Ghost Apples, the ninth collection of poems by Katharine Coles – who might be a witch (IMHO) given the ready way she connects with animals (including her parrot Henri, pronounced in the American fashion) and who surely has a magical way with words and their readers – kept me sitting in a hot car for more than two hours devouring the very-well-composed new work. (Right beside the monster air-conditioning unit that, maddeningly, kept switching on and off. But I kept reading.)
The book’s cover art, “Ivory-billed Woodpeckers” by Joseph Bartholomew Kidd, designed by Jessica Perkins, had me absorbed for entirely too long, given the heat. A trio of woodpeckers, two of them perched in a well-pecked tree limb, is spooky and endearing, too.