Julia Cohen, Collateral Light

 

If your first assessment of a lake is its perimeter
forego prayer for the face
Water slaps            laps up       eye-fauna

In which designated space would your trapped
door unfold?                If I do not spark?

Double-edged pen               a pile of piney breath
to defend or discard (“I STARED AT YOUR CAMERA / & PROMPTLY DIED”)

I’ve had Chicago poet, interviewer and essayist Julia Cohen’s second poetry title, CollateralLight (Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013) on a list of books I still needed to get my hands on for years, most likely since I caught her work in an issue of Black Warrior Review [see my review of such here] (further on that list include titles by Jennifer Moxley and Paige Lewis, in case you were wondering), only recently managing to actually do just that thing. The poems that make up Collateral Light are set as small moments, words and phrases that pool and cluster, propelled by fire, syntax and rhythm; a finely-honed sequence of small fragments that accumulate and hold together against, around and through the spaces she’s set just as deliberately as any word choice. She composes pinpoints that shape and hesitate, hold and cluster across narratives. “You happen // Here” she writes, as part of the title poem, “I am watching bees / traverse your jeans // I bit the point / of the strawberry // Off to the left / I’m seeding // The light peels back / a ringing splint [.]”

Set if five numbered sections, Cohen’s poems in Collateral Light are piercing and propulsive, sharp and articulate. “Damp & cylindrical,” she writes, to close the opening poem, “NO ONE TOLD ME I WAS THE ARROW,” “I raised / a black rooster / tipping / the color / of my red / heart’s name // I sharpen / my point // plunge / into a glass / of soil [.]” She manages to compose a sequence of narratives built out of sketched-out words and images that tether against an otherwise jumble, making clear sense out of pinpricks. “Everything I do / is very grainy,” she writes, as part of “THE ROOM DEFORMED THE SOUND OF IT,” “My pixels / deflect arrows [.]” Composing short phrases that accumulate down the stretch of each page, there is something similar in the shape and structure of many of these poems to the work of the late Robert Creeley, offering each phrase-line as a further step down a staircase, uncertain, exactly, where the poem might finally land. “A formation of water wheels / A formation of organs,” she writes, as part of “THE PLACE WE WORRY ABOUT,” “Movement caught in the work [.]” There is something interesting, also, in how each section begins with a single phrase set at the bottom of the page, almost offering a suggestion of tone or temperament for the poems gathered within; a single line to be read across the bottom of each of these five section-pages as a progression of the book’s tone and purpose: “my face was curious,” “I can’t just sit here with feelings,” “Open the invitation to anyone,” “Everything needs to be moved through” and “Let’s worship doubt.” And then, of course, the final poem in the collection, which is set after the final section and colophon, almost as an end-credit piece, suggesting a poem to simultaneously close and suggest where she might go next:

IT MOVES IN, IS NOT STATIC

Abdomen            domain

Where I store my arrows

This is the first of her books I’ve managed to see, having seen neither her debut full-length poetry title Triggermoon Triggermoon (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), nor her lyric essays, I WAS NOT BORN (Noemi Press, 2014), so I am clearly and ridiculously behind on her work. What has the intervening decade brought to her work? Where is she now? I suppose I should count myself fortunate she hasn’t been more productive over the intervening years, although now that I’ve said it, I’ve begun to worry.

Black Warrior Review 40.1

HEAT

A row of little ovens waits on the cliff.

I can’t wait to get inside.

Mother me, dry heat.

Bake me into a baby. (Emily Kendal Frey)

While in Florida, we wandered through the occasional bookstore, and I managed to pick up a copy of the most recent issue of Black Warrior Review (fall/winter 2013; 40.1). There are so many American journals I’ve only heard of, and haven’t managed to yet see, a constant frustration of the international border between us One thing I didn’t know about the journal, as the colophon reads: “Black Warrior Review is named after the river that borders the campus of The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The city, river, and journal derive their names from the sixteenth-century Indian chief Tuscaloosa, whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—tusca (warrior) and lusa (black).” I’m struck by a number of the selections in this issue—writing from such familiar names as Emily Kendal Frey, Bianca Stone and Julia Cohen—as well as some names I hadn’t previously been familiar with, including Wendy Xu, John Zackel or Adam Atkinson, for his “jacket copy” series, three of which are included in the issue. Atkinson’s three pieces are strange, and strangely compelling and entertaining, even if every element in each poem might not work. They’re certainly worth the trip, and certainly intrigue; I wonder how far he’s planning on taking this suite of unusual poems?

Jacket Copy for The Cop Followed Frank Into the Diner

The definite article in this book’s title is to be eyed suspiciously. This poet highlights many and any cops, Franks, diners, and followings into. For instance: “The cop frankly dined on / the fellow.” Or: “It follows that Frank copped a feel.” Or: “Diner: 3 A.M. / Cops from the vice squad / with weary sadistic eyes / spotting fairies.” At times, it plays like bathroom humor, if the bathroom was at Stonewall Inn and stuffed full with lubricated bodies: “The cop’s forearm followed his fist / into Frank’s asshole. A fist appeared through a portal twenty years from now and nailed / a cop in the kisser.”

What really struck in the issue included some of the prose, far more lyric than what I’ve encountered in most literary journals these days, from John Zackel’s short story, “The Potential Energy of Mr. English,” to Ben Roberts’ “Snapshots from the Wedding,” which includes:

There were those who arrived in the early morning hours before the Wedding. Others had waited in that place some thirty and three years. Here is the appointed hour: three in the Post Meridian. No one who came even a minute after was admitted. The Wedding waited on no one but the Bride and the Groom. For it is written, ‘No one shall arrive late to the Wedding.’ It is as if you had not come at all.

Given how particular I am about prose these days, I’m intrigued in the flavour of the prose in the pages of this journal, most of which is far more interesting stylistically than most of the far-too-straight examples of prose I see in literary journals. A further highlight was Julia Cohen’s “I Cannot Name It, It Lives,” listed under non-fiction. Cohen’s piece begins:

You are the splintered cloud of wood. Hum of halogen, a stutter strikes your microcosm’s sharp connector thorn. Home & the uncut call?

The density of a word, its cellular level I poke intricately awake. Indigenous to repetition. A girl drains an object. Your full sink & floating asparagus tips.

Object painted with asthma attacks. Object between relationships. Frozen object taken out of the freezer.

A good mention by Ana Božičević and Amy King at Pen America Center: Poetry Roundup: Po-blog is dead, long live the Po-blog!

Ana Božičević and Amy King were good enough to mention the "12 or 20 questions" interviews I've done here since September, 2007 (three series of such listed here, here and here) over at the Pen America Center blog. Thanks so much! They list a whole slew of (mostly American) literary poet-bloggers (with links!), including Elisa Gabbert, Anne Boyer, Sina Queyras, Craig Santos Perez, Dodie Bellamy, Bhanu Kapil, Pierre Joris, Carolyn Zaikowski, Mike Young, Julia Cohen and CA Conrad. Be sure to check out as many of them as possible!