Triggermoon Triggermoon

by Julia Cohen

In a world that is both intensely biological (conscious of the nervous system, worms, owl excrement) and intensely mechanical (halogen lights, towers, helmets) there is a surprising amount of room for imagination and magic. Julia Cohen uses that space very well.

Genres: Poetry

55 pages, Paperback

First published July 20, 2010

Reviews

[Black Lawrence Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many ways can we touch, be warm? And how can we de-center the very place where we stand? Julia Cohen’s first full-length collection,Triggermoon Triggermoon, attempts to answer these questions in lyric poems that mix autobiographical memories with paratactic & de-gendered voices. Arresting and unsettling, Cohen’s poems speak in breathless wonder & youthful exuberance, yet are grounded in mature concern for the "generation that hasn't happened." They extend beyond the individual speech act, making more meaning than any solitary voice could tell. Triggermoon Triggermoon is a lyric disrobing, not of personal narrative or story, but of how to let go of one rung while jumping for the other.

Praise

The poetics enacted in Triggermoon Triggermoon is rare in its exuberance and delicate humanity, its wistful acceptance of imperfection as the human condition, imperfection as a kind of pet we grow to love and depend upon. I have grown to love and depend upon this book.
—Bin Ramke

Julia Cohen’s poems will knock you out with their fresh logics like some moon-governed dream. Echoes echo, moons moon, the animate world amazes repeatedly with its agile turns of meaning and sound. With its two-headed kitten, its insurgent billy goats, its capillary action, this collection is half in the world and half in the “non-world” that “occasionally rolls over you,” utterly grounded in the domestic and wildly transformative.
—Elizabeth Willis

[Mike Kavanagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

To read Juila Cohen's Triggermoon Triggermoon is to stare at the sun. You are fascinated and continue to look, but prolonged exposure numbs you and it is best appreciated in short sprints. The stream of consciousness in the writing makes the mind wander, so I found it best to focus on a singular theme and watching for it like bright orange flags guiding me through a strange forest.
The theme I encountered was one of infinite's. Infinitely existing or infinitely void, both ideas reared their heads throughout the collection. Cohen tweaks a tired exercise to soothe anger, an exercise that requires you to count backwards from ten to clear your mind and become rational. Cohen's version however is "We will let our anger cool by counting backwards from the millionth / decimal of pi" (17). Tweaking such a simple idea to include a seemingly never ending process clues the reader into bubbling aggression that despite effort simply wont go away. The status of a human relationship isn't very clear, but with another line displaying continual grief, readers are again clued into a relationship that shows as much admiration as there is confrontation. Despite anger management techniques, the line "I'll widow, I'll always have a body to mourn" (24) conveys a feeling of eternal grief for the passing of this person. The human condition to move on from a death and accept it as nature is not acceptable in this line, and the person will see beyond a gravestone and remember the body in the coffin buried below.
On the opposite side of forever though, there is eternal nothing. In the poem "I Count Between the Seconds to Find Your Head Does Not Rest the Pillow", there is a feeling of loss, of a death close to the narrators heart. And despite earlier quotes explaining constant grieving, there is a feeling of closure by not committing to an ending. By Cohen saying "I cannot finish this poem for you" (26), she has allowed closure to come in the form of not being able to properly express grief. The rest of the poem shows a person who is looking for that who is lost, and by saying they can no longer go one with the poem, they walk away from the situation. Perhaps a phantom line after the quoted line would be "So you must finish it yourself". The narrator is worn out from the passing, and needs help from the other side, a reciprocation of grief that will never come. Leaving the poem open, but walking away from the table is a beautiful way to handle sadness. On the same melancholy note, there is a line is "The Kite" that stands out as an example of trying to defeat infinite darkness. "A darkness the candle could not encounter" (62), makes the reader wonder what or who the candle is, and what the darkness represents.
With a title like "The Kite", the imagery of a kite and a candle go together well. One rises above, with seemingly invisible force, and the second fights off the scarey unknown of dark surroundings. But the darkness in this poem is never ending, one that a candle can not combat and one that is too deep ever for a playful kite to overcome. By showing no gray area, the reader is forced to cope with a situation that simply will always exist within the pages of this book. Other images that stood out but didn't fit the bill were the ideas of cutting grass and beards (mentions of beards see many more mentions throughout the collection, actually). There are uniquely continual, but not without a lifespan. In the poem "Not the Grasses", both things are mentioned and they seem to go hand in hand. Trimming, primping and continual maintenance throughout a lifetime. Too bad they don't fit into the ideal of "forever" as both cease to exist once the soil (or pores) they live in dry up and loose their ability to sustain.

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Imagine this perfectly windy day. There is a kite, the most perfect kite. And we are on a perfect grassy slope, looking down a clean run, a lack of trees as a runway. We want to burst, kite string in hand, wind lifting those wings and its hollow bones. But the string beneath our kite, it has birthed itself a tangle of white, an unspooled ream of loops. The wind will not last and the mass of string seems a doable challenge, so we drop to your knees, to the lawn, and begin feeding lines through lines..."

Read the full review at PANK: http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/...

[Donald Armfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is an imaginative world of the poets autobiographical memories spun out of logical moments or torn from dreamscapes that sometimes echo under the stars.

Favorites:
-Lopsided Longing for Spoons Buried in the Backyard
-Sleep Disemboweled in This Forest
-I Consolidate January to Mean One of Two Stamps
-I Count Between the Seconds to Find Your Head Does Not Rest the Pillow
-Comb the Chrysalis from your Beard to Fasten the Milkweed
-No Bravery in the Night Room

[Joe]

A friend described books of poems like this as “starry-eyed. It’s a good description but only to a point. Many of the poems here mix the adult and the childish, the weathered and the diminutive. Here, the first lines of the book from the poem “There Was a Bridge of Tattered Rugs”:

I’ve cut the rope-swing, carved scars in a tree
I’ve taken a glass bottle & shingled its sides
I’ve taken some velvet leg & tossed it in the gully of my bed
I’ve wasted quilt

A nightgown soaked in milk
The bassinet sleeping in the greenhouse
A boat-shaped spider crabbing the high corner
What have I done to this world

It’s not that these are starry-eyed but that they are reflecting on a starry-eyed time and its objects, exploring the limits of how much we can enchant or re-enchant the world. There's a lot at stake in this, giving the poems here the kind of fierce punch that neo-surrealist-museum-of-fun-weird-stuff poems can lack. One of my favorite endings, from “I Count Between the Seconds to Find Your Head Does Not Rest the Pillow:

In a place I cannot reach you, noon is only a closet of babyteeth
A wall covered in animal heads, glass eyes, mismatched fur
A dictionary of guesses waxed over & left to burn

And so your arm is no longer the pillow
I cannot finish this poem for you

Exactly the book I needed mid-semester, something I could take one poem at a time, that delivered more often than not.