Can you tell yourself a joke? Or is that like trying to tickle your own ribs—impossible to succeed, and odd to try. I ask because Andrea Cohen’s brilliant, tough new collection begins with a comedy routine played with a ghost: “I tell my mother/I’ve won the Nobel Prize.//Again? she says. Which/ discipline this time?” The punch line to “The Committee Weighs In”: “…I pretend//I’m somebody, she/pretends she isn’t dead.” My surface reading is poignant—the speaker wants to “be somebody” for her mother by winning prizes. My close reading is bleaker. By losing her identity as her mother’s daughter, Cohen has become nothing and nobody. No body=dead.
Loss permeates Cohen’s book. Wit shapes the language that lets her rejoin the living. A meditation or lament may be addresses to the self or to God. Poems of rage may rant against fate or, as in Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” echo in the speaker’s satisfied ear. But you can’t tickle yourself. Wit and humor assume an audience. Through a rhetoric that requires response from someone other than the one who speaks, Cohen opens her way to the world. She is changed, like any visitor to Hades, but she returns.
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Sound play is an essential part of Cohen’s epigrammatic repertoire. In the title poem, she defines the Russian saying: “…One need only /to have known deep cold, an inmost //Siberia made more Siberian by one /who basks nearby, oblivious in her Bolivia.” While her multi-syllable internal rhymes delight the ear, the tension between subject and sound is almost unbearable. The parallel chime of “Only,” “known,” “cold,” and “inmost” releases the groan of lamentation, but to pronounce the plosives in “basks,” “nearby,” “oblivious,” and “Bolivia,” you almost have to stop speaking.
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“Bolivia” reappears in the book’s final poem, “Gravy Boat”: “I’ve got one foot/in the gravy, one/in the gravy boat.//It’s the same foot./The other one?/I cut if off.” Gravy’s one syllable away from grave; like a trapped fox, Cohen amputates part of herself to survive. “Where am I sailing?/Who can say?/Goodbye, Bolivia, hello gravy!” No basking in Cohen’s future—but then, maybe, less Siberia. Life is motion. One can’t stay a blossom, whose job in “First Thought Best Thought” is “to bloom, to be//beautifully unschooled in ruin,” forever.
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Cohen’s blurbs praise her pithy epiphanies, her mordant tone, and her craft. Her sentences are easy to understand, but the damaged world they unspool, line by line, is difficult to negotiate. In the compressions of Furs Not Mine, each word punches above its weight. Rhyme stabilizes, humor works its through-line; the poem emerges from its pressures terse and tight. Cohen creates an idiom equal to the life-changing grief she’s come to report. It’s not like anyone else’s, and I can’t think of obvious antecedents. Recently, her publisher scored a coup with poet Gregory Pardlo’s Pulitzer Prize winning Digest. I hope the various committees take a good look at Furs Not Mine for 2016.