Lara Coley

Lara Coley is San Franciscan educator, living in France to save money on rent. She is a former fellow artist-in-residence at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts, Co-Curator for VelRo Weekly Reading Series, Editor-in-Chief of Transfer Magazine, and coordinator for the Poet in the City program. Her work is featured in journals including New American Writing, Rogue Agent, Love is the Drug Anthology, Visible Ink, Opium, and in operas composed by the SFSU music department. Lara is the recipient of awards including the Browning Society Prize for Dramatic Monologue, the Daniel J Langton Poetry Prize, and the League for Innovation Poetry Prize. Lara has taught ESL and led poetry workshops in juvenile detentions centers, high schools, universities, and mental health treatment centers. She holds an MFA in poetry from San Francisco State University and is currently pursuing her second masters to become a Marriage and Family Therapist.

ex traction

Lara Coley delivers her debut poetry collection with a hunger that gnaws at the line between lust and love.

It’s sexy, honest, and does not shy away from what makes us human: a yearning to love and be loved. Using a dichotomy of imagery in which sharp meets soft, or sweet is replaced with salt, ex traction explores how we sometimes mistake a red flag for a target, and run like hell at the man that’s ready with a saber to put into our back. How, sometimes, we make ourselves into red flags and wave until we become flames that burn down everything we wanted. Coley looks at loss and lust and how desperately we want to sculpt both of those into love, and how the less we get, the more we want, need, and demand.

ex traction is an empowering, emotional, evocative read that you can’t miss.

Praise for Lara Coley

ex traction traces the hidden shapes of desire with the thrilling precision of a blade on skin. There is fire and heat, depth and searching, the refusal of passion’s clichés in favor of insights only poetry can bring. Coley’s words will ignite you, if you let them, if you
dare.

— Carolina De Robertis, Cantoras and The President and the Frog

In this visceral debut, Coley explores the relationship between trauma, desire and loneliness, reminding us how love can be a brutal negotiation. The expectation is the hurdle/ The expectation is the knife, she writes, in a voice both passionate and urgent. Through prose poems, lyrical leaps and powerful invocations, the speaker seeks to embody love, a love as inexhaustible as clawing at the moonlight, swallowing the stars.

— Preeti Vangani, Mother Tongue Apologize

Lara Coley’s ex traction, sharply dissects love relationships. She wields language like a knife, simultaneously gutting and intoxicating the reader with each poem. These poems are in my DNA now.

— Jennifer Lewis, The New Low

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Lara Coley

ex traction

Praise for Lara Coley

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ex traction