The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor - (Fence Modern Poets) by Kathryn Cowles (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor was selected for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize.

"When Eleanor Eleanor left, at least half of the art she had made instantly disappeared, having suddenly never existed at all, evidenceless. When a tree falls, etcetera. When you are your own museum head and go off, so does the historical record. Some artists are compelled toward self-preservation, all acid-free and vacuum-sealed, climate-controlled and HD-scanned, archiving every last snip. Some artists are excellent executors of their own fiction. Like so many women before her, Eleanor Eleanor was not. But she did write things down. She sometimes said that her art works did not feel actually finished when she finished them. Perhaps she used the writing as addendum, as Derridian supplement. Because her art was so often experiential, conceptual, fleeting, fragile, or intentionally self-destroying, much of what we have left is this residual after-writing, a kind of fossil record."

- from the Introduction by Kathryn Cowles

Review Quotes

"Especially urgent now is an imagery that does not flicker, transient overcrowded in transience, but, rather, an imagery that flies and an impassioned language of ascent, like wings, that makes of imagery emblems of liberation and of a further, lovelier humanness. Kathryn Cowles has reinvented the ekphrastic principle and given it velocity. The results are visionary in the most immediate sense of that word." -- Donald Revell

About the Author

Kathryn Cowles's third book of poems, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor, won the Fence Modern Poets Prize and will be published in December of 2025. Poems from this project won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Manuscript-in-Progress Award, and collage-poems from the project were part of a solo exhibition at the Solarium Gallery in Geneva, NY. Other books include Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed Editions) and Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star), which won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize.

Her poems and poem-photographs have been published in Best American Experimental Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Diagram, Free Verse, Georgia Review, New American Writing, Verse, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, and elsewhere. She earned her doctorate from the University of Utah and is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she directs (rotating) the Trias Residency for Writers and co-edits the Beyond Category section of Seneca Review.