Brenda Coultas


Brenda Coultas is an American poet.

Life

She was raised in Indiana, often working odd jobs such as welding.
She graduated from Naropa University, studying with Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. Coultas also taught at Naropa University.
She moved to New York City in 1994. With Eleni Sikelianos, she worked at the Poetry Project in NYC, edited the Poetry Project Newsletter
In 2003, she was a visiting poet at Long Island University. She lives in the Bowery.
Her work has also been published Brooklyn Rail, Trickhouse, the Denver Review, and in two collections: An Anthology of New Poets, and conjunctions 35'' "American Poetry: States of the Art".

Awards

Brenda Coultas’ collection of formally innovative fictions, Early Films, seems like McCain and Deanovich to be influenced by the casually flat tone of New York School poetry, but also like them in wanting to use that tradition for new ends. Coultas also shares with Deanovich a concern for ordinary middle American folks. But where Deanovich treats her characters with generous irony, Early Films is gloriously vicious. This is not a book for the faint hearted. Indeed its concerns with pathology, murder, and all sorts of country bumpkin grotesquerie reminds me most, perversely, of the cheap thrills of a horror genre writer like Joe Lansdale.

More than an investigative poetics, then, Coultas has created a poetry of archaeology. The investigative technique uncovers a vast landscape of soil, artifacts and spirits. The authenticity of the tales, of the histories, seems irrelevant in this light. The important point is that Coultas is working, that she is digging, and, in continuing to dig, carrying her poetry into unique and fresh territory.