Imminent Disappearance, Impossible Numbers, & Panoramic X-Rays (Green Rose Prize)

Imminent Disappearance, Impossible Numbers, & Panoramic X-Rays (Green Rose Prize)

The speaker of these poems is a man overwhelmed by the multiple lives he must juggle, but he chooses to live as deliberately as possible, inundated with an influx of information and conflicting gravities, trying make sense of it all and seeing the humor and sadness that is around him with a charged clarity that contains both simplicity along with surprising pyrotechnics. "The incessantly multiplying, witty, flummoxed, frivolous, grave, inspired, desperate and serenely exploding chloroplasts of Bruce Cohen's imagination are driven by an awesome hunger for life all of life, every damn bit! So much of our day-to-day and our most intimate feelings and thoughts makes its way into these poems that you begin to feel that Cohen might be the keeper of some vast secret surveillance system. His mission is our mission (whether we know it or not) total acceptance and his wonderful poems come to show us how it might be done, how it might feel." --David Rivard "On the surface, this book tells a 'Saturday morning world' story of Americans playing it (and singing it) cool, our middle-aged speaker-hero doing nothing more mutinous than 'futzing in [his] garden, hoeing hills for Peruvian potatoes.' But simmering below that grocery store world of 'being served lukewarm beige meals with latex gloves' is a beautifully mournful meditation on our 'lives…sandblasted by heartache and disillusionment.' Yes, this book is 'haunted by the knowledge that the mirage is a mirage.' It's also a wise, cynical, hilariously dialectical and contradictory low-grade-fever carnival ride interested in 'the entire scope of suffering.' It starts at Ultra Talk, but is extra downhearted. And jumpier. Sick of how unreal American reality has become but want to take a load off too? This book's for you!" --Adrian Blevins "Would it help to say that Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X-Rays is provocative and thoughtful? That Bruce Cohen has written the book of poems where narrative intensity is rivaled by lyrical flights of desire and loss? Muscular and sensitive, hardworking and ever-turning, the poems in this giant collection speak from need. If you feel at all the condition of being alive, do yourself a favor: read this book." --Matthew Guenette “The incessantly multiplying, witty, flummoxed, frivolous, grave, inspired, desperate and serenely exploding chloroplasts of Bruce Cohen's imagination are driven by an awesome hunger for life all of life, every damn bit! So much of our day-to-day and our most intimate feelings and thoughts makes its way into these poems that you begin to feel that Cohen might be the keeper of some vast secret surveillance system. His mission is our mission (whether we know it or not) total acceptance and his wonderful poems come to show us how it might be done, how it might feel.” (David Rivard) BRUCE COHEN'S poems and non-fiction essays have appeared in over a hundred literary periodicals such as AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review, as well as being featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He has published three volumes of poetry: Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press), which was awarded the 2007 Orphic Poetry Prize, Swerve (Black Lawrence Press), and Placebo Junkies Conspiring with the Half-Asleep (Black Lawrence Press). Another book, No Soap, Radio!, was published in 2015. A recipient of an individual artist grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, prior to joining the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Connecticut in 2012, he directed, developed, and implemented nationally recognized academic enhancement programs at the University of Arizona, The University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Connecticut.