ANDREA COHEN
Andrea Cohen is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Sorrow Apartments (Four Way Books, 2024). Other collections include Everything, Nightshade, Unfathoming, Furs Not Mine, Kentucky Derby, Long Division, and The Cartographer's Vacation. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several fellowships at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and is currently teaching at Boston University.
In another
life, I’d
want this one.
I was visiting a poetry class at Worcester State University last week, and a couple students asked: What’s the hardest thing about writing poems? And I said: Nothing. Digging ditches is hard. Working in a poultry plant is hard. Being the chicken headed to the poultry plant is hard. Getting to write poems? That’s a pleasure.
March 24, 2024