Everything : poems

The poems in Everything, Andrea Cohen's seventh collection, traffic in wonder and woe, in dialogue and interior speculation. Humor and gravity go hand in hand here. Cohen's poems have the rueful irony of a stand-up comic playing to an empty room. But look around: there are wrecking balls, zebras, lovers, milk money. It's a room to hang around in. "Clever, capricious poems grounded in the very matter of life: loving, losing, and persisting Andrea Cohen's Everything approaches the idea of the macro through an elastic inquiry of the micro. In a poem entitled "Dust," the speaker posits " We funnel it between the stones./ What stones become is what/ holds them together." The collection examines logic through analogy; for example, if everything is formed of anything, then isn't absence a product of abundance? In poems that follow their own line of questioning wherever it may lead-to destinations that are often unexpected and always rich with discovery-Cohen explores love, grief, and alternate endings. The worlds she creates in the poems expand, contract, change shape, and change course. On the subject of waiting, Cohen writes, "...someone kept/ punching a vending/ machine, as if another / hour might come out," and in the pliant universe of this collection, time might as well be vended or dispensed in an unexpected way. These poems ask us to remain open and to circumvent ordinary answers on the route toward extraordinary, nuanced ones"-- Provided by publisher