Hold Like Owls

"Koets has a penchant for surprising metaphor. She possesses a personal delight for the highest flying verbs and their alluring descriptors. . . . I am grateful to this poet for this first book of poems. I am grateful for what she has taken the time to remind me of. She is just getting started. I applaud the alphabet spilling from her hands."—Nikky Finney, author of Head Off & Split, from the foreword

"The subject of these poems is relationships: of a human with her past, of lover with her beloved, of speech with the unsayable, of cherishing in the face of evanescence. The primary mode is metaphor practiced as a profound alchemy, that is, knowledge acquired by the merging of several meanings, and purity achieved by separation into new clarities. Koets's voice is, simultaneously and by turns, intimate, strangely remote, mournful, ecstatic, seductive, and challenging. This book is an earnest and welcome addition to our great communal work of discovering, creating, and inventing a voice and image of the person we can love. It is a manifold gift."—Li-Young Lee, author of Behind My Eyes and recipient of an Academy of American Poets Fellowship

Winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize