As befits this daring exploration of a life that defies clear categories and boundaries, Naomi Cohn's revelatory memoir The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight shapeshifts between lyric essay and prose poetry and traverses the divides between lived experience, history, and scientific knowledge. Told in the form of imagined alphabetical encyclopedia entries, this meditation on progressive vision loss examines and illuminates Cohn's at first halting then avid embrace of braille as part of relearning to read and write as an adult. Using etymology, historical and medical research, and personal vignettes, this abecedarian collection of linked micro-essays and prose poems is both Cohn's singular story of grieving and refashioning a life built around words and an evocation of the larger discussion of how our society views disability. The Braille Encyclopedia is poignant, playful, and wry, providing a literary reckoning of the technical and emotional aspects of facing the loss of sight.
Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores reclamation. Her past includes a childhood among Chicago academics; involvement in a guerrilla feminist art collective; and work as an encyclopedia copy editor, community organizer, grant writer, fundraising consultant, and therapist. A 2023 McKnight Artist Fellow in Writing, her previous publications include a chapbook, Between Nectar & Eternity (Red Dragonfly Press, 2013), and pieces in Baltimore Review, Fourth River, Hippocampus, Terrain, and Poetry, among others. Cohn has also appeared on NPR and been honored by a Best of the Net Finalist and two Pushcart nominations. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
"Naomi Cohn's The Braille Encyclopedia is a story of a life told in moments, in asides, in meditations, in lyric observations that can be as nuanced as they are sweeping. There is an impressive unity to this collection and a momentum that casts a spell as the pages turn." - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
"The Braille Encyclopedia shimmers—poetry in paragraph form. Compelling, often humorous entries show declining vision along with acute awareness. Readers meet Louis Braille and Adjustment to Blindness Training and a braille Torah that isn't kosher because it must be touched. By the end, we understand what 'touching my reading' means. 'When it's so much work to write a single word,' Cohn explains, 'it had better be worth saying.' Cohn's words are worth saying." - Ranae Lenor Hanson, author of Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress
"Naomi Cohn's engrossing debut memoir The Braille Encyclopedia is a wonderful wide-ranging rendering of a life in love with words and the world words make. Cohn brilliantly twines personal and familial history with the history of Louis Braille and his life on the way to creating a tactile language for people living with blindness. At turns poignant and humorous as it chronicles Cohn's progressive loss of sight, I finished this abecedarian collection of essays and prose poems gratefully feeling I'd gotten an 'all-around education." - Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods
