Sugar

In her ninth collection of poetry, Andrea Cohen returns with her patent precision, wry wisdom, and all-encompassing lyrics, where each image seems both small and mammoth, able to identify magic in the mundane and to see beyond it to the broader picture. Take, for example, the titular poem, in which the speaker insists that she was present for an anecdote her friend has relayed to her as if it happened to someone else. She insists, making her case by presenting details, like how "e;from some hidden speaker / Lady Day [was] singing Sugar / I never maybe my sugar- / maybe as an action item- / imagine-"e;... Cohen's closing line is brutally beautiful, encapsulating a life philosophy as much as it represents the last word in this argument: "e;and if I never was / here please please don't tell me."e; Perhaps the great irony of Andrea Cohen's work is that the economy of her poems, their spare construction, is what makes them capacious enough to hold the magnitude of this fundamental paradox: life is too severe to sugarcoat, and yet, in the end, we crave the complex flavor of this particular mess, the singular experience of its bite and sweetness. Our bodies are brief windows through which we can experience the world, and, in Sugar, Cohen reminds us that we find wonder in what we cannot fathom precisely because we cannot control it: "e;You can't climb / on top and call // yourself conqueror, / or straddling, whip // love into submission. / Love wanders from sky // to sky - [...] // a kind of glowing / twilight makes / before it tires / of one place."e; These poems enjoin us to make of our lives a spectacular place for love to retire, for evening to come, for the aftertaste of dark honey to linger.