Overview

"MINING FOR STARDUST is a fiery and tender witness, a poetic chronology of one of the greatest collective paradigm shifts of our lifetime. Coggin's first poem in the collection was written on the first day of the COVID-19 lockdown. Each subsequent poem moves the reader through the pandemic, the summer of protests, the U.S. presidential election, and toward what seems like the other side of this darkest time in our memory. She does not shy away from the atrocities and the heartbreak, but leaves the reader in a space of healing. The book is intermittently filled also with nature, birds, and love poems for her wife, her safe inner world. MINING FOR STARDUST is an intentional practice in finding streaks of light in the shadows, ""sifting flakes of space for gold/ amidst the dark matter/ surrounding us on all sides."" It is memorial, grief, joy, beauty, truth, resistance, reflection, love, and balm for the aching human heart. It is the work of a scribe who earnestly engraves this moment into our human history. This collection is something you can hold in your hands, point to, and say, ""I lived through all of this, too. I survived. I made it to the other side."""

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9781953447456

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Reviews

"""I love this book. I love its starry figures and starry thirst, its cosmic expansiveness, its compassion for the injured and COVID, AIDS captured, for its wisdom and giving, and for its embroideries of lives to lives and life infinite. I love its purpose to embrace humanity in a time of apocalyptic inner and outer rage and isolation. Each line aches for an essence, a new system to build, an authentic, deep and spirit light of America. Kai sees deep and writes as if in a garden of celestial human quantum life breath. I thank Kai Coggin for this book of candles, of light years threaded to our love bodies."" - JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus ""In her recent poetry collection, Mining For Stardust, Kai Coggin brings her exquisite attention to the year 2020. Part eulogy for 'not just numbers but human beings, ' part call to conscience for racial, social and environmental justice, and part love song to her wife, this book is both marvel and balm. We are reminded of 'our own common frailty, ' our connection to each other, the planet, and the universe. Coggin is a poet of deep physicality and sensuality-'a mushroom's underbelly, ' the 'unspeakable neon beauty' of a forest. What gives Mining For Stardust its remarkable vitality is Coggin's gift of balancing grief with joy, even hope. 'When the world is flooded with so much darkness, ' she writes, 'what else can we chase but the stars, but the blooming cosmos.'"" - ELLEN BASS, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, author of Indigo ""Like the very stars they speak of, these poems grant us light through resplendent language and imagery. They guide us like a constellation through the darkness of the pandemic, racial strife, and political crisis toward a new horizon with courage, perseverance, hope, love, and reverence for the cosmic within ourselves. Epic in scope yet intimate in detail, Mining for Stardust is, and will remain, a definitive chronicle of the emotional complexities we've had to navigate through during these tumultuous yet life-affirming times."" - RICHARD BLANCO, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country ""In Mining for Stardust, a chronicle that salvages life from a year of deadly pandemic, the poet lays her words down at 'the holy feet' of her wife, and praises the sacred earthy gifts of fat frogs, red-bud blossoms, the 'sun-bleached bones' of a fox 'vertebrae articulating/something I haven't the words for yet.' She grieves and praises 'the African dust...calling to her stolen children...the great gardener tilling the soil'--and grieves and praises the fallible humans, us in our 'islands of want' that we turn into graveyards for burying, that we turn into gardens for planting. Jubilantly, she claims the queer beauty of the world, the Milky Way all 'shimmer and shine' like fireflies-- 'bioluminescent beings seeing each other.' She says to us, 'It shines, darling-it shines for you.'"" - Minnie Bruce Pratt, author of Magnified ""Kai Coggin's Mining for Stardust is filled with love poems-to her wife and the life they have made toget"

I love this book. I love its starry figures and starry thirst, its cosmic expansiveness, its compassion for the injured and COVID, AIDS captured, for its wisdom and giving, and for its embroideries of lives to lives and life infinite. I love its purpose to embrace humanity in a time of apocalyptic inner and outer rage and isolation. Each line aches for an essence, a new system to build, an authentic, deep and spirit light of America. Kai sees deep and writes as if in a garden of celestial human quantum life breath. I thank Kai Coggin for this book of candles, of light years threaded to our love bodies. - JUAN FELIPE HERRERA, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus In her recent poetry collection, Mining For Stardust, Kai Coggin brings her exquisite attention to the year 2020. Part eulogy for 'not just numbers but human beings, ' part call to conscience for racial, social and environmental justice, and part love song to her wife, this book is both marvel and balm. We are reminded of 'our own common frailty, ' our connection to each other, the planet, and the universe. Coggin is a poet of deep physicality and sensuality-'a mushroom's underbelly, ' the 'unspeakable neon beauty' of a forest. What gives Mining For Stardust its remarkable vitality is Coggin's gift of balancing grief with joy, even hope. 'When the world is flooded with so much darkness, ' she writes, 'what else can we chase but the stars, but the blooming cosmos.' - ELLEN BASS, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, author of Indigo Like the very stars they speak of, these poems grant us light through resplendent language and imagery. They guide us like a constellation through the darkness of the pandemic, racial strife, and political crisis toward a new horizon with courage, perseverance, hope, love, and reverence for the cosmic within ourselves. Epic in scope yet intimate in detail, Mining for Stardust is, and will remain, a definitive chronicle of the emotional complexities we've had to navigate through during these tumultuous yet life-affirming times. - RICHARD BLANCO, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country In Mining for Stardust, a chronicle that salvages life from a year of deadly pandemic, the poet lays her words down at 'the holy feet' of her wife, and praises the sacred earthy gifts of fat frogs, red-bud blossoms, the 'sun-bleached bones' of a fox 'vertebrae articulating/something I haven't the words for yet.' She grieves and praises 'the African dust...calling to her stolen children...the great gardener tilling the soil'--and grieves and praises the fallible humans, us in our 'islands of want' that we turn into graveyards for burying, that we turn into gardens for planting. Jubilantly, she claims the queer beauty of the world, the Milky Way all 'shimmer and shine' like fireflies-- 'bioluminescent beings seeing each other.' She says to us, 'It shines, darling-it shines for you.' - Minnie Bruce Pratt, author of Magnified Kai Coggin's Mining for Stardust is filled with love poems-to her wife and the life they have made toget

Author Information

Kai Coggin is the author of MINING FOR STARDUST (FlowerSong Press 2021), INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019), WINGSPAN (Golden Dragonfly Press 2016), and PERISCOPE HEART (Swimming with Elephants Publications 2014), as well as a spoken word album SILHOUETTE (2017). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country-Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor's Arts Award and named Best Poet in Arkansas by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Luna Luna, Blue Heron Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.

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