By Erin Wood
Our lights burn brighter as we hold ourselves and others to the flame of truth, and Hot Springs’ Kai Coggin shows us what it means to become more luminous through her third full-length poetry collection, Incandescent. Forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press on June 19, the book release will take place at 6:30 that evening at Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee + Tea in downtown Hot Springs. Coggin will also be the featured reader at the Argenta Reading Series in North Little Rock on June 22 at 7 pm.
About the collection, Coggin shares, “It is a book that was written mostly in 2016 and 2017 during the height of the last presidential election, and reflects the chaos and darkness of our current times. It strives to offer the reader a bit of hope, a spark of revolution, a call to rise up and stand as warriors against the unraveling of our collective principles of good. Incandescent means to emit light as a result of being heated. We must be must use our light now, when the world needs it most.”
Coggin is a former Houston Teacher of the Year turned poet, author, and teaching artist. Kai teaches an adult creative writing class called Words & Wine at Emergent Arts in Hot Springs. She is also a teaching artist on the Arkansas Arts Council’s Arts in Education Roster and with Arkansas Learning Through the Arts (ALTTA), specializing in bringing poetry and creative writing to youth around the state. Visit her at kaicoggin.com.
A 5.83” x 8.27” paperback with 128 pages, Incandescent is available for preorder and order at siblingrivalrypress.com and through local and national booksellers.
A Hot Springs native, Erin Wood is a writer, editor, and publisher in Little Rock. She owns and runs Et Alia Press (etaliapress.com). Wood is author of Women Make Arkansas: Conversations With 50 Creatives (April, 2019) and editor of and a contributor to Scars: An Anthology (2015).
