Andrea Cohen's poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, The Cartographer's Vacation, received the Owl Creek Poetry Prize; other honors include a PEN Discovery Award and Glimmertrain's Short Fiction Award. She directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series and writes about marine research at MIT. ""...an ideal and recommended introduction for those new to her poetic style, and a welcome update for those previously familiar with her work...""--Midwest Book Review. ""For a poet with Cohen's gift, it must require immense control to stop once she starts. When cohen turns to a topic like 'Current Events,' she swerves away from the expected meditation on today's headlines and begins to catalog a simpler kind of current event instead.""-Rain Taxi Review Summer 2010
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An ideal and recommended introduction for those new to her poetic style, and a welcome update for those previously familiar with her work. --Midwest Book Review
For a poet with Cohen's gift, it must require immense control to stop once she starts. --Rain Taxi Review
For a poet with Cohen's gift, it must require immense control to stop once she starts. --Rain Taxi Review
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"What Would You Like On Your Desert Island?" "Who wants to know? The god who marooned me or the god who plots my rescue?",
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This review is from: Long Division (Paperback)
This poetry collection by Andrea Cohen is different--special--so fresh, so accessible, and so exciting in its imagery, irony, humor, and honest sentiment, that time became irrelevant for me when I was reading. In the course of three hours, I was laughing, smiling in knowing agreement at new insights, loving the "a-ha" moments when I finally "got" what the poet's image was all about, weeping at the unvarnished treatment of death in some poems which evoked sorrows of my own, and loving the intimacy of sharing so many events with a woman I had never met but now know better than some of my "closest" friends.
Cohen's writing is absolutely clear (no fuzzy images and contorted syntax) and clean in its structure--the poems are composed, not the result of unstructured free writing in which the poet so often celebrates himself and the primacy of his every utterance. The poems often consist of stanzas of equal lengths, with a single line at the end to secure the final idea and give it emphasis. "Current Events," for example, consists of three-line stanzas, each line having three stresses, as the poet lists perfect moments in time--Asian pears at peak, starlings stringing their nests with hairnet and Christmas lights, a paperboy happy at the weight of his papers, following them with a single line, ordering the reader to "praise, and praise, and praise." Andrea Cohen is a communicator, a woman who speaks from the heart without treacly sentiment, a poet so skilled in all the arts of poesy that she can match her metrics to the cadences of everyday speech. In the quotation from "In a Haystack," for example, six two-stress lines are read as one easily understood sentence, without all the pauses and heavy beats of most nineteenth century poetry and without the blankness of much twentieth century verse. Many poems offer unique points of view. A poem written from the point of view of a needle is amusing in its own right, and in this case the needle is on an adventure, imagining its "one good eye [filled] with the filament of pasture," or itself as "pillow to the weary." "To an Ant Fallen in the Salt Shaker" is a humorous reminder to an ant, who may have been looking for sugar instead, that the sweetness [of life] requires hard work. "Flying Fish" considers the predicament of a fish who feels that he is neither fish nor fowl. "Limbo" he says, "is hell upon a fish," a symbolic image which can have many meanings. Many poems recall Cohen's childhood, her family, and the important moments in her early life in the South--saying thank you the trash pick-up man, the time she had show-and-tell and demonstrated glass-cutting with disastrous results, the time she was bitten by a snake and needed an "anti-boat," and the time the family car killed an eight-point buck. But many other poems are from adult life, a heart-stopping poem on the death of her brother, the senility of her grandfather, the killing of the animals in the zoo in Palestine, and issues of love: While loving and losing is hard, "to have loved and never/ had, to be chained/ to the imagined, its expense/ account without bounds," that's harder still. Andrea Cohen is a poet whose clarity of vision and imagery combines with the clean structure of her language and verse to create poems which communicate on all levels, some of them humorous, some of them achingly sad, and all of them unique. n Mary Whipple The Cartographer's Vacation
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Note from the Publisher,
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This review is from: Long Division (Paperback)
Andrea Cohen's poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, The Cartographer's Vacation, received the Owl Creek Poetry Prize; other honors include a PEN Discovery Award and Glimmertrain's Short Fiction Award. She directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series and writes about marine research at MIT.
Praise for Long Division: "Lyric compression and a wonderful command of the plain style make Andrea Cohen one of a handful of poets who can make her voice the conscious echo of her mind. And it's a mind well furnished with whimsy, heartbreak, and moral questioning, a mind brilliantly attuned to the tragicomic, Kafkaesque nature of the day to day. But unlike Kafka, these poems don't end in conundrum, paradox, and irresolution -- they also partake of the comprehensive affections of a writer like Chekhov, as unsparing as they are forgiving, resolute that their ironies not stop at irony but give a full account of our need for love, sex, personal identity, and spiritual understanding." (Tom Sleigh) ********** "Current Events," a beautiful poem by Andrea Cohen, has praise of pears rotting from fruit to artifact in a bowl, and for a punctual soprano singing off-key, and for cicadas playing their furious music at dusk, and for spring, whose cancellation or postponement has not yet been announced, for the bounty of the innocent treasured here and now, praise and praise and praise. The poems in her book are a bounty in this way and it is a bounty of the innocent and the innocent is treasured here and now, and praised, in poem after poem. The things of this world are in these poems -- children, birds, fish, an ant caught in a sugar bowl, two lovers listening for and not hearing the cry or howl of a grey fox whose suffering they'd witnessed earlier, she herself seen in a shape-shifting fun house mirror, a wedding dress of peacock feathers, lit by a mangled paper lantern. It's the unblameable beauty and variety, of creatures, children, trees, artifacts, bounty that's always seen and heard in the condition of what you might call their joyful vulnerability. The book is bountiful too in the variety and skill of its versification. There are many different and pleasurable kinds of music in these poems." (David Ferry) ********** "I have been searching/for a mineral/that drowns want." Maybe I like these poems as much as I do because I've been searching for the same mineral (no luck), or because they're smart and varied in subject and style, or because I feel, in each one, a powerful mixture of curiosity and invention. By the end of the book, I want no end to the book, and there it is again, desire and what to do with it in a world Andrea Cohen has made me see differently." (Bob Hicok)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Witty, self-deprecating, lovely,
By
This review is from: Long Division (Paperback)
I can't speak to this collection with the technical and literary knowledge of the other reviewers. I just love poetry and had to have this book once I read "In a Haystack." The book's a phenomenal piece of work. The poems here make me laugh out loud at things that used to make me cry.
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