Imminent Disappearance, Impossible Numbers, & Panoramic X-Rays

by Bruce Cohen

Overview

The speaker of these poems is a man overwhelmed by the multiple lives he must juggle, but he chooses to live as deliberately as possible, inundated with an influx of information and conflicting gravities, trying make sense of it all and seeing the humor and sadness that is around him with a charged clarity that contains both simplicity along with surprising pyrotechnics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936970407
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	03/24/2016
Series:	Green Rose Prize
Pages:	67
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

BRUCE COHEN'S poems and non-fiction essays have appeared in over a hundred literary periodicals such as AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review, as well as being featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has published three volumes of poetry: Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize, Swerve (Black Lawrence Press), and Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (Black Lawrence Press). Another book, No Soap, Radio!, was published in 2015. A recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, prior to joining the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Connecticut in 2012, he directed, developed, and implemented nationally recognized academic enhancement programs at the University of Arizona, The University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Section I

Eggshell White 5

Rilke Said I and I and Meant Anybody 7

Uncanny 8

Curious Questions 11

The Pleasure of Art the Art of Pleasure & Self-Deception 13

Beach Day 15

Follain Combs the Parking Lot for His Vehicle after the Movie 16

The Day After 18

Power Broker 19

Assurance: A New England Autumn 20

Absence Excuse 22

Non-Emergency Room 23

Section II

Act II: 26

The Unclaimed Third Pillow 31

When the Girl in My Class Told the Class Her Secret 34

Strange Facts 36

After His Twelve-Hour Day 37

Blue Laws 38

Life on This Other Planet 39

American Bandstand 40

What I Used to Love about Smoking 41

Chicken Pox 42

The Lazy Future 43

Sour Candy 44

Eight Months Pregnant 45

My Friend Only Calls When He Needs to Tell Me There's Nothing More to Say 46

Section III

The Bronx, 1961 51

Renewal 52

Secret Phone Call 53

My Own Personalized Sunshine 55

Emergency Surrealism: 56

San Francisco, 1989: Cancelled World Series 57

Begin the Interrogation 58

The Way People Talk 59

Remake 61

Career Minded 62

On the Tip of Your Tongue 64

The Shampoo Bottle's Empty 65

Constant Leakage 66

What People are Saying About This

David Rivard

“The incessantly multiplying, witty, flummoxed, frivolous, grave, inspired, desperate and serenely exploding chloroplasts of Bruce Cohen's imagination are driven by an awesome hunger for life all of life, every damn bit! So much of our day-to-day and our most intimate feelings and thoughts makes its way into these poems that you begin to feel that Cohen might be the keeper of some vast secret surveillance system. His mission is our mission (whether we know it or not) total acceptance and his wonderful poems come to show us how it might be done, how it might feel.”