Finding Sustained Power in Three New Books

Julie R. Enszer reviews three books for The Rumpus this week: Jill McDonough's Here All Night(Alice James Books), Marilyn Hacker's Blazons: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2018 (Carcanet), and Andrea Cohen's Nightshade (Four Way Books), which Enszer says is "perhaps the best book that I read in 2019." More from that:

The few of her poems (“Major to Minor” and “Cloud Study”) that appeared first in the New Yorker enchanted me. Would the full collection sustain that power? The answer is yes.

Poet Robin Becker praises Cohen’s work as “sculpt[ing] away the inessential.” The poems are spare. Compressed. In a fashion that is reminiscent of Kay Ryan, though Ryan’s poems more often include a turn to wit on their path to some revelation about the human condition. Cohen has wit in her repertoire, too, but she gestures more often with dramatic irony. In a poem about the end of a relationship, “Division Of,” Cohen describes the beloved taking a painting from the home “of the girl on the stair” while leaving. Then taking the nail “on which the girl in a pink haze hung.” This action results in a hole “in horsehair plaster—” and then in the final devastating couplet, she writes, “and the crumbling / that comes after.” Cohen’s metaphoric engagement with objects, winnowed down through removal, provide a dramatic revelation of human nature.

In another, equally devastating poem, “How Sound Travels,” Cohen begins,

You said goodbye and I
heard good and I, and

only later, the buzzing
b, its lethal sting.

In the first stanza, Cohen demonstrates how the mind mutates and shapes our various experiences through language, often with a mistake, a misstep, a small misinterpretation...

Read all three reviews at The Rumpus.