Shiva

Andrea Cohen

Evenings we sit in the livingroom, together. Friday I takemy mother’s slot (noon)at the beauty salon. Ruth,who for forty years washedher hair, washes mine.We’re all in the deserttogether. Your motherliked the water cold,Ruth says: news to me.From a thousandmouths, our dead assemble.

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Photo:
Francesca G. Bewer

Andrea Cohen’s new poetry collection, Everything, was published this year. Other recent collections include Nightshade, and Unfathoming. Cohen’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic MonthlyThe Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

New York, New York

Featured in Lambda Literary’s February’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books List

“The poems in Everything are so short and sharply formed, and so individually memorable, that one is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is a work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul.”
—Christian Wiman

“This is acutely literary writing that wears its literariness lightly enough for long journeys to unfamiliar places.”
—David Orr, The New York Times

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