THE STRANGER I BECOME

Part memoir, part meditation on poetry, part conversation with her husband, friends, and the many animals that live with and around her, The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Coles begins this collection of lyric essays with a meditation on walking, and "the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged."

The essays travel, always on foot, from Coles' home, with its kept and wild birds, into the canyon her home overlooks, itself populated with creatures ranging from voles to owls, moose, bobcats, and coyotes. From there, always looking, always walking, in the company of the words that move her, they traverse her neighborhood and distant places in this country and the world. All along, they consider the poetry that inhabits her: the winged creatures of Dickinson, Ashbery's "reflections," Keats's "irritable reaching," Anne Carson's ever-unreachable apples, and more. Taken together, they make up what Lance Olsen calls "a poetics of the vivid."

Katharine Coles is the author of two novels, seven collections of poems, and the memoir Look Both Ways. The recipient of grants from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation, she has served as Poet Laureate of Utah and was inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Utah.