Periscope Heart

by Kai Coggin

In Coggin's debut collection of poetry, the Heart is the lens through which she leads us in words. Every line is infused with beauty and light and a yearning that is inescapable, palpable. Her voice is precise and piercing, like a song you hum without knowing, because it is already inside you. Her poems carry the fluttering soul, with vivid imagery that is tangible and evocative. PERISCOPE HEART is the sound of wings opening. "I first met Kai Coggin as a blazing fire of energy, a supernova educator in the Houston high schools. Now she is on her light path teaching through her own poetry. Her words are spells, chants, prayers, invocations. Thank you, Kai, for work of the spirit, for illuminations like desert thunder and a night sky of benedictions.” - Sandra Cisneros author of House on Mango Street "Kai Coggin’s first full-length collection, Periscope Heart - as the title may suggest - overflows with intimate reflections on life and love that offer the reader heartfelt observations into places ordinarily beyond our range of vision. Through sensual chronicles that beautifully illuminate taboo subjects, Coggin’s poetry draws from nature and personal narratives to intimate us with her passion for justice, social change and spirituality, in dynamic, seductive strokes.” - Catherine Ghosh Editor of Journey of the An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry by Women “Kai Coggin’s Periscope Heart is beauty mapping the dark, a canyon of becoming and letting go. It is a compass to a place where desire is no different than already-full. It beckons and peels open what is fierce in our softness. This book unleashes possibility, celebrates the wild and untethered, while slowing everything down to the heart’s pace.” - Andrea Gibson Spoken Word Artist and Author of The Madness Vase, Winner of 2008 Women of the World Poetry Slam Periscope Heart is the first full length collection of poetry from Kai Coggin published by Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC.

140 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2014

About the author

Kai Coggin (she/her) 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 Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, 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, 2018, and 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, 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.

Reviews

[Deirdre Fagan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coggin asks early in the book, “Would you mind if I made you my muse?” If you have heard Coggin, as host of Wednesday Night Poetry, which went online during the 2020 pandemic, you have heard her open her heart and mind to the world, seen her hold your hand to yours, perhaps held your hand to hers on the screen, joined her heart as you felt her words. This is not new. This book of poetry acknowledges, among others, its readers, and thanks them for opening their hearts to Coggin's words. Heart is at the center of these poems, as is listening, and a teaching forth, an inclusion and an appeal to join Coggin in relishing the world, nature, and each other, and a commitment to improving the spaces we inhabit while we are here. In Whitmanesque sensual and inclusive and lyrical long lines, Coggin navigates the body, her own and others, wholly inhabiting each moment, intentionally signaling peace and change, educating us on how to "eat" our pasts in order to recover, on the possibility of "peace bombs" instead of war bombs, on love, always love. Coggin is a force and I am grateful for her passionate and wise words in Persicope Heart and her contributions to the poetry community.

[Katherine Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved these poems. I needed to read many of them. My favorite were the poems about nature, especially "How A Tree Becomes A Wildflower", because I've been on a Waldenesque nature kick lately. The poems I needed to read the most, however, were the poems about love. They made me uncomfortable at times because of their sheer intimacy. I felt like I was peeking in through a window on some of the speeker's most vulnerable and intimate moments, and it made me feel a bit indecent. Somehow, Kai Coggin manages to take words and breathe life and love and all that comes with those them into the pages of a book. I've been on a journey of identity for the past couple of years and seeing the soul of the speaker of these poems so vividly help me see deeper into my own soul.
This is not a book to read in one day. Take these poems. Sit with them. Speak to them. Let them speak to you.