“To be as supple and vulnerable as Kai is a wish I have for each and all of us,” reads Nicole Callihan’s foreword to Hot Springs Poet Laureate Kai Coggin’s newest book.
Published last week (on Earth Day, of course) by Harbor Editions, “Mother of Other Kingdoms” is Coggin’s fifth collection of poetry and follows 2021’s “Mining for Stardust.” By comparison to her previous work, “Mother” is said to be gentler and more personal, with a shift in focus from political resistance to the natural world. The publisher describes the book as a “tender, inward-exploration of motherhood, amidst the chaos and destruction of human life on earth. These lyric poems center on mothering the more-than-human world — plants, flowers, animals, birds, insects — all with their elaborate taxonomies and delicate identities.”
Coggin lives up to that promise with “Midwifing Tadpoles in the Anthropocene,” a poem from the collection in which she and her wife delight at being mother nature’s assistants. Here’s the first stanza:
My wife made a siphon with a long black tube
and through some slow water sorcery sort of vacuumed up
the hundred or so wriggling tadpoles that were clinging
to the side walls of our small plastic pool,
not to be sucked out into oblivion mind you, but moved swiftly,
as if worm-holed, into their own private pond we made out of the blue
tupperware bin that used to hold our Christmas decorations,
now a makeshift manger for a hundred or so baby froglets
almosting into their other selves.
Voted “Best Poet” twice by Arkansas Times in our annual readers poll, we profiled Coggin in December. You can purchase a signed copy of “Mother of Other Kingdoms” on her website.