Ending in Planes occupies itself with language and location. The poems ask the reader to receive the word without expectation, as playful utterance and sometimes allegory shaped at the horizons of the page. The collection performs hybridity as a collision between a rolling landscape of places—Seville, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Martin—and a speaker who at times addresses the reader directly and "means for you to answer." As a whole, the book is a travelogue of conversations with self and other, of fragmented meditations on love and loss, and of disrupted narrative sequences which move us from the familiar to unversed terrain.
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of Archon / After (Omnidawn Publishing, 2024); godhouse (Omnidawn Press, 2023); Third Voice (Tupelo Press 2016); the 2013 Noemi Book Prize selection Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014); Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014); domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), winner of the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You're Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002), selected for the Green Rose Prize; and Desdemona's Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), a Naomi Long Madgett Prize selection. Her poems appear or will appear in many anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black Nature, From the Fishouse, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of Forking Paths, IOU: New Writing On Money, and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America.
Kocher has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and Yaddo. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine and serves on the Board of Directors for RASA: Race, Solidarity, and the Arts. She has taught poetry writing at the University of Missouri, Southern Illinois University, the New England College low residency MFA program, the Indiana Summer Writer's workshop, and Washington University's Summer Writing program. She currently teaches poetry, poetics, and literature at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
"In book after amazing book Ruth Ellen Kocher remains a dynamo of lyric and formal invention. Ending In Planes further extends the ways her extraordinary poems experiment with the feeling of experience. Call her our Cecil Taylor, our Martha Graham of the word as she creates a language so otherworldly it seems to move beyond itself. This is remarkable book by a remarkable poet." - Terrance Hayes
"Ruth-Ellen Kocher's last book was called Goodbye Lyric. Here she says hello to lyric once again, but a lyric broad and wide enough to include a depersonalized I, a general you, even as lyric's intimacy is felt in every line. Again and again these poems ask the hardest and the most crucial questions: Is violence inevitable in the encounter between you and I? Do we touch 'only to know touch'? Does the earth love us? This is lyric made landscape of mind, bringing to my mind Leslie Scalapino's expanded syntax or Alice Notley's anarchic intensities. These poems think men, think women, think addiction, think despair and think desire, taking thought all the way to song and back again, so that as I read them I am compelled by their recurrences, their rhythms and their riffs, and I am assiduously tracking thought, considering all the 'Dark things which are loved.'" - Julie Carr
