Andrea Cohen
Andrea Cohen writes and swims in Watertown, MA. Her heroes have swum Venetian canals, the Chattahoochee, and The English Channel. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. Her fourth poetry collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books. Other collections include Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press 1999).
She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, the Owl Creek Poetry Prize and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.
“The body is ninetypercent water, ninetypercent thirst.I have been searchingfor a mineralthat drowns want.”
“The other fish think me proudor discontented with my station.The birds think I'm beneath them.Even submerged I am outof my element, which I fearthe Lord in his hasteforgot to invent. I senta letter to him once, pleading:make me this or make me that,limbo is hell upon a fish.I got a message back. It read:Don't despair, I made you purposelythat way—bounding breathlessinto space, the way I madeAdam and Eve, flittingbetween the field and ruined gardensof each other's airy arms.”
“We lost our everything,she said, which said everythingabout loss. My accumulationdictates my ruin; it’s differentfrom your dismantling, which can happen slowly or all at once.What’s crucial is a totalinventory, which may revealsome one element not obliterated.We lost our everything,she said—we—she repeated,meaning the we-ness remained,which in the end must be the seedof re-beginning, the seed that divines the plow, the ounceof dirt, the memory of digging.”