"[Cowles] 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 . . . An intriguing, risk-taking work, with special appeal for millennials and crossover readers." —Library Journal, Top Ten Spring Poetry
"[T]he innovative latest from Cowles uses text and image to explore the strangeness inherent in everyday experience. Cowles's collages do not serve as mere illustrations, but rather complicate, call into question, and layer interpretations onto the poems proper. Her approach to defamiliarizing mundane tasks ('Every morning we open the curtains, / Every evening we sit on the porch') is multifaceted and intriguing." —Publishers Weekly
"The poems themselves are hatching modalities that bounce between the matter of language and the matter of the real world. Cowles' collection is slippery, elusive, but also in essence, inexpressibly familiar." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Kathryn Cowles is an especially adriot transcriber of our particularly fragile and unstable moment of being human; she is in a continual process of half-describing and half-creating a world she can love." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"As a map departs from its origins, so equally do those origins multiply beyond the single map. Cowles' is a dynamic topography, and she positions herself as a distinct (and distinguishing) perspective upon prolific surfaces." —DIAGRAM
"Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World by Kathryn Cowles is a vibrant installation in experimental American poetics that emphasizes the strength and potential of hybridity between environmental sounds, language, and the visual. This potent interaction creates new, handsomely bizarre, and excitingly new feats for poetry. As readers, we are brought to new proximities in these poems not just with the exterior mappings of our surroundings, but with our very own interior. I trust what the speaker can and cannot say in these poems—what is presented through image and through the sound of birds. Cowles has shown us a new kind of map, and I can't stop listening to it." —EchoTheo Review
"The need to catalog, to document, and to mourn are all active forces in Cowles's poems, which seek to both stay within and potentially alter a moment . . . Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World is a work of grappling with the representational and the real and the thin boundaries between them." —Colorado Review
"Cowles's attention to image and visual media . . . throughout Maps and Transcripts has the quality of a pilgrim before a relic. Some relics are objects are objects with an intrinsic sacredness within a faith tradition, but some objets we make holy because of our attention. Both kinds of relics have the ability to transform our attention, and that seems to me what Maps and Transcripts offers its reader—an imaginative transformation, an attention to the real." —Entropy
"The reader pivots between pieces that purport to describe the world—and then pretend to explain how descriptions work—but the poet's goal isn't to move us toward comprehension. She wants to situate us, at last, 'here'—gazing at the map of the poem." —On the Seawall
“Where are you? Where do you think you are? How do you know? Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World will quite possibly change your mind, or that part of your mind that thinks it knows, or relies on anything in print. Come take a journey from an island in Greece—by boat and plane and step—to Ohio, only to walk out into a field of wildflowers you thought you knew, but didn’t. The luckiest readers will wind up in a rocking chair on a porch, seeing the world as if for the first time.”—Mary Ruefle
“The careful measure of this world against all other versions, measured by birds, by boats, by the sea . . . Kathryn Cowles explores the ways that acute, engaged attention is, in itself, a unit of measure, delivering us up to a world the size of a world. She covers a lot of territory, and always with an intimacy that makes us present, in her images and in her imaginary, both always mapping the world as a way of participating it in more closely—a stunning text that sweeps the reader along with its travels.” —Cole Swensen
“Kathryn Cowles’s new book is an extraordinary exploration of the heart of human existence. Interrogating our relationship to place, the environment, religion, history, memory, love, and more, she employs a myriad of forms and approaches. The language here is a symphonic arc at once dissonant and harmonic, experimental and narrative, a perfect blend of opposites seeking always to open a road, a liminal zipper into possibility. Part alchemical formula, part cartographer’s process, part prophecy, part fairy tale, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World weaves spell after spell, poems and images spooling out as coordinates, compass points, leading into a lyric, playful but deep probing of what might be recovered and turned to a redemptive purpose."—Chris Abani
“Kathryn Cowles's beautiful new work is threaded with sites of everyday transformation—where a landscape becomes an image or a bird song becomes a sequence of hyphenated phonemes or a flash of consciousness becomes a poem. In text and image, Cowles shows us how to see and hear through the interstitial spaces we've been so thoroughly trained to overlook. Tracking an intimate call-and-response between the poet and her surroundings, these poems reveal a practice of tender attention as generous and fully alive as the worlds they map.”—Elizabeth Willis
03/01/2020
It's hardly surprising that a collection whose title references "maps and transcripts" addresses our desire to nail down experience, but the award-winning Cowles (Eleanor, Eleanor) 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. Of course, she faces the same problem, and sometimes the poems feel unsatisfactory—which is exactly the point. Life doesn't happen as neatly as art can make us believe, and Cowles can be good at capturing that disjunction: "and one day everyone decides/ to bale their hay/ every single field down/ all at once everyone// all at once/ my friend is sick/ sick and far away." VERDICT An intriguing, risk-taking work, with special appeal for millennials and crossover readers; poem-photograph collages throughout.
