MINING FOR STARDUST is a fiery and tender witness, a poetic chronology of one of the greatest collective paradigm shifts of our lifetime. Coggin's first poem in the collection was written on the first day of the COVID-19 lockdown. Each subsequent poem moves the reader through the pandemic, the summer of protests, the U.S. presidential election, and toward what seems like the other side of this darkest time in our memory. She does not shy away from the atrocities and the heartbreak, but leaves the reader in a space of healing. The book is intermittently filled also with nature, birds, and love poems for her wife, her safe inner world. MINING FOR STARDUST is an intentional practice in finding streaks of light in the shadows, "sifting flakes of space for gold/ amidst the dark matter/ surrounding us on all sides." It is memorial, grief, joy, beauty, truth, resistance, reflection, love, and balm for the aching human heart. It is the work of a scribe who earnestly engraves this moment into our human history. This collection is something you can hold in your hands, point to, and say, "I lived through all of this, too. I survived. I made it to the other side."
