Description
The Town of Insomniacs
***WINNER OF THE STARTING GATE AWARD***
by Rosetta Marantz Cohen
$14.99, paper
978-1-63534-802-6
2018
Rosetta Marantz Cohen is Myra M. Sampson Professor of Education and Faculty Director of the Lewis Global Studies Center at Smith College. She received a BA in English from Yale University, an MFA from Columbia University and an Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia. Her previous chapbook (Domestic Scenes) was chosen my Maxine Kumin as winner of the Poets of the Foothills International Chapbook Competition. She is the author of five books on educational history and policy, including most recently, The Work and Lives of Teachers: A Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She lives in Northampton, MA with her husband, Sam Scheer.
ES –
Cohen is a post-modern formalist, giving shape to feeling and to mood through her supreme command of rhythm and meter. Like the suburban home on the collection’s cover, each poem in this collection registers as a piece good architecture along the axes of function, structure, and beauty. The poems are functional insofar as they supply a dwelling-place for deep meaning. As razor-sharp assemblages, they are structurally sound. And, most importantly, the works are exquisite: haunting and deeply mysterious. I plan to teach “Word Problems” to my undergraduates. A necessary read.