Disloyal Yo-Yo

If you were to splice the DNA’s of Walter Mitty and Salvador Dali, or Cuisinart together the collected works of Louis Simpson and Dean Young, you might get the poems of Bruce Cohen. His suburban speakers are often cleaning the garage or steaming off wallpaper in the bedroom, but secretly they are involved in criminal adventures of the imagination, in subtle and hilarious cultural critique, in fantasies of quiet desperation. These are rampages of irony, tenderness and wit, furnished with the verbal wizardry and bravado of a quiet maniac.-This is terrific work from start to finish, by a bright new poetry star in the American sky. –Tony Hoagland Bruce Cohen’s Disloyal Yo-Yo is not a collection of poems so much as it is a full-blown surreal but humane visionary account of what it means to be alive in the 21st century. His imagination sweeps across his experience like the Super Doppler he hopes might hover over our lives to transmit intimate newscasts. And what gets transmitted in Cohen’s poems is not only the intimacy of human relationships but the strange, quirky, unpredictable transformations, a tornado of patio furniture, that refreshes and reinvents our world. –Michael Collier Like the paintings of Rene Magritte, the songs of Tom Waits, and the Coen brothers’ films, Bruce Cohen’s poetry offers observations that are simultaneously razor-sharp recognizable and arrestingly askew. His poems are haunting and hilarious, coolly surreal and stingingly poignant. As the best literature always does, his poems knock me off-balance as they expand my understanding of the absurdities, challenges, and dividends of modern life. Cohen sits at the top of my short list of favorite contemporary poets. —Wally Lamb Bruce Cohen’s poems, which I have known for years, keep coming back to me in some askew way that leads me forward. He is one of the most loving and unpretentious humorous poets I know, and the incisiveness of his craft is always guided by awareness. He means poetry to be quick–bared, vital, bold, original, alive–and he pulls all this off again and again. Finally, a whole collection to begin to do Bruce Cohen’s poetry some justice. –William Olsen