Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In this genre-blending collection, Julia Cohen entwines the lyric and the essay with text messages, transcripts of therapy sessions, letters between Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, meditations on Levinas and John Coltrane to document a love story about language, suicide, anxiety, atheism, and finding a way back to feeling. Julia Cohen re-interrogates and reintegrates that ongoing paradox Psyche presents us-figure that refuses to stabilize the ongoing crisis between soul and mind. As of Psyche of old, Eros lurks everywhere, even in absence. But here, resisting the ease of mere allegory, Cohen stitches together differing forms of texts—lyric verse, prose poems bordering on the surreal, brief narratives, excerpts from psychoanalysis—to unfold the agonized reality of a lover's attempted suicide. I WAS NOT BORN opens in the extreme difficulty of relations falling apart; it ends in affirmation that word calls out as a lover calls—be it in sonnet or be it in text message—to its dearest counterpart, world.
Julia Cohen is an interview columnist at Tarpaulin Sky. She's the author of one collection of lyric essays, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press, 2014), which was recently translated into German and released by Literaturverlag Droschl. She's also written two books of poetry, Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2014) and Triggermoon Triggermoon (BLP, 2011). Her nonfiction and poetry appear in issues of Nat.Brut, Juked, Jellyfish Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, Boston Review, and BOMB. She's currently working on a new collection of essays, Freak Lip.
Julia Cohen has a BA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She's an Assistant Professor of English and Literature at Wright College. She teaches creative writing and literature courses. She's an activist for public higher education.
"Julia Cohen proves herself a protean writer, engaged with both world and word, playing for keeps. A finely etched portrait of a relationship with a suicidal lover proves but the portal for the author to recover a self and bid it sing. A beautiful, original, and deft achievement." - Maggie Nelson
"In I Was Not Born, Julia Cohen kindles a pillar of fire that reminds us that we do not always get out alive, that not everyone survives her or his youthful dreams. Like '… breaking into an apple,' the nourishment, the seeds, the core of life pulses throughout this accomplished work." - Brenda Coultas
"In ways unforeseeable until the very fact of this book, Julia Cohen re-interrogates and reintegrates that ongoing paradox Psyche presents us—figure that refuses to stabilize the ongoing crisis between soul and mind. As of Psyche of old, Eros lurks everywhere, even in absence. But here, resisting the ease of mere allegory, Cohen stitches together differing form of texts—lyric verse, prose poems bordering on the surreal, brief narratives, excerpts from psychoanalysis—to unfold the agonized reality of a lover's attempted suicide. This possible death, the intention of it, causes rifts of every sort—interpersonal and intrapersonal, putting out of balance that sublime confusion erotic love most depends upon: the relation of subject to object. That relation is also, Cohen knows, language's own erotic life. In the face of an act that makes inarticulate all that must be said, all the should be said, she lets her language enact for us what poetry's deepest faith might be. It's a faith not empty of desire, but in ardent pursuit of it. For Cohen reveals, as a poet must, that the poem is a lover's work, seeking as love itself does, to keep intact the relation between us and each object we encounter, all we exist among. I Was Not Born opens in the extreme difficulty of those relations falling apart; it ends in affirmation that word calls out as a lover calls—be it in sonnet or be it in text message—to its dearest counterpart, world." - Dan Beachy-Quick
