Lifting the Horizon

Shoshana Olidort reviews Andrea Cohen’s “The Sorrow Apartments.”

By Shoshana OlidortAugust 2, 2024

• Poetry

ANDREA COHEN’S The Sorrow Apartments (2024) takes its epigraph from the Russian writer Anton Chekhov: “And I remember the whole of that day vividly, though nothing particular happened.” It’s a fitting opening for a collection in which “nothing particular happens,” a nothing that is also everything—memories, observations, ruminations—rendered vividly, and with Cohen’s delightful, dry humor. The loosely linked poems in The Sorrow Apartments, Cohen’s eighth collection, grapple with, among other things, time—how it moves (often unpredictably) and is also immovable. In “Fox,” the speaker recalls watching her first movie, “The Future playing / on the same screen / as The Past,” in what was nothing more than “a series of stills, / strung together, spilling / out under a trompe l’oeil / night—just another / […] illusion of motion.” Illusion, motion, and the illusion of motion come up again in “Cause and Effect,” which reads, in its entirety: “I lost my / way—why // did I ever / think it mine?” Recalibration, rather than regret, seems to animate many of these poems, a sense, that is, of making sense, of coming to terms with life as it is (“Every pedestal— / a monument / to dust”) rather than imagining how it might have been. “Elegy for Me” begins:

I was what
I loved: lambswool
on the lamb, the glamour
of flesh, memory of
what it is to speak
as evening enters
a room in winter.

Here, enjambment gives form to memories, which are themselves often disjointed and seem to come out of nowhere, with no clear beginning or end. But Cohen has other tricks up her sleeve as well, some of which an inattentive reader might easily miss. The line “what it is to speak” is one such maneuver; omit it and the memory is generic, even trite—to conjure up a scene in which “evening enters / a room in winter” requires no great feat of imagination. It’s much harder to visualize “what it is to speak” in those (or really any) circumstances. What’s being invoked here is the memory not of a particular act of speech but of the very possibility of speech.

Silence reverberates across this collection, in the white spaces that surround and seem to permeate Cohen’s spare lyric poems, in short lines that often end, abruptly, with an em dash, as if to suggest a breakdown in communication. “This is the house / where we did not,” writes Cohen in one poem, and in another: “I dwell in the room // of questions where / you left me.” In “Acapulco,” the speaker learns, through a stranger, about the father she thought she knew: “How gentle, he was,” says the stranger, “How wise. He was the father / I didn’t have.” To which the speaker responds, but only in her own head: “[H]e / was the father I didn’t have either.”

At its heart, The Sorrow Apartments is about taking stock, a kind of soul accounting that, in lesser hands, could easily have veered into sentimentality. “Being / human means having to / remember so much,” writes Cohen in a poem titled “Rhubarb and Garbage.” Does being a poet make it easier to be human, I wonder, easier to remember, or to hold the weight of all that needs remembering? 

In “Something,” the speaker recalls, as a child, “lifting the golden coil / of the kitchen phone to maneuver / under my mother’s conversations,” an act she likens to “lifting / the horizon.” It’s a striking, stirring image, both the description itself—with what we might call its internal metaphor, which captures something of a small child’s sense of wonder, how it can turn a phone cord into a “golden coil”—and the external metaphor, which raises more questions than it answers. What would it mean to lift the horizon? What might one encounter on the other side? 

Cohen is a master of metaphor, even if—or perhaps precisely because—her metaphors don’t always behave as we might expect them to. Rather than concretizing the abstract, something the “golden coil” achieves, a metaphor like “lifting the horizon” does the reverse, imbuing the mundane act of lifting a phone cord—or a “golden coil”—with an abstract quality that elevates it into an almost otherworldly phenomenon. Something similar is at work in “UFOs,” in which the speaker asserts: “I witness objects / I can’t identify except / to say they seem / like children about / to ask a question.” Here, Cohen uses metaphor to draw our attention to and defamiliarize what might otherwise go unnoticed, both by stopping to observe random objects and by comparing them to “children about to ask a question.” If you’ve spent time with children, you’ll know that asking questions is ubiquitous, but what children look like when they’re on the verge of doing so is not at all self-evident. Cohen’s metaphor thus amplifies the mystique of the unidentified flying objects, while also calling on the reader to conjure up the image of a child “about to ask a question.” I envision a child’s face bearing an expression of wonder, or stupefaction, even naivete—wide-eyed, open-mouthed—to match the questions the poem poses in their name: “Does everyone get / their own sky? Is life / really like a bullet / you try to ride, or / more like a buffet”? In addition to metaphor, these lines draw on another kind of language play—juxtaposing bullet and buffet, words that seem, at first, to be utterly unrelated but that bear a striking resemblance to each other when placed in close proximity on the page. Through this artful sleight of hand, Cohen invites us to consider unexpected points of convergence and connection in poetry, as in life. 

“My life was going on / in the next room,” writes Cohen in the opening lines of “Adjacent,” which unfolds in a residential facility where, to return to Chekhov, nothing particular happens, where people play “board games and / Pinochle […] / talking over each other” while “making borscht” and “flowers out of pink / and blue tissue.” The poem concludes by comparing the speaker’s position, listening in on their life from an adjoining room, to the way a “child // warm and dry might / listen to rain.” While the ending seems to bring things full circle—with the child standing in as a metaphor for the elderly speaker—any neat parallelism is undercut by the poem’s final word: rain. Each time I read this poem, I find myself half-expecting it to end differently, by invoking how a “child warm and dry might listen” not to the sound of rain but to parents discussing plans that implicate them but in which they have no say. The effect is an amplification of the sense of disconnect with which the poem begins—only this time it’s the reader who is being held at arm’s length from the world of the poem.

The sense of split consciousness, of being adjacent to but not fully inhabiting a space, or one’s own life, haunts many of the poems in this collection. “I could—with one / stone—kill two birds,” says the speaker in the opening lines of “Stone Age,” before noting that to do so would be to “dwell / alone with a blood- // stained stone,” with “nothing overhead // suggesting a way to fly / outside myself.” The elusiveness of escape is perhaps best evoked by flight, another recurring motif in The Sorrow Apartments, from “Flight Pattern,” whose speaker recalls discovering, as a five-year old, “the head of the wren // by the road,” and finding its wing only much later, at which point “it was impossible / to piece even the idea // of a bird back together”; to “January Rain,” in which an injured bird is found “tucked inside its wing,” so that “flight / is not an option”; to “Freight”: 

What weighs
more—

pound
of feathers

or the memory
of thinking

you might fly?

In “The Truth Comes Out,” Cohen considers another mode of escape by examining the absurdity of the phrase “on my person, / as if my person were / an entity trotting / beside me.” Reading this, I was reminded of a sentence from Christine Smallwood’s 2021 novel The Life of the Mind: “She wished there was someplace she could put her body down for a while, just a little while, before getting back into it.” Indeed, who among us wouldn’t welcome the chance to unburden themselves of their person every now and then?

Cohen’s irreverence shines through in poems like “God,” which is all of three lines, and reads: “I forgive you / for letting / us invent you,” and “State of the Union,” which appears on the facing page and laments an unpredictable turn of events that has left “even the fortune // cookie start- / up shuttered.” The subject of “Springfield” is a man “made of rage and tinted glass” and driven by a loneliness that weaves its way through all the motels in all the Springfields of America, with their “anonymous white walls” and “the bedside Bible and the red pen / tucked inside, as if we might be inspired to / make corrections.”

In the poem “Wrecking Ball,” from Cohen’s previous collection Everything (2021), we learn that a wrecking ball doesn’t need to do anything to wreak havoc on the world; it merely “hang[s] around up // there, and even / the idea of big // sky crumbles.” That sense of ease and effortlessness permeates Cohen’s self-possessed poems, as if they had simply floated, fully formed, onto the page, where they hang around, not like a bedside Bible in a Springfield motel but more like a “child about to ask a question,” as if, by their mere presence, “lifting the horizon.”