Sugar

by Andrea Cohen, Unknown Author

About Sugar, David Orr has “Andrea Cohen’s ninth collection is elegantly precise—but this isn’t the precision of a meticulously arranged garden or tidy bookshelf. Rather, Cohen’s nimble, exacting lines are like guide ropes strung up the sides of an icy Her precision manages risk, and the risk leads to startling vistas. An entire relationship dynamic unfolds in the five monosyllables of ‘Proximity’: ‘She died / Of my wounds.’ In ‘Ghosting,’ the ambiguity of departure—the way in which lives and loves sometimes cease without concluding—is captured in all its shades of   ‘Any ghost will / tell you— // the last thing / we mean // to do / is leave you.’ We sometimes think of poems as recreating experience, but Cohen’s work reminds us that poetry, at its most patient and compassionate, is also a way of discerning. Sugar brings us a step closer to the sun; it helps us to orient ourselves, but more than that, it helps us to see.”

103 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 15, 2026

About the author

Andrea Cohen writes and swims in Watertown, MA. Her heroes have swum Venetian canals, the Chattahoochee, and The English Channel. Her poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. Her fourth poetry collection, Furs Not Mine, will be published by Four Way Books. Other collections include Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry 2009), and The Cartographer's Vacation (Owl Creek Press 1999).

She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, the Owl Creek Poetry Prize and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.