Long Division
Poems by ANDREA COHEN

Andrea Cohen's poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Memorious and elsewhere. Her first poetry collection, The Cartographer's Vacation, received the Owl Creek Poetry Prize; other honors include a PEN Discovery Award and Glimmertrain's Short Fiction Award. She directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series and writes about marine research at MIT.

Praise for Long Division

Lyric compression and a wonderful command of the plain style make Andrea Cohen one of a handful of poets who can make her voice the conscious echo of her mind. And it's a mind well furnished with whimsy, heartbreak, and moral questioning, a mind brilliantly attuned to the tragicomic, Kafkaesque nature of the day to day. But unlike Kafka, these poems don't end in conundrum, paradox, and irresolution -- they also partake of the comprehensive affections of a writer like Chekhov, as unsparing as they are forgiving, resolute that their ironies not stop at irony but give a full account of our need for love, sex, personal identity, and spiritual understanding.
-- Tom Sleigh

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"Current Events," a beautiful poem by Andrea Cohen, has praise of pears rotting from fruit to artifact in a bowl, and for a punctual soprano singing off-key, and for cicadas playing their furious music at dusk, and

for spring, whose cancellation or postponement has not yet
been announced, for the bounty of the innocent treasured here

and now, praise and praise and praise.

The poems in her book are a bounty in this way and it is a bounty of the innocent and the innocent is treasured here and now, and praised, in poem after poem. The things of this world are in these poems -- children, birds, fish, an ant caught in a sugar bowl, two lovers listening for and not hearing the cry or howl of a grey fox whose suffering they'd witnessed earlier, she herself seen in a shape-shifting fun house mirror, a wedding dress of peacock feathers, lit by a mangled paper lantern. It's the unblameable beauty and variety, of creatures, children, trees, artifacts, bounty that's always seen and heard in the condition of what you might call their joyful vulnerability.

The book is bountiful too in the variety and skill of its versification. There are many different and pleasurable kinds of music in these poems.

-- David Ferry

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"I have been searching/for a mineral/that drowns want." Maybe I like these poems as much as I do because I've been searching for the same mineral (no luck), or because they're smart and varied in subject and style, or because I feel, in each one, a powerful mixture of curiosity and invention. By the end of the book, I want no end to the book, and there it is again, desire and what to do with it in a world Andrea Cohen has made me see differently.
-- Bob Hicok