paper • 140 pages • 17.95
ISBN:978-1-954245-78-5
eISBN: 978-1-954245-79-2
March 2024 • Poetry
Reviewed by the New York Times
Reviewed by Los Angeles Review of Books
About Andrea Cohen’s poems, Christian Wiman has said: “One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul.” In The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen’s eighth collection, those signature gifts are front and center, along with sly humor, relentless economy, and the hairpin curves of gut-punch wisdom. How quickly Cohen takes us so far:
Bunker
What would I
think, coming
up after
my world
had evaporated?
I’d wish
I were water.
The Sorrow Apartments is home to spare and uncanny lyricism–as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder. These poems race at once into the past and the possible. And yet, instead of holding things up to the light for a better view, Cohen lifts them to the dark and light, as in “Acapulco,” where an unlikely companion points out, “as men tend to, / the stars comprising Orion’s belt – / as if it were the lustrous sparks and not / the leveling dark that connects us.” For a poet who has been called unfashionable from the get-go, unfashionable never looked so good.
If Andrea Cohen’s poems sometimes feel like they are whispering in your ear long after you have read them, it’s because these aren’t just poems. Cohen has found a way to make spells out of glimpses of the world. But these are poems that don’t take themselves too seriously, but rather, in a playful manner, reveal the world via half-breaths, with rhymes that spark or ring in the ear-becoming a tune to follow, a tune to live by.
These poems are not fancy; they are true, and if there’s higher praise one can give, I’m not sure. There’s a joyful sort of darkness at play, an awareness of the abyss on all sides, and a here-we-are-in-this-absurdity sense of luck and wildness…These poems, with warmth and force, show how we get purchase on our days. And the book as a whole is a good reminder that the simplest, walloping truths can be so hopeful, so deeply reassuring: “The mind’s the finest/ gardener— in deepest/ snows, the plum/ tree blossoms.”
[A] sense of ease and effortlessness permeates Cohen’s self-possessed poems, as if they had simply floated, fully formed, onto the page, where they hang around, not like a bedside Bible in a Springfield motel but more like a “child about to ask a question,” as if, by their mere presence, “lifting the horizon.”
Cohen offers high-flying pleasures that transform the sorrows of memory, family, and failed love into the winged perceptions of a particularly charming and vigilant poet.
The attentive and intelligent eighth book from Cohen (Everything) charts childhood, loneliness, and existential unease with the poet’s trademark mix of philosophical clarity and surprise….Any new collection from Cohen is a gift.
Cohen doesn’t use childhood memories as vehicles for mere nostalgia, but as the ground to explore how life becomes magical, mysterious….In these small movements toward connection, Cohen rings the bell of freedom, and it’s exhilarating.