My Books
Habitats
Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s robust new collection, is her best yet-a field guide to the pleasures and perils of adulthood, a reckoning with what is and what will never be. Moving through disappointment and joy, divorce and remarriage, the death of parents and a stare down with her own allotted time on Earth, Whitcomb seeks out or stumbles into rooms of reflection, landscapes that enlarge us, gardens and clearings where “lean and stubborn devotions” take root. These lush and rugged poems are alive to the “tug of memory / awake in everything,” those habitats of geography and mind that clarify and define what is most important-belonging to ourselves. “Not young or uncomplicated or down-to-earth,” Whitcomb is both realist and dreamer, uncovering the “mercy in each minute of the sense’s deft erasure.” Niche by niche, line by line, she “persists in loving the world,” finding wherever she looks a certain hard-won grace, not wanting to be “anyone or anywhere else.” Habitats is many worlds at once-a marvelous journey into the powers of ordinary witness and a testament of the courage to change.
The Daughter’s Almanac, Winner of the 2014 Backwaters Prize
“With unflinching stanzas threaded through with grief’s relentless lyric, THE DAUGHTER’S ALMANAC is a masterwork, a deftly crafted illustration of the myriad ways beauty collides with pain. Succinct and utterly memorable, these poems take hold of the heart and tug it toward an insistent light. We are washed alive in that light. We are changed by it.”
—Patricia Smith, 2014 Backwaters Prize Judge
Saints of South Dakota and Other Poems
In this breathtaking debut collection, Katharine Whitcomb’s Saints of South Dakota wrests from the clatter of the American road a new language that is both prayerful and muscular, tender and utterly necessary. In poems examining the perils of difficult love, Whitcomb brings readers to an understanding of inevitable suffering, and finds a hard-won transcendence in the details of the lived life. These poems—elegant in form, and tonally scrupulous—show us that ecstatic revelation is real, poignant, and right before our eyes.
The poems in this collection are full of wondrous things: Chinatown funerals, customized Cadillacs, men who dive through glass with cats in their arms to escape from burning buildings. Artfully wrong, yet hewing in subject matter to the heartware and gutware that really matter to us, these poems gripped and held me and kept me returning to their hold.
— Lucia Perillo, 2000 Final Judge
Anthologies Featuring My Work
Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry
Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Furman, and Derek Sheffield, Mountaineers Press, 2023. Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide.
This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Devil’s Club to Cassia Crossbill), offering locals and visitors a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins
Edited by William Wright and Daniel Westover, Clemson University Press, 2016. The discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry in the twentieth century was a revelation for postwar poets, who discovered in both Hopkins’s style and subject matter a voice seemingly bottled for their own time. This influence has not faded in the twenty-first century; in fact, it has grown all the more pervasive as poets from many backgrounds and nations have found, in the voice of this nineteenth-century Jesuit, a revolutionary way of addressing contemporary concerns relating to human imagination, ecology, “green” ethics, the role of art, and individual spirituality. The poets collected in The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins engage with Hopkins in diverse ways. Some mention Hopkins or address some aspect of his life. Others channel his innovative poetics or address important Hopkinsian themes. All demonstrate the centrality of his influence in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, critics have mostly neglected the importance of Hopkins as a contemporary model, instead pinning his influence to the early twentieth century. In a climate where high modernism, Whitmanic free verse, and the confessional lyric are often held up as contemporary poetry’s dominant forerunners, this book proposes a more complex genealogy, tracing back to Hopkins and his influential early admirers current strands of emotional and spiritual openness, pleasure in word play and sonic textures, and veneration of the dynamic material world.
Fire on Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry
Edited by Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy Two Sylvias Press, 2014. Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry is the first electronic collection (now in a print version) of poems by women writing today. Poets Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, Co-Editors of Crab Creek Review and Co-Founders of Two Sylvias Press, have collaborated on this ground-breaking literary project. Featuring over 70 of the most extraordinary poets from a variety of backgrounds and whose ages span from thirteen to ninety-one, Fire On Her Tongue showcases superbly crafted poems exploring the contemporary woman’s experience. Fire On Her Tongue: An Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry includes poems by Katharine Whitcomb, Kim Addonizio, Madeline DeFrees, Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alicia Ostriker, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Zucker, and many other accomplished poets.
Thirty Days: The Best of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project’s First Year
Edited by Marie Gauthier Tupelo Press, 2015. The Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, begun as a creative approach to fundraising, has burgeoned into a community. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, rough drafts that are posted daily online, the poets sponsored and encouraged every step of the way. This anthology comprises the best of those drafts, now revised, from the 30/30 Project’s first year. Katharine Whitcomb participated as a 30/30 “marathon poet” in December 2014; her poems are included in this volume.
All of Us: Sweet: The First Five Years
Ok, but what’s American poetry doing now? This anthology answers: it’s partying. In these pages, award-winning poets and those whose books we are still looking forward to mingle, chat, drink, dance, and get down to the business of making meaning with words. All of Us anthologizes poems from Katherine Reigel’s online journal of poetry and creative nonfiction, Sweet: A Literary Confection, including poems by Katharine Whitcomb, Tim Seibles, Kelle Groom, Luisa A. Igloria, Oliver de la Paz, and many others.
The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders
Edited by Jared Hawkley, Susan Rich, and Brian Turner 2013. McSweeney’s The Strangest of Theatres explores how poets traveling outside our borders can serve as envoys to the wider world and revitalize American poetry in the process. The edited collection includes original and reprinted essays by contemporary poets who address questions of estrangement, identity, and home while traveling abroad. In addition to Katharine Whitcomb, authors include Kazim Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nick Flynn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Rankine, and others.
The Art Courage Program
With Brian Goeltzenleuchter Jaded Ibis Press, 2014. The Art Courage Program is a hybrid book combining two literary genres: self-help and cultural criticism. This book offers readers the tools needed to overcome anxieties associated with all aspects of art. The step-by-step program encourages readers to move beyond negative art reactions, learn from and be healed by their experiences, and find acceptance and even appreciation of art.
Renga for Obama
Edited by Major Jackson, Harvard Review Press, 2017. In early 2017, Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson curated the “Renga for Obama” project, a celebration of the Obama presidency featuring over two hundred American poets writing in pairs. The project, which originally appeared at Harvard Review Online, was published two stanzas a day for the first hundred days of the Trump presidency and was highlighted in the Washington Post. It has since been released as a limited edition chapbook with an introduction by Major Jackson and is available for purchase in Harvard Review’s online store.
Chapbooks
Lamp of Letters
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Hosannas
Hosannas is a collection of nine poems by the award-winning poet Katharine Whitcomb. The word hosanna traditionally refers to a shout of praise or an appeal for deliverance, and her poems fit both meanings. Whitcomb’s poetry is informed by her experience of driving through the Midwestern landscape for ten years as a traveling sales rep, and her resulting reverence for the people and the history of that region. The work is a weaving, narrative journey that asks questions and seeks answers by comparison and through hope.