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6 books match the query 'Cohen, Andrea'

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Everything

Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books, 2021

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.

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Furs Not Mine

Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books, 2015

The poems in Furs Not Mine display Andrea Cohen’s masterful craft and lyricism and her keen wit. In Cohen’s elegiac shoals, we see how “Great griefs are antidotes / for lesser sorrows,” and in her strange, surprising narratives, we glimpse a man darting into traffic for a hubcap, “meaning to build his dream / vehicle from scrap.” These poems, too, have the feel of dreamy constructions, in which bliss “from a distance, can look like pain.” That’s the magic of this collection: it holds loss and promise in the same image—sometimes even the same word.

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Nightshade

Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books, 2019

The poems in Andrea Cohen’s Nightshade, her sixth full-length collection, are constructed from the wisdom of loss—of lovers and loved ones and a world gone awry. Cohen builds a short poem the way a master carpenter does a tiny house, in lines that are both economic and precise, with room enough for sorrow and wit to exist comfortably in their spaces. The great pleasure in reading these poems is their surprise in the way the endings arrive again and again in startling truths: The bride whose dress is sewn “from a hundred/tattered flags/of surrender” and the ever-present reminder of the title poem that the things of this world are both “poison and . . . balms” that “We /call . . . bitter- / sweet––what / living isn’t?”

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Sugar

Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books, 2026

About Sugar, David Orr has said: “Andrea Cohen’s ninth collection is elegantly precise—but this isn’t the precision of a meticulously arranged garden or tidy bookshelf. Rather, Cohen’s nimble, exacting lines are like guide ropes strung up the sides of an icy mountain: Her precision manages risk, and the risk leads to startling vistas. An entire relationship dynamic unfolds in the five monosyllables of ‘Proximity’: ‘She died / Of my wounds.’ In ‘Ghosting,’ the ambiguity of departure—the way in which lives and loves sometimes cease without concluding—is captured in all its shades of gray: ‘Any ghost will / tell you— // the last thing / we mean // to do / is leave you.’ We sometimes think of poems as recreating experience, but Cohen’s work reminds us that poetry, at its most patient and compassionate, is also a way of discerning. Sugar brings us a step closer to the sun; it helps us to orient ourselves, but more than that, it helps us to see.”

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