Time and Chance

Majestic, playful, brainy, heart-wrenching, Katharine Coles's tenth collection of poems at once celebrates and elegizes: her teachers and parents--both dead at ninety--who still issue advice (some good, some not) from beyond the grave; the creatures who pass through her canyon quarter-acre; the moon as it rises and sets; even her Levi's shrink-to-fits, when she realizes she'll never wear out another pair. The poems "guide us with their empathy, sometimes yoked with a wry irony, around the physics of interactions." [John Kinsella] More than anything, this is a book about presence: haunted by the past yet firmly rooted in the also-haunting now, Coles keeps spinning, finding herself in words, in her body, in time.