The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor

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

Eleanor Eleanor and Kathryn Cowles were spooled side by side like thread until Eleanor abruptly disappeared. In the wake of Eleanor's leaving, Cowles lovingly compiles her unspooled residual poetry, full-color collages, and captions into this exquisite "fossil record," this ekphrasis-turned-on-its-head "partial catalog."

In Kathryn Cowles's deliciously innovative third book, Eleanor lays bare the depths of the confines still facing women in Western life, even while we're told we're free to choose. She affixes wings to feminine figures cut out of magazines, asks, is there a way beyond? A way to real freedom, to a femininity that looks and acts however we choose? Cowles opens the door for readers to imagine new beings far beyond persona, who might sit at the same table of the invented authors in Fernando Pessoa's world. In her introduction as editor, she writes:

"Eleanor Eleanor and I were born in the same place in the same month in the same year, and though we veered apart now and then (she liked to wander, to live in the back of a bad car, to waitress somewhere for a month or work a season on a farm), we always found our way back into each other's company before long. But it has been more than a year now, and it's never been a year. She's just gone. And where? Everyone always wants to know...

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.

This partial catalog, then, is an anti-chronological selection of her writings, which I found loosely shuffled on her otherwise cleared-off desk--a desk I never saw previously cleared in all the years I have known her, which is to say pretty much always. Seemed like a sign. On top was an otherwise blank notecard with my name on it."

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.