Alicia Cohen was born in 1970 in San Diego, California. She attended Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. After Reed she enrolled in the Poetics Program at State University of New York, Buffalo in 1994, studying with Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Robert Creeley, Jill Robbins, Keith Sanborne, and Tony Conrad. She received her PhD, with a minor in Media Studies, writing a dissertation on experimental realisms and the sense of the visible in Emily Dickinson, Robert Duncan, Leslie Scalapino, and Jack Spicer. She has published two prior books of poems, B EAR (Handwritten Press, 2000) and DEBTS AND OBLIGATIONS (O Books, 2008), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. In 2004 she produced Northwest Inhabitation Log, a multimedia installation and opera. Recently, she has lived in Athens, Greece, where some of these poems were written and was resident in Bergen, Norway, with Tom Fisher and their two children, Pascale and Harold.