranger entanglements."
—Elizabeth Bradfield

"Emily Dickinson characterizes the lives of women as a 'soft eclipse.' In this collection of poems, Kateri Kosek offers us a hard eclipse, as framed by the astonishing account of solar darkness by Annie Dillard. Between the two occultations, we have life as it is experienced by someone who is alive to nature and to the nature of our contemporary culture. In Kosek's American Eclipse, we find—unveiled— work filled with luminous poetry."
—Paul Kane