The Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience.
Coles begins her lyric essays with a meditation on "the urge to move beyond, to understand myself as a stranger, estranged." The essays travel, always on foot, from Coles's home, with its indoor and outdoor birds, into the canyon her home overlooks, itself populated with creatures ranging from voles to owls, moose, bobcats, and coyotes. From there, always looking, always walking, often in company, they move into her own neighborhood and through other cities domestic and foreign, which, alongside the poems that inhabit her, make up what Lance Olsen calls "a poetics of the vivid."