Professor Brenda Coultas Pens New Poetry Collection, “The Tatters”
Deborah Anders
212-463-0400 x5178
deborah.anders@touro.edu
Brenda Coultas, professor of languages and literature at the New York School of Career and Applied Studies (NYSCAS) at Touro College, has written her fourth book of poetry, The Tatters, published by Wesleyan University Press.
Coultas’s poetry is inspired by the artifacts of urban and rural life and includes commentary about society’s role as stewards of the environment.
Through an investigative approach to her work, Coultas maintains that the natural world no longer exists in any pure form.
The title poem, “The Tatters,” for example, contains a passage about random, yet symmetrical pigeon feathers that city dwellers overlook as they go about their daily business. The feathers represent the wildlife of the urban landscape and serve as totems, showing the way:
“The feather this afternoon is a black and grey tongue pointing east…the feather again (the blade). This time on the street. First quietly in front, then as I move, cocks quietly to the 10 o’clock position. Later in the day, silently soaked with winter salt.”
“Poetry engages all the senses− touch, taste, sight, sound, smell,” Coultas says. “It is also a source of pleasure, of beauty. We are moved and changed through poetry.”
At a recent poetry reading at NYSCAS, Coultas called attention to the hazards of hydro fracking, a controversial method of blasting chemical-laced water into shale beneath the ground to extract natural gas:
“Theft of water, relocation, diversion from its bed. Hydrofracking, I never thought they’d use our water against us.”
Lewis Warsh, author of the novel A Place in the Sun and the poetry collection Inseparable, writes about Coultas’s work that “Unlike most writers who are working in hybrid forms, Coultas creates a seamless enmeshment between poetry and prose, and this consistency of voice and tone is one of her great strengths.”
Coultas said that by reading, writing and studying poetry, “we plug ourselves into a continuous ritual and rhythm of expression that goes back even before the concept of the written word.”
Prof. Coultas has taught at Touro College since 1994 and has penned three other poetry collections: The Marvelous Bones of Time (Coffee House Press, 2008); A Handmade Museum (Coffee House Press, 2003); and Early Films (Rodent Press, 1996). She graduated from the University of Southern Indiana, earned an MFA from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and has served on the faculty of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.
This fall Prof. Coultas will be a mentor at Emerge-Surface–Be, a fellowship program sponsored by The Poetry Project and the Jerome Foundation, which pairs emerging poets with poet mentors. For more information, visit esbfellowship@poetryproject.org.
The Tatters is part of the Wesleyan Poetry Series. For more information or to order the book, visit: tatters.site.wesleyan.edu.
