Description:
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."
Review Quotes:
Past Praise
"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." --Ilya Kaminsky