Elizabeth Cohen

Wonder Electric Elizabeth Cohen

Elizabeth Cohen's Wonder Electric opens in the wonder of domestic spaces where, "in this republic / of tamed energy, you can read / by pointed ghost light," situating us in the idea of home while deftly warning of the forces beyond it. There is both "always a celebration / of violins in D Major happening / somewhere...under the wingspan / of every moment, every day" and there is always a force undoing us. With heartbreaking wryness, Cohen walks readers through an array of mysteries and losses-climate change, the empty nest, suicidal whales, deer season, the mystery of dogs, fierce love for a daughter, a pandemic, loneliness, the loss of those we love. Again and again, Cohen plumbs the empty spaces inside us, counting among her tools for survival, "my bandage of poetry / when night comes flying in, like a thrown knife." Elizabeth Cohen is a poet of tremendous imagination and skill, each poem its own catalog of surprises-this chapbook an utter delight that left me heart-frayed and full.

-Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021)

With luminous language and charged imagery, Elizabeth Cohen's Wonder Electric suffuses "the dark heart of the plague," its unemployed and sick, the N-95 mask and warnings from the surgeon general, quarantine and candidates lined up in this, "our open semi-automatic season in America."

-Paola Corso, Poet and Author of Vertical Bridges

It's easy to be a prisoner of Elizabeth Cohen's poems. They are full of air and light, of the current crazy and the need to stop and pay attention to the cotidiano (as we call it here in my querida México).

-Mark Statman, Poet, Translator, and Author of That Train Again