Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World: Poems

By Kathryn Cowles

This “innovative” poetry collection “uses text and image to explore the strangeness inherent in everyday experience” (Publishers Weekly).

“I take seven photographs turning / in a circle, a panorama, / but how will I place them hanging / on a wall back home? Something already slipping,” Kathryn Cowles writes. These poems surround a central question: how much of a moment is captured by the mechanisms we use to describe it? How much of the shore, the birds, the feeling? In pursuit of an answer, Cowles leads readers through a sequence of distinct landscapes (islands, plains, mountains, oceans), puzzling over and embracing the valley between literature and lived experience. Along the way, Cowles’s language is light but recursive, rotating around beloved places: a new house, a garden, a seemingly endless plane ride, a battery-operated spit of lamb, a photograph of a battery-operated spit of lamb, dogs, Sue, Ohio. This collection defamiliarizes and refamiliarizes the “actual world,” while navigating toward the clear and substantial stuff of living. Arresting on both visual and textual levels, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World isa collection that lingers in memory and place, in the unsettled distance between reality and its transcriptions.

“Deftly shows that as we struggle to transform into language what we see and hear and feel, the results are inevitably incomplete; there’s a gap between what we want to say and what we actually manage.” —Library Journal

“The need to catalog, to document, and to mourn are all active forces in Cowles’s poems . . . a work of grappling with the representational and the real and the thin boundaries between them.” —Colorado Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781571319791

Book preview

Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

Poems

Kathryn Cowles

MILKWEED EDITIONS

© 2020, Text by Kathryn Cowles

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. [phone]

milkweed.org

Published 2020 by Milkweed Editions

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover art by Kathryn Cowles

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First Edition

Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Alan B. Slifka Foundation and its president, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka; the Ballard Spahr Foundation; Copper Nickel; the Jerome Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the National Poetry Series; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cowles, Kathryn, author.

Title: Maps and transcripts of the ordinary world : poems / Kathryn Cowles.

Description: Minneapolis : Milkweed Editions, 2020. | Summary: Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a collection of poems about memory, place, and distance between reality and its transcriptions-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019041953 (print) | LCCN 2019041954 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571315021 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781571319791 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3603.O8894 M37 2020 (print) | LCC PS3603.O8894 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041953

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019041954

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