Everything
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The poems in Everything, Andrea Cohen’s seventh collection, traffic in wonder and woe, in dialogue and interior speculation. Humor and gravity go hand in hand here. Cohen’s poems have the rueful irony of a stand-up comic playing to an empty room. But look around: there are wrecking balls, zebras, lovers, milk money. It’s a room to hang around in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The playful seventh book from Cohen (Nightshade) opens with an epigraph from Antonio Porchia: "Every toy has the right to break." The opening poem, "Wrecking Ball," picks up on this motif: "Its offices are thin/ air. On days off// it still goes in / wrecking balls are// workaholics." Divided into four sections, these short-lined poems often border on the spiritedly surrealist or absurd: prison bars become "stripes pried/ from a zebra's back," and in the two-line offering "Safety Glasses," the speaker announces, "The rose tint/ isn't optional." Yet in their absurdity these poems subvert assumptions about a world filled with sorrow, silence, and hurt. A master stylist, Cohen uses em dashes and commas with an exactness that allows each poem to become elliptical and self-contained. These poems take no "thing" for granted, not even the concept of eternity, as Cohen declares in "Openings": "I didn't want// forever forever." It is the wit that astounds here, and an intelligence that sees the world anew.
