I Was Not Born

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In this genre-blending collection, Julia Cohen entwines the lyric and the essay with text messages, transcripts of therapy sessions, letters between Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, meditations on Levinas and John Coltrane to document a love story about language, suicide, anxiety, atheism, and finding a way back to feeling. Julia Cohen re-interrogates and reintegrates that ongoing paradox Psyche presents us-figure that refuses to stabilize the ongoing crisis between soul and mind. As of Psyche of old, Eros lurks everywhere, even in absence. But here, resisting the ease of mere allegory, Cohen stitches together differing forms of texts—lyric verse, prose poems bordering on the surreal, brief narratives, excerpts from psychoanalysis—to unfold the agonized reality of a lover's attempted suicide. I WAS NOT BORN opens in the extreme difficulty of relations falling apart; it ends in affirmation that word calls out as a lover calls—be it in sonnet or be it in text mess