Kathryn Cowles
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kathryncowles.bsky.social
Kathryn Cowles
@kathryncowles.bsky.social
1K followers 670 following 130 posts
Poet/Artist, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor (Fence Modern Poets Prize, forthcoming), Maps and Transcripts (Milkweed)
Editor “Beyond Category”@SenecaReview
HWS Prof
Trias Writers Residency Director

www.kathryncowles.com
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Kathryn Cowles @kathryncowles.bsky.social · Mar 24
Big beautiful news, friends: I won the Fence Modern Poets prize, and my book will be out in the winter. It’s called The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, and it contains lots of collage-poem pieces, like the one here.

I am so delighted and honored and moved I keep swooning mid-step.
A black and white collaged image of a three headed, multi-armed lady with the following poem interspersed: Self-Portrait as Mythological Figure I am on the move. My mind is attached to my body at the hip. My hip is attached to my hand. I use my hand to write. I yes my yes. I have found the good light. I am looking myself in the eye. I have free use of my limbs, and look how very forward I can go.
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
burgi.bsky.social
THANK YOU to @kathryncowles.bsky.social, @hanvanderhart.bsky.social & @kaseyryoen.bsky.social for supporting WHITE DOOR (Carbonation Press) with their generous words. I'm beyond honored! 💖🙏💖

And thank you, too, to Alan Sirulnikoff for letting me use his wonderful art for the cover! 🙏💖😍
Three copies of WHITE DOOR on patterned upholstery fabric. Cover image shows detail of Alternative Reality by Alan Sirulnikoff, photography: long logs and a white door among them, floating on dark water. Image of blurbs as appearing in book listing: From the first astonishing poem of White Door you can feel it—the stitching together of separated things, the line pulling away from the sentence and then hard-threaded back at stanza’s end, the then pulling away from the now, the child from the mother, frayed, and then hand-sewn back. Burgi Zenhaeusern’s language is stitch-work, textile, sensory, but the kind of sensory that begins to lean figurative, to mean more than it says. The I can be “light forced through / split clouds,” or “my shiny coin” can be “falling into the empty well of me—its bright ping,” the sun can be a she, “her mouth a white-hot hole,” fear can be “packed like old snow.” When I look up after disappearing into the careful weave of these poems, I am amazed to find how far moved I am from where I started, how completely everything behind me has changed in the new light. - Kathryn Cowles, author of Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World Framed by the tender ordinary, by branches through the kitchen window, by generational memory and a grandfather’s painted Alpine meadow, Burgi Zenhaeusern’s White Door asks the central question of poetry: “How long / can you continue without yearning?” Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, and this collection streams with the light of attention and language that feels to me holy. - Han VanderHart, author of Larks In White Door, Burgi Zenhaeusern circles back again and again to necessary, enduring questions—how to care for each other, what home is—refusing to settle for anything less than the real. Despite the way exploration tends to “re-etch longing,” despite the complexities of language and being, these poems do not give up their hunger to understand. Intelligence and integrity shine through them. Kasey Jueds, author of The Thicket
November 15, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
fencebooks.bsky.social
…from Kathryn Cowles’s introduction to THE STRANGE WONDROUS WORKS OF ELEANOR ELEANOR. This winner of the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Book Prize will be out in now just less than a month: Dec. 9th, 2025! @kathryncowles.bsky.social

Pre-order today at Bookshop.org: bookshop.org/p/books/the-.... 🪽
November 11, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
jordandavis.bsky.social
Nada Gordon @nadagordon.bsky.social
TODAY, by Nada Gordon Oh! flame wars, tweets, endless chat streams! You really are stupid! Likes, friends, emojis, opinions! all the stuff they've always talked about still makes the internet a disappointment! These things are with us every day even on telephones and in dreams. They do torture meaning. They're a kind of pox.
April 9, 2024 at 2:24 AM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
hanvanderhart.bsky.social
we must hurry while tenderness survives in us

Susan Howe

@ndbooks.bsky.social #booksky #poetry
Penitential Cries by Susan Howe, featuring a woodcut of little Timothy fleeing a demon figure of sin. Emily Dickinson sent this image in a letter to Susan the morning after a “revel,” with the note “ PS lest you misapprehend, the unfortunate insect upon the left is Myself, while the Reptile upon the right is my more immediate friends, and connections.” In the notes, in the back of the book ✨ arrive there is Lady Honoria Dedlock seated at her desk in Chesney Wold reading old love letters, even older than the ones our mother kept in a cardboard box beside the washing machine in the cellar. Children can see a thousand miles off Heart pictograph little frills. Personal and individual solemn forms appear we must hurry while tenderness survives in us secret languages cherished beliefs swim- ming in sun motes as if we had known then life expectancy or return to being ancient Mitral tremolo sliding glissandi chaff from Penitential Cries by Susan Howe (New Directions, 2025)
November 2, 2025 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
fencebooks.bsky.social
We’re truly delighted to share the cover of THE STRANGE WONDROUS WORKS OF ELEANOR ELEANOR by Kathryn Cowles (@kathryncowles.bsky.social), winner of the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series!

Cover design: Sharon DeGraw 💌

Pre-order today: bookshop.org/p/books/the-... 🌠
October 25, 2025 at 12:08 AM
kathryncowles.bsky.social
From finding out about this new book by the terrific poet @tracepeterson.bsky.social and having it my hands: less than five days. Can’t wait to read it!
A lavender glossy book cover with a sweeping black font. The title is THE VALLEYS ARE SO LUSH AND STEEP and the writer is Trace Peterson. The book is the winner of the Saturnalia Books 2025 Alma Book Award. Pictured next to some matching purple windfall mums.
October 20, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
davidnaimon.bsky.social
the transcript is up for the conversation with Diana Arterian: tinhouse.com/transcript/b...
Between the Covers Diana Arterian Interview - Tin House
David Naimon: Today’s episode is brought to you by Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook. This debut novel from Clark is the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory. Inspired by th...
tinhouse.com
October 19, 2025 at 10:53 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
nikk.ca
absolute workhorse of a reaction image from over 100 years ago
elegant woman blasting a suitor in the face with the NO gun
October 20, 2025 at 7:36 AM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
kelsijosilva.bsky.social
Wait until they hear what the Greek Poets used to do.
bleary.off-the-records.com bleary @bleary.off-the-records.com · Oct 13
If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.
Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing? 2? Questions I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up. Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?
October 13, 2025 at 8:48 PM
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adrianf.bsky.social
Muriel Rukeyser
Islands O for God's sake they are connected underneath.
September 15, 2025 at 12:05 PM
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nineteendegrees.bsky.social
Sketchbook, mixed media collage. Part of a diptych.

Slow clouds ii.

mixed media collage
found papers, acrylic, foil, wax

#art #artist #artsky #collage #mixedmedia
September 17, 2025 at 7:07 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
velociicoaster.bsky.social
the human body was not made to take in this much bad news every single day
August 28, 2025 at 1:58 AM
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melnickjeffrey1.bsky.social
"When the first of August came round, the Professor realized he had pleasantly trifled away nearly two months at a task which should have taken little more than a week."

--Willa Cather, 1925 and timeless
August 1, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
slowdownshow.org
“I feel a heavy kinship with the speaker in today’s poem. Their embrace of the world exhibits the ecstatic yearning and vulnerability essential to the imagination,” shares Major in today’s encore episode.

Read “In Love” by Chloe Martinez: bit.ly/3U5Hx6H
An excerpt of “In Love” by Chloe Martinez a headshot of Chloe Martinez
July 30, 2025 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
adrianf.bsky.social
Denise Levertov
Keeping Track Between chores— hulling strawberries, answering letters- or between poems, returning to the mirror to see if I'm there.
July 27, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
burgi.bsky.social
"In a place where institutions and systems have collapsed, it is the human gesture—freely given—that preserves the sacred."
Alaa Alqaisi in Beneath the Howl of Hunger
@arablit.bsky.social

arablit.org/2025/07/23/b...
Beneath the Howl of Hunger
“And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.” – Alaa Alqaisi
arablit.org
July 27, 2025 at 2:19 PM
kathryncowles.bsky.social
It’s the time of year for hot poems about fruit. Here’s the beginning of D. H. Lawrence’s “Medlars and Sorb-Apples”:

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

(You can read the rest yourselves, you beasts.)
The first bit of a poem with remarkably untidy underlining of key parts of the first few lines in blue ink: Medlars and Sorb-Apples I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. I love to suck you out from your skins So brown and soft and coming suave, So morbid, as the Italians say. What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay: Stream within stream. Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine Or vulgar Marsala.
July 17, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
fklein907.bsky.social
Therapist: and are the ominous Newsweek bisexuals in the room with us now?

Ominous Newsweek Bisexuals:
considermycat.bsky.social Jae H @considermycat.bsky.social · Jul 17
A very happy 30th birthday to bisexuality, born this day in 1995 🎂
Newsweek’s infamous 17 July 1995 cover: “Bisexuality: Not Gay. Not Straight. A New Sexual Identity Emerges.”
July 17, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
geoffreybabbitt.bsky.social
A Grain of Sand in Lambeth has a cover! Many thanks to Caroline Dickens and the folks at UN Press for the design. Official release is December 2nd, which I am happy to share with the wonderful Jami Macarty’s The Long Now Conditions Permit, whose cover I also love. Preorder links below in comments.
July 16, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Kathryn Cowles
erinvachon.bsky.social
panic attacks count as cardio
July 15, 2025 at 2:40 PM
kathryncowles.bsky.social
Holli Carrell is a writer to watch, friends. Just read a sample poem at the link and you’ll be preordering the book, just like I did. A clear descendant of Jean Valentine. I can’t wait for this one to arrive.
perugiapress.bsky.social Perugia Press @perugiapress.bsky.social · Jul 15
We’re excited to announce APOSTASIES by Holli Carrell: Release date September 15. Available NOW for preorder at a sale price till 9/15 at perugiapress.org/product/apos... and also available at asterismbooks. Check it out in our Linktree! @hollicarrell.bsky.social @asterismbooks.bsky.social
July 15, 2025 at 2:52 PM
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perugiapress.bsky.social
We’re excited to announce APOSTASIES by Holli Carrell: Release date September 15. Available NOW for preorder at a sale price till 9/15 at perugiapress.org/product/apos... and also available at asterismbooks. Check it out in our Linktree! @hollicarrell.bsky.social @asterismbooks.bsky.social
July 15, 2025 at 1:14 PM
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casswhit.bsky.social
My first full collection of poems, Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf comes out today! Many many thanks to Richard Siken, Jennifer Harris, & Simone Muench for believing in it!

It wrestles with the doubt, desire, addiction, identity. You can buy it here, bookshop.org/p/books/wolf...
Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf
Check out Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf - <p>Having written a book called <em>Wolf Centos</em> that opens with the quote "All the poetry has wolves in it, Pam," how could I not be entranced b...
bookshop.org
July 15, 2025 at 1:47 PM
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jessicacuello.bsky.social
Tiger Bark Press will be publishing my translation of Tania Langlais' Pendant que Perceval tombait, a book-length poem about Virginia Woolf's last day. I'm excited to share this spare, strange, and beautiful book that reads like a riddle. Pub date Feb 2026🌊🐎
Contract for book with Tiger Bark Press Photo of poet Tania Langlais and translator Jessica Cuello
June 25, 2025 at 11:20 AM