Poet­ry

The Sor­row Apartments

Andrea Cohen
September 18, 2023

About Andrea Cohen’s poems, Chris­t­ian Wiman has said: ​“One is caught off guard by their cumu­la­tive force. This is work of great and sus­tained atten­tion, true intel­li­gence, and soul.” In The Sor­row Apart­ments, Cohen’s eighth col­lec­tion, those sig­na­ture gifts are front and cen­ter, along with sly humor, relent­less econ­o­my, and the hair­pin curves of gut-punch wis­dom. How quick­ly Cohen takes us so far:

Bunker

What would I
think, com­ing

up after
my world

had evap­o­rat­ed?
I’d wish

I were water.


The Sor­row Apart­ments is home to spare and uncan­ny lyri­cism – – as well as leap­ing nar­ra­tives of mys­tery and loss and won­der. These poems race at once into the past and the pos­si­ble. And yet, instead of hold­ing things up to the light for a bet­ter view, Cohen lifts them to the dark and light, as in ​“Aca­pul­co,” where an unlike­ly com­pan­ion points out, ​“as men tend to, / the stars com­pris­ing Orion’s belt — / as if it were the lus­trous sparks and not / the lev­el­ing dark that con­nects us.” For a poet who has been called unfash­ion­able from the get-go, unfash­ion­able nev­er looked so good.

death & mourning
poet­ry

Discussion Questions

The Sor­row Apart­ments is a wit­ty, grim­ly per­sis­tent inves­ti­ga­tion into what it means to be a per­son simul­ta­ne­ous­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the world and say­ing farewell to it, echo­ing the Jew­ish philoso­pher Levinas’s asser­tion that every­one is at once infi­nite­ly unique and hope­less­ly finite. Ani­mat­ed by mor­dant humor and a dis­tinct­ly Jew­ish sen­si­bil­i­ty, this col­lec­tion inter­ro­gates the nature of con­scious­ness, the lin­ear­i­ty of time, the per­ma­nence of loss, and the per­sis­tence of mem­o­ry, nav­i­gat­ing a world of mys­tery and won­der where the self feels both like the pro­tag­o­nist of the sto­ry and an irrel­e­vant bit play­er washed ashore on the periph­ery of a greater nar­ra­tive. ​“I lost my / way — why // did I ever / think it mine?” Cohen asks in ​“Cause and Effect.” Ges­tur­ing toward the idea of an omnipresent, unknow­able high­er pow­er, she asserts in ​“UFOs,” ​“I believe that things / fly, that I don’t know / what they are or what / they might sig­ni­fy / … they seem / like chil­dren about / to ask a ques­tion.” Hand­ed the keys to the hope­less­ly named Sor­row Apart­ments, the speak­er protests that they’re intend­ed for some oth­er Andrea Cohen: ​“there are so many of us, a rab­bi and a rabbi’s wife, a porn star, a mur­der­er.” Through­out, this is a con­tem­po­rary meta­phys­i­cal Jew­ish poet­ry that ​“dwell[s] in the room of questions.”

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