Description
A First Collection By the Winner of the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.
"Brian Cochran's poems are precise clusters of sounds through
which meaning peeks; they are allegories that slip out of that category
as soon as we try to fix them there; they are rivers meeting but not
quite blending; they are hummingbirds bursting through the page; they
are locations and glimpses; they are migrations of thought, sound, and
feelings — 'a thousand voices in the wakened field'; they scrutinize
differences ('Crows are big,, but ravens are enormous, roughly the size
of a red-tailed hawk.'); they move effortlessly from 'ellision' to
'ellison', all while attending to what is and what isn't there and here,
wherever we are in the vastness of our particular geography. They are
poems in prose, words distributed across the page, narrow columns, field
guides, and letters. Through the medium of poetry, the poet channels the
spirits of Jack Spicer, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Julia Alvarez,
Philip Guston, and dreams of werewolves, and yet they are unmistakably
by Brian Cochran. One might say these poems, in all their sensuous
densities, are not for everyone, but I would say that they are just for
you.” —John Yau, Contest Judge
Poetry.
Author Bio
Brian Cochran lives in University City, Missouri, a few miles south of where the Missouri and Mississippi rivers collide. He has received fellowships, residencies, and grants from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Bread Loaf, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell. Brian has an M.F.A. from Washington University, and works as a writer at a small engineering firm in St. Louis.
Author City: SAINT LOUIS, MO USA