The
Everyday Uncommon, Poems by Terese Coe
The Everyday Uncommon,
Terese Coe’s first book of poems, is notable for the sharp, tight-fitting
corners of both the poems’ lines and the author’s wit. Form,
thought and rhythm come together to make a strikingly staccato music.
“It’s clear to me that she knows what she’s doing, she’s doing what she wants to do, and she does it well.”—Hayden Carruth
“She domesticates and humanizes the exotic without robbing it of its strangeness, just as she reveals the inherent strangeness in everything looked at closely,however muchwe persuade ourselves thatwe already know it intimately. Congratulations to Terese Coe ona first book that is a joy to read, and makes me, for one, eager for the second.”—Rhina P. Espaillat
“Thoreau boasted that he had traveled widely in Concord; Terese Coe has traveled widely almost everywhere else. These are the poems of a free spirit of wide ranging interests, sometimes geographical and sometimes literary, and some of the book’s finest journeys are made via Emily Dickinson’s ‘no frigate like a book.’ Intensely curious, and even more intensely observant, Coe uses wry good humor and considerable formal dexterity to keep the reader turning the pages of her album.”—R.S. Gwynn
“The Everyday
Uncommon introduces Terese Coe as an able voice in formal poetry.
Her allusive poems, alive with history and various mythologies, take us
from New York to London to Tibet; she juxtaposes old and new idioms and
often turns an everyday phrase inside out in a way that makes us sit up
and take notice. Coe is at her best, however, when her theme is love,
which takes her lines to their highest lyricism.”—Deborah
Warren
Terese Coe holds an M.A. in dramatic literature, and first wrote
professionally as a drama critic for The Rocky Mountain Review
in Salt Lake City, then as a columnist for The Wood River Journal
in Idaho. She has taught poetry workshops for advanced English students
in Kathmandu, Nepal and for children in Idaho; has written several plays
about artists and writers in New York; worked for periodicals in positions which
ranged from paste-up to writer to editor-in-chief; and was an actor
with The Committee Workshop and the God's Eye Theatre in San Francisco
in the late 60s. She has traveled widely and given readings in Nepal as
well as at St. Mark's Church and The Cedar Tavern in NY, was a 2000
and 2002 recipient of Giorno Poetry Systems grants and a 2003-4 finalist
in the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and received a trophy for parody
at the Nuyorican Cafe’s First Annual Poets Ball. She now lives
in downtown Manhattan, where she teaches English composition.
Her poems, translations, adaptations and reviews have appeared or
will soon appear in The Formalist, First Things, Orbis (UK),
Iambs and Trochees, Blue Unicorn, Pivot, Leviathan Quarterly
(UK), The Edge City Review, The Texas Review, The Shakespeare
Newsletter, and in a number of online journals including Verse
Daily and The HyperTexts,
as well as a 2004 interview in Triplopia.
ISBN 1932339612, 80 pages, $17.00