|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth Cohen is associate professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Plattsburgh. Her 2003 memoir, The Family on Beartown Road, was a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers pick. Last year, Saint Julian Press released her book Bird Light, poems from the annals of her lifelong affection for birds and bird watching.
|
Praise for THE PATRON SAINT
OF CAULIFLOWER
How to prepare for the end of the world
except by trying to feed the world? In The
Patron Saint of Cauliflower, Elizabeth Cohen gives us poems that nourish
the starving soul, recipes and spells and odes in praise of what sustains us,
even against the gravest odds: food and love and the imagination, itself. She
turns her passion for the physical world –– plant, animal and human –– into
magic, metaphor and music here. The children of Aleppo are eating grass, but
they have also trained themselves, in her reckoning, “to hear the sound of
sunshine/on broken glass.”
––Cecilia
Woloch, author of Earth and Tzigan
Elizabeth Cohen just became one of my
favorite contemporary poets. These poems are fusions of poetic craft and canny
wisdom. I'd say "cunning," but there is nothing elusive about the
poems: they come straight at you. The speaker is so real that you sense how
language can reckon with the present. These poems won't leave you lonely.
On the contrary, you'll feel sustained and inspired long after the poet has
thrown down the mic. I don't think we've had a poet since Roethke who can draw
so effortlessly on her poetic palette, or one since Rilke whose ink feels so
alive on the page. I am grateful to be able to hold in my hands a work of
unsinkable wisdom, spirit, humor and love. In Whitman's words, “All things
please the soul, but these please the soul well.”
––Jerry Mirskin, author of Crepuscular
Non-Driveway and
Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate
be the Sun
Before there was LITERATURE, lyric poems were
charms, spells to make love happen, curse, alter weather, protect children,
heal, provide safe passage into other worlds. The poems in this collection are
potions conveying an old magic, spells that Elizabeth Cohen casts that conjure
beauty in its detail and oddness, in its tragic and joyful embodiments. What are the secret ingredients these poems
contain? Something beyond technical skill, but
including it. Something the reader discovers inside.
––Stuart Bartow,
author of Questions for the Sphinx
and Einstein's Lawn
Fair warning, dear
reader, dear reader with food cravings, with recipes and no one to cook them or
cook for but your own flawed self, with heartbreakingly busy appetites, with a
love for the grains and strains of this world so fierce you're ready to eat
these poems. Fair warning. Elizabeth Cohen's cabbages and figs, cauliflower and
cakes, starvation and salt, will fill your mouth and stir your soul. These poems
will trip on your tongue as you eat them out loud. They'll stick to your heart
like love, like the tremendous love that went into crafting them, like the love
that concocted us all.
––Janet
Kaplan, author of Dreamlife of a
Philanthropist
and Ecotones, forthcoming in 2019
from Eyewear Ltd!
In elegant,
candid, raffish poems (about food but also about everything) Elizabeth Cohen
again shows us how poems can be loci for ardent life. Her unmistakable voice is
confiding and intimate--and her extraordinary charm is to seem offhand and yet,
with invisible art, to have made every line true.
––April
Bernard, author of
Miss Fuller: A Novel and Romanticism: Poems
Elizabeth Cohen’s
latest book of poetry presents a literary feast for the mind and heart. How
wise to interweave the comforts of food (goulash, artichoke, raisinets) into the unnerving state of today’s world. These
poems reveal how our attention to both words and the sustenance we offer
ourselves and loved ones may well be a saving grace. As we wrestle with fears
of an apocalypse, all of us these days need “more than…Beauty” to get by.
That’s not to say these poems aren’t beautiful. They are, with their rich lists
of life’s moments (“a book left out in the rain, heartbreak, snow-caked
walkways”) and a reassurance that even if the world is unravelling, cabbage is
steady.
––Donna
Baier Stein, Writer and Editor – Tiferet
Magazine
Reading Elizabeth Cohen’s, The Patron Saint of Cauliflower, I'm
reminded of Baudelaire's saying that “Any healthy man can go without food for
two days--but not without poetry.” In this collection that celebrates what we
eat from the mundane (the pretzel) to the gourmet (asparagus in fig sauce),
Cohen has served up lines that satisfy the poet and foodie, reminding us how both
arts help us celebrate our humanity. Each of these poems is “a psalm, a
portent, a proof-in-the-pudding” and each rich, flavorful, delicious.
––Gerry
LaFemina, author of The Story of Ash
and Palpable Magic
Elizabeth Cohen’s The Patron
Saint of Cauliflower clamors with the voices of ten thousand mothers passing
their history and knowledge to daughters who, in turn, will share with their
own offspring. These nimble words are “food is love” manifest: “Bathe the
asparagus in beetroot / Bask in the blistered fig . . ..” Cohen’s poems are
rich with allusions not only to the alchemy of cookbooks, but to the alien
magic of apples and other spellbound fruits.
—Bertha
Rogers, poet – Bright Hill Press Founder and Editor
“The world is unraveling,
but the cabbage is steady.” This astonishing statement, as wild as it is
domestic, characterizes the inventive, rollicking feast that is, The Patron Saint of Cauliflower.
Vegetables appear as their true selves, like the humble cabbage revealed as
“the tough orb in its squeaky jacket.” Under Cohen's white-hot gaze, edibles
and non-edibles alike undergo a chemical change that releases their fury and
autonomy—the ubiquitous paper cut “sits/on the throne tip of the thumb/like it
has won/the class award for cruelty,” and an apple startles with its quiet
declaration of resistance: “I am an apple … I am not sin.” These poems
germinate in the realm of women; kitchens and children starving in civil wars,
and they speak to the truth of human desire, rage and loss; the strength to transform
what we are given, into what we want.
—Lynn
McGee, author of Sober Cooking,
Heirloom Bulldog and Bonanza
Elizabeth Cohen's Patron Saint of Cauliflower is matter of
fact and practical: "I am preparing
for the end of the world." Cohen
takes the most ordinary of images and glories in them as signs for trouble and
triumph throughout human existence. And
she does this with the care and attention of a gourmet chef, but this chef is
more like a mother. She feeds us because
we need to eat.
––Jericho
Brown, author of The New Testament
Elizabeth Cohen’s food poems
for the soul pretend nothing away: not the horrors of the current world, not
the fears of a mother for her children, not the sinister forces of greed and
corporatism that infuse even our daily bread. All foods are allowed on her
table, coexisting in relative harmony, but some—like ideas, ideologies—are
healthier than others. Never healthier-than-thou, however, Cohen leaves it to
our palates to judge both tastes and ethics; even her side-glances at the world
of consumer goods that seems to offer so much but gives so little are not
wholly un-seduced. Let yourself be seduced, reader, by this layered food, these
precious leaves, where bitter opens upon sweet, then savory, then spicy, and
the diction’s touch is light even as the imagery is deep: Page through the stained, sticky pages/of the hallowed book,/imagine
the way sweet and mellow/can be conjured from nothing.
––Natania Rosenfeld, author of Wild Domestic
Anthony
Bourdain, move over! Elizabeth Cohen is also a maestro of food, but not food
for the sake of food. In her sizzling collection food, both actual and
metaphoric, is counterbalance to human loss and pain and terror and
premonitions of apocalypse. Like the cabbage, these poems are “Pure muscle that
comes up from the earth.” Today, when our garden appears to be vulnerable to
every species of parasite, we need all the muscle we can manage. The cabbage
abides, and by partaking of Elizabeth Cohen's poetic sustenance, so will we.
––George
Drew, author of Fancy’s Orphan
|
Cover Art: Alexandra Eldridge
|
Publication Date: June 15, 2018.
Paperback: $16.00 ISBN: 978-0-9986404-8-8 Number of Book Pages: 80 For review copies, contact: Ron Starbuck or Elizabeth Cohen To schedule readings, book signings, and book group visits, contact Elizabeth Cohen: Elicoh@aol.com |
|
Press Release with Photo
|
| ||
Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com
SAINT JULIAN PRESS, INC. © 2022
|
|
|
|
Web Hosting by IPOWER
|
|
|
As an Amazon Associate — Saint Julian Press, Inc. may earn funds from any qualifying purchases.
This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.