The Stranger I Become

“Readers who appreciate a good ramble of the mind … will feel illuminated by Coles' (Look Both Ways, 2018) cascading rhythms and insights.” —Booklist

"Walking as peripatetic philosophy—that’s what these essays enact, wandering in bright, exquisite, perspicacious ways among our myriad blindnesses and insights, through our dissolutions of mind and body, life and the other thing, inviting us all the while to unsteady and strange ourselves into a poetics of the vivid."
—Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven

“This marvelous collection of essays zigzags between close readings of poems by Emily Dickinson, Jorie Graham, and John Ashbery, and reflections on curious phenomena observed and described by scientists in a host of different fields. ‘Now I find no choice but to relax into the strange­ness of voices,’ Coles writes, ‘and to enter, through them, a kind of bliss.’ Inspiring and exhilarating, The Stranger I Become is a hymn to the possibilities of such bliss.”
—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

“Poet Katharine Coles’s passion for travel and looking, her relentless physical and intellectual energy, bear the soul of this sensuous and thought-provoking collection. Joyfully weaving together science, philosophy, art, and poetry, Coles takes us on an intimate journey through her mind’s eye, an active yet unseen reliquary, both sacred and familiar.”
—Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore