Andrea Cohen has been executing a perfect-ten gymnastic vault in her poems for eight books now, and she continues this feat in The Sorrow Apartments with poems to be read and reread and never be tired of. Even in their compression, most poems continue to circle, heightened by Cohen’s music, as in “Bunker”:
What would I
think, coming
up after
my world
had evaporated?
I’d wish
I were water.
Cohen’s poems wend their way, appearing Zen-like, related to koans — except they’re not. They move forward definitively; they come to a full stop, for example, in “Passing the Torch”:
It hurts when
they hand it
to you, and
when they
say: pass
it on.
This type of poem might be described as philosophical, but more importantly, it allows for reverberations. Any poem, long or short, lives in danger of lines or stanzas going slack, but there are writers with the gifts— and the perspicacity — to craft this kind of poem so that it never misses a beat and also somehow contains multitudes. It not only sticks, it begins to magnify.
In the poem “Mantle,” we find an ars poetica of sorts, and insight into her poems’ staying power:
I have —
on my mantle —
a jam jar filled
with nails. Every-
thing I love has
burned down,
but I still have
my mantle
and my nail
aquarium. I
still have
my fire.
This is the centerpiece of The Sorrow Apartments, which in other respects defies characterization — there are so many threads running through it. The book is, however (as Cohen’s books often are), a wonderful “nail aquarium,” a dizzying array of poems with lines hard as nails on display. And no matter what has burned away, there is still, in each, a fire. It is the mantle every working poet dreams of.
Even in this eighth collection, Cohen continues — not to hammer, but to confidently place each tank of nails up there. In “Mantle,” her brief lines rely on the inherent music of “jam jar” and “nail/aquarium,” the repetitions of “I still have” and “mantle,” and the lashing (in all senses) enjambments of each line. The intricate care of her finishing touches extends throughout The Sorrow Apartments, leaving the reader to enjoy poems wide-ranging in the worlds they inhabit, stripped of extras and wielding immense power (think of atom splitting in verse — this is something Cohen’s poems have come to be known for).
Cohen has always shown a magical mastery of the line and line break as she completes each book, but in her early books, the reader is surrounded by more narrative, more comfortably inhabitable space, whether in the world of the butter cow (Kentucky Derby) or the story of a rescue dog named Eureka (Long Division) or a moment of blueberry picking with one’s mother, relived many years later (Furs Not Mine). In Unfathoming, she starts loosening the narrative, leaning towards couplets, which she goes on to polish in Nightshade. When we get to Everything, one could slice a hand on self-contained and razor-sharp poems, with title and verse pulling equal weight. In The Sorrow Apartments, that kind of crystalline poem mixes with a healthy selection of narrative. The longer poems are more poet-centered, perhaps, than her early narratives. These include a ubiquitous and touching exchange with a phone bot (“Something”) and a conversation with the real estate agent in the book’s title poem (“The Sorrow Apartments”). In each poem, long or short, she exhibits the same craft and precision that she’s used before, varying her tone between heartbreaking and humorous, the words of each line a whiplash against what follows, often pitted against the speed of technology, text, and error in the world of the 21st century:
In limbo, I spoke
into the phone,
which transcribed
that as in limo.
In limo? she
wrote back.
OMG, she wrote.
She’d asked me
to marry her
habitually, the way
you’d ask someone to bring home milk …
(from “Stretch”)
The beauty of Cohen’s longer poems lies in their ability to be archly funny in one moment, and express intense pain in the next, all in the surprising details that the poem would be “less than” without.
Sometimes the words come together in a furious fever dream of a short poem in which one idea (mistaken, wished for) connects with and then is quickly replaced by another, as in “Balm”:
It’s a balm,
he said, or
so I thought —
not wanting
bomb to be
the last
word heard.
“Balm” is spare; its beginning and ending leave the door open to a wider context, while Cohen’s “I” at the center of the poem positions itself as something solid, creating tension and doubt between the balm and bomb. The circumstances here are less important than the speed of associations and Cohen’s clear love of sound and wordplay. Through most of the poems in The Sorrow Apartments, the reader joyfully, unsuspectingly, follows the path laid out, trusting in the careful momentum Cohen creates to reach whatever ending is in store. In “Elegy for Me,” we see all facets of the “I” — “lambswool/on the lamb/the glamour,” entering into “the silent film called Us” that leads us to “the genius projectionist,” as we absorb both breakage and solution:
I was what
I loved: lambswool
on the lamb, the glamour
of flesh, memory of
what it is to speak
as evening enters
a room in winter,
snow falling as
in a silent film
called Us, and
if a reel breaks,
the genius projectionist
perched above
the darkened theatre
fixes it and begins
again at the beginning
As a general rule, a short line can crumble into nothing without the right attention. It’s also risky to assume any short poem will achieve depth, but Cohen manages to do so in what might otherwise have seemed aphoristic. Another piece among the best of the short poems that accomplishes this is “I Know a Man” by Robert Creeley, which shares some of its best traits with Cohen’s work:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking — John I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake look
out where yr going.
The comparison works not just because of length (Creeley’s poem is longer than many of Cohen’s), or a similar use of enjambment (one could argue his lines here are longer) or productive incorporation of white space — Creeley and Cohen’s little poems work overtime, constantly pushing us into new territory. They both achieve their gestalt, and even when the darkness surrounds us, they have movement; they have fire. They also pursue the unknown, unafraid, or at the very least, they allow their curiosity to override the fear. Cohen begins The Sorrow Apartments with a poem called “UFOs,” admitting from the outset: “I believe that things/fly, that I don’t know/what they are or what/they might signify.” This, too, is a refreshingly honest take on how a poem takes a breath and might fly.
[Published by Four Way Books on March 15, 2024, 122 pages, $17.95 paperback]