My poems have appeared in bath magg, The Rialto, Finished Creatures, Shearsman Magazine, Volume Poetry, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Anthropocene Poetry. In 2022, with composer Christopher Cook, I won the Rosamond Prize.
My work has appeared in the anthology Angled by the Flood: Poems about the Sea, edited by Elsa Hammond; and featured in Osmosis Press‘s ‘new writing’ series.
I teach life-writing and qualitative research methods at Oxford University, I am an Honorary Fellow of the Department of Education and of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing.
A poem for Ben about snow
Open your eyes forget your arms
The venue flares with living light, a silent rave
of crystal jelly, swarms of filmy limbs each trailing
strobes of chemical excitement, frantic
glow-tips spark between ecstatic colonies of pulsing
bells, and brittle stars detach their arms, sensitive
to blue-green light that shimmers like a riot
and in the deepest parts they wait, transfixed,
for the web-cloaked vampire squid, spinning out the moment and
the throng is poised until the drop
releases them, a single palpitating heartbeat thrums
and radiates until their wonderland is visible from space,
its chiffon limits fading into the milky sea.
Author’s Note
A poem found in Annie Dillard’s Mornings Like This.
I did not write a word of it. Other hands composed
the lines. Pawing through, they [held] and wave[ed]
aloft the element of broken text. I lifted them. Sometimes
I dropped the books themselves; and added original
intentions to a loose collection of torn and damaged
fragments. The baffling quality of spiritual knowledge
looks sober on the page. Consequently, I took
wild liberties, poetry’s oldest and most sincere aim.
Katherine Collins 