Julia Cohen, Collateral Light

 

If your first assessmentof a lake is its perimeter
forego prayer for theface
Water slaps           laps up       eye-fauna

In which designated spacewould your trapped
door unfold?                If I do not spark?

Double-edged pen              a pile of piney breath
to defend or discard (“ISTARED AT YOUR CAMERA / & PROMPTLY DIED”)

I’vehad Chicago poet, interviewer and essayist Julia Cohen’s second poetry title, CollateralLight (Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013) on a list of books I stillneeded to get my hands on for years, most likely since I caught her work in anissue of Black Warrior Review [see my review of such here] (further onthat list include titles by Jennifer Moxley and Paige Lewis, in case you werewondering), only recently managing to actually do just that thing. The poemsthat make up Collateral Light are set as small moments, words andphrases that pool and cluster, propelled by fire, syntax and rhythm; afinely-honed sequence of small fragments that accumulate and hold togetheragainst, around and through the spaces she’s set just as deliberately as any wordchoice. She composes pinpoints that shape and hesitate, hold and cluster acrossnarratives. “You happen // Here” she writes, as part of the title poem, “I amwatching bees / traverse your jeans // I bit the point / of the strawberry // Offto the left / I’m seeding // The light peels back / a ringing splint [.]”

Setif five numbered sections, Cohen’s poems in Collateral Light are piercingand propulsive, sharp and articulate. “Damp & cylindrical,” she writes, toclose the opening poem, “NO ONE TOLD ME I WAS THE ARROW,” “I raised / a blackrooster / tipping / the color / of my red / heart’s name // I sharpen / mypoint // plunge / into a glass / of soil [.]” She manages to compose a sequenceof narratives built out of sketched-out words and images that tether against anotherwise jumble, making clear sense out of pinpricks. “Everything I do / isvery grainy,” she writes, as part of “THE ROOM DEFORMED THE SOUND OF IT,” “Mypixels / deflect arrows [.]” Composing short phrases that accumulate down thestretch of each page, there is something similar in the shape and structure ofmany of these poems to the work of the late Robert Creeley, offering eachphrase-line as a further step down a staircase, uncertain, exactly, where thepoem might finally land. “A formation of water wheels / A formation of organs,”she writes, as part of “THE PLACE WE WORRY ABOUT,” “Movement caught in the work[.]” There is something interesting, also, in how each section begins with a singlephrase set at the bottom of the page, almost offering a suggestion of tone ortemperament for the poems gathered within; a single line to be read across thebottom of each of these five section-pages as a progression of the book’s toneand purpose: “my face was curious,” “I can’t just sit here with feelings,” “Openthe invitation to anyone,” “Everything needs to be moved through” and “Let’sworship doubt.” And then, of course, the final poem in the collection, which isset after the final section and colophon, almost as an end-credit piece,suggesting a poem to simultaneously close and suggest where she might go next:

IT MOVES IN, IS NOTSTATIC

Abdomen           domain

Where I store my arrows

Thisis the first of her books I’ve managed to see, having seen neither her debutfull-length poetry title Triggermoon Triggermoon (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), nor her lyric essays, IWAS NOT BORN (Noemi Press, 2014), so I am clearly and ridiculously behindon her work. What has the intervening decade brought to her work? Where is shenow? I suppose I should count myself fortunate she hasn’t been more productiveover the intervening years, although now that I’ve said it, I’ve begun toworry.