Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

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...