Reverse Engineer, Ornithopter Press, 2022

Available at ORNITHOPTER PRESS

Featured on Poetry Daily

Featured at Tupelo Quarterly

Featured on UPenn’s ModPo video series

Interview on The Last Word

Interview on Texts for Nothing

"Colby uses simple words and twisty syntax to embody the process of reverse engineering language-based relationships; with questions and humor, she finds the traps and trapdoors in our language." Randall Potts, The Rumpus

Reverse Engineer begins with an epigraph from Rosmarie Waldrop that reads, 'doubting I love while knowing I’ve wanted to.' In many ways, this is what Colby spends the entire collection exploring; doubt and love are central to this beautiful collection, as the speaker questions what love is, what we are, and how we make meaning.” Chase Cate, Colorado Review

“Borrowing apophatic strategies from mystical theology, Kate Colby approaches the real by negation, by speaking only of what cannot be said.” Alina Stefanescu, Eiger, Monch & Jungfrau

“Colby sees a whole harmony of the spheres in human constructions – their follies, their desperate dependencies, their musical seriousness – and lets us her readers in on the joke.” Tom Snarsky, Neutral Spaces


“Informed by contemporary physics and epistemology, Reverse Engineer is a book about what defies description and eludes understanding. Kate Colby acknowledges this conundrum. Thinking about the self and the universe, we tie ourselves in knots. A poem may be such a knot—or so Colby suggests: ‘A poem’s a Rube Goldberg doo- / hickey to elicit a flicker—I die / while I’m writing, if as yet not / of it.’ I think I will always remember these lines, this flicker.”

​—​Rae Armantrout

Reverse Engineer is full of daisy-chained aphorisms apophatically accounting for what thinking is like (‘a simile works / like this’), extending beyond sense so that sensation gets severely enjambed, and I get to feeling, ‘I am what’s needed / of my own erasure.’ I love how Kate Colby’s poems hurt ‘me.’”

—​Aditi Machado

 

Dream of the Trenches, Noemi Press, 2019

Available at NOEMI PRESS

March 2019 Staff Pick at The Paris Review

Best of 2019 Nonfiction at Entropy

Powell’s Books Favorite 2019

“[Kate Colby is] the kind of writer who notices both the windshield and the speck of dust on it, and Dreams of the Trenches is the kind of book that places them side by side and says, Look.” The Paris Review

“Dream of the Trenches feels like a remake of William Carlos Williams’s ‘Spring and All’ for the 21st century…a charmingly obsessive, self-conscious deconstruction, an intellectual fun house of recurring and recursing ideas, a post-Postmodernist treatise on the idea of its own existence.” Powell’s Books

“This is a book about the process of writing, thinking about the self, and thinking about the self in relation to writing. It's also a book about movement. It shape-shifts, taking on the guise of a sly Matryoshka doll, aware of its own nesting tendencies, all the while aware that you are aware of them.” The Rupture

I’m a Kate Colby fan, and I think this might be my favorite book of hers.” Elisa Gabbert, Every Book I Read In 2019”

“Few recent books attest to a practice of intense, focused observation more surprisingly, or more comprehensively, than Kate Colby’s Dream of the Trenches.Stephanie Burt, "Elizabeth Bishop in Context

 

The Arrangements, Four Way Books, 2018

Available at Four Way Books

On Washington Independent Review of BooksSeptember 2018 Best Books List

On The Millions’ Must-Read Poetry: October 2018 List

“Counteractions, counterindications, and impossible interactions mark this meticulously crafted and sonically alluring seventh collection from Colby.” Publisher’s Weekly

Featured on In Their Own Words, Poetry Society of America

“These are sharp elegies—not quite of the dead, but of the failures of language and connection all around us…” The Millions

Featured on Speedway & Swan, University of Arizona

“In Colby’s poems, the veil between eye and I flutters, dissolves, and reappears, allowing the reader to intuit the subjectivity of the self: if seeing is believing, can we discern who we are from what we choose to see?” Salamander Magazine

“Kate Colby is a poet of great restraint, great elegance, and great attentiveness. These qualities all shimmer through her latest collection.” Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

“In addition to observed matter in dialog with absence, New England melancholy may be the second pole of Colby’s art.” Immanent Occasions

“Colby's impeccable craft, as well as the pacing of the collection as a whole, allows these poems to build a world that asks readers to push themselves beyond the familiar ways of organizing their existence toward more uncomfortable and intangible interrogations of self.” The Rupture

“It’s lucky for me/us that one of my favorite poets is so productive. It seems like she can just sit and look out a window while the laundry spins and have ten brilliant thoughts.” Elisa Gabbert,Every Book I Read In 2018”

 

I Mean, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015

Available at UDP

“Using its title anaphoristically and clocking in at nearly 70 pages, the title poem is a tight, nimble, and wide-ranging work that manages to, in the author's words, 'pile words up / and wrap the referents around them' in a remarkably fun and conceptually virtuosic way. The essays also display an erudition that can be both heady and playful…With verve and purpose, Colby plays trick after alluring trick to write herself in and out of meaning.” Publishers Weekly (*starred review)

“This is a big book for Colby, she is trying to lay everything out. For those who are a fan, it is a must read. For those wanting to write better expository prose, a must read.” Queen Mob’s Tea House

Innovative forms written by literary warriors like Kate Colby illustrate the breadth of structural opportunities in contemporary nonfiction.” New Pages

“The title poem in Kate Colby's effervescent I Mean comes in at a staggering 60+ pages and it never drags for a second. If this poem were a train it would be on time at every station.” Today’s Book of Poetry

“In her long poem exploring the pragmatics of intention, ‘I Mean,’ Kate Colby includes [an] aspiration for the poet’s authorship to respond to the new possibilities of molecular biology: ‘I mean ontogeny, phylogeny, the camera / panning out from microbe to cosmos.’” Peter Middleton, Expanding Authorship: Transformations in American Poetry Since 1950

Featured at The Poetry Foundation

 

Blue Hole, Furniture Press, 2015

Winner 4th annual Furniture Press Poetry Prize / Selected by Elizabeth Robinson

Available at FURNITURE PRESS

“Kate Colby’s poems unfurl like a complex melody. You wander through the day with them, following the loop of tune. ‘Everything might already exist,’ she writes, ‘but it hasn’t all been found.’ ....Colby’s robust intelligence and her vulnerability make for a poetry that has durable, if evolving, meaning."              Elizabeth Robinson

UNFINISHED BIRD, a song cycle based on Blue Hole, Van Reipen Collective, 2016

 
 

Return of the Native, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011

Available at UDP

“The poems in this collection transcend Hardy’s influence; they begin and engage in a dialogue all their own, a dialogue that is distinctly American...Colby’s use of borrowed language turned on its head forces the reader to question just how these idioms function, how language itself functions.” CutBank

 
 
 

Beauport, Litmus Press, 2010

Available at LITMUS PRESS

Finalist for the 2010 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award in Poetry

“Colby investigate[s] and disassemble[s] the merely historical imagination...mixing scenes from [Henry Davis] Sleeper's life and times with her own early life in New England and New York. Visual impressions, sense memories and real names (Frederick Law Olmsted, Baron von Haussmann) collide as Colby meditates on the supposed, perhaps illusory, autonomy of a house, of an art, of a life.” Publishers Weekly

“These are poems of quiet beauty, wielding power through lovely simplicity. They wander through ideas and memories, they explore what is lost and what is learned in the process of becoming a person.” NewPages

“In these reveries, Colby’s language at times rises to lyrical heights…Time here has become irrelevant, the speaker unable to pin it down, as past lives merge with present ones…both strange and unknown.” MAKE Magazine

“Kate Colby poses the question of whether the fictions that orient our daily lives are necessarily less real, natural and true than the more visceral, complex and historically subtle world supposedly revealed by ‘realist’ poets.” João Paulo Guimarães, Nordic Journal of English Studies

“Colby knows how memory can play tricks on us down the passage of time. [Beauport] is her take on the 19th century, a world peopled by fashionable turn-outs in Central Park, bands of Old World immigrants, antique buoys and small glass globes; a work of the imagination that is informed by her own particular understanding and sensibility.” Galatea Resurrects

 

Unbecoming Behavior, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008

Available at UDP

“Kate Colby examines Jane Bowles’ biography through an imaginative parsing of sensory detail, autobiographical detail and critique of creative process. The long poem is as engaging and resonant as the subject matter is rich” Galatea Resurrects

“To use her own words, Kate Colby’s poetry 'cannibalizes' and 'interbreeds' with itself, with the author’s life, and with the work and life of Jane Bowles, the great 20th century fiction writer and playwright. This booklength poem creates its own trajectory—a set of rapid explosions which transform into caresses. Colby’s harmonics—graceful, melodic, fluid and dissonant by turn—work in counterpoint to the relentless flow of fragments and blurs. Unbecoming Behavior is hyper-active to the extreme, and a step onwards.” Lewis Warsh

Available as a free digital proof

 

Fruitlands, Litmus Press, 2006

Winner Norma Farber First Book Award 2007 / Selected by Rosmarie Waldrop

Available at LITMUS PRESS

Fruitlands is an ambitious and astonishing first book which, though it knows that it cannot resolve the complexities of our world, nevertheless tries to give them form. Its brilliant and precise language does indeed ‘figure the problem (not figure out).’"    Rosmarie Waldrop, Poetry Society of America award citation

“Kate Colby has a gift for blending observation with lyric energy and wit. Capturing the world through a constantly shifting frame, these poems urge us to consider the difference between the ‘false spring’ and the real one. Colby’s field of reference ranges from Hofstadter to Schwarzenegger, and her ambitious title poem will leave you reeling.” Elizabeth Willis

“What is reality’s role in the conceptual? What is our own? What are our relationships with human contrivances, such as science and art and language? How is the natural world involved in these relationships? If these questions have a dialect, Fruitlands speaks in it.” Cutbank

Forthcoming

Thingking (chapbook), Tomaž Šalamun Prize Editor’s Choice Winner, Factory Hollow Press, 2024

Paradoxx, Essay Press, 2025

Chapbooks

Sun Damage, Essay Press, 2017             

Engine Light, PressBoardPress, 2016

Rock of Ages, Anadama Press, 2015

A Banner Year, Belladonna Press, 2006