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Collateral Light
by Julia Cohen
92 pages/32 poems
Publisher: Brooklyn Arts Press (October 15, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1936767228
ISBN-13: 978-1936767229
Price:$15.95
www.BrooklynArtsPress.com
Review:
Julia Cohen's speaker, 'chalky / from / banged up / stars,' addresses the sticky stuff of existence
from all sides, from that '[t]ender veil of the buffering field.' This book is full of arrows. Some
pierce, some direct, some 'snap in half and form an X to mark the animal inside that animal / alive
& yelping through the skin.' Or we re shot through by being persons. Cohen won't heal, but will direct
us in our grief, our weird grief shot through with pleasure. 'I can't just sit here with feelings.'
If you lose your grip on this book, if you slice your hand as the vanes pass through, hold tight as
only the busted-beautiful can.
–Danielle Pafunda
Advance Praise:
If you relish a poetry of the ear and eye, the light touch of vowels mingling in a breathing landscape,
then you will feast on this book and these poems from Julia Cohen. Here the news is alive and subtly
elegant. Here the cognate child builds her musings syllable by syllable to talk of insects on snow
and little cliffs. Here the phrase is music and memory is inexhaustible. The things found in her night-
garden—mimicry should be deliberate; the colossal leaf; the broken dinner plate—are replete with
suggestive power. This is a voice indeed of an active and precise imagination.
–Mark McMorris
About the Author:
Julia Cohen's first full-length book, Triggermoon Triggermoon, was published in 2011, and her third
collection, I Was Not Born, will be released by Noemi Press in 2014. Her poems and lyric essays
appears in such journals as jubilat, New American Writing, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review,
DIAGRAM, and Black Warrior Review.
From the Book:
Sadpaint
by Julia Cohen
A bird-covered tree–
what kind of person I am
Sirens crash through the pines
like a painting of a girl
kneeling in corners
hostage to hanging clouds
I hide my pills in
the clock I hear yet can't spot
My crust of bread points at you
like an index finger
to calendar the brush drying
against my cheek
of ants logging the insect home
of bangs balancing on eyelids
Three prongs of a shadow relent
the descent to wriggle loose
Okay so I don't want a sad
painting watching over us
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