Cochran, Brian: Translation Zone

Marsh Hawk Press, paperback Publication Date: May 31, 2023 Publisher Marketing: A First Collection By the Winner of the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. This collection of experimental lyric poems, which won the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Book Prize, explores the porosity of borders inside the imagination. Many pieces are prose poems, whose topics include jazz, Thelonious Monk, the great plains, Philip Guston, hummingbird migration, Ciudad Ju-rez, river confluences, Yoko Tawada, and the "translation zones" of language, restlessly moving and commenting on themselves. "Brian Cochran's poems are precise clusters of sounds through which meaning peeks; they are allegories that slip out of that category as soon as we try to fix them there; they are rivers meeting but not quite blending; they are hummingbirds bursting through the page; they are locations and glimpses; they are migrations of thought, sound, and feelings--"a thousand voices in the wakened field"; they scrutinize differences ("Cro