Conversations and Versifications

The author James Sallis said Marvin Cohen's first book "The Self-Devoted Friend (1967) is a collection of short pieces [which] are variously narrative, dialogue, essay, epigram-some are surreal, some are pastiche and parody, some are reminiscent of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en Prose. Ellipsis is the predominant quality: the reader is asked to accept this material, this disparate substance strung together with associate devices . . . Parts are superbly comic [though it does not] afford the r...