Debts and Obligations

Finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Awards.

Alicia Cohen’s poems are divided into mysterious sections that, crossing-over, tie wolf-children or people who are animals other than human to nations as if in-formed in the text’s transpiration as if identity set in terms of law and patriarchy in The Oresteia, nature in relation to humans in Moby Dick, and emptiness of identity in the film, Vertigo. The mystery is not concluded in the sector of mothers, infants, and death. Her poems are writing present unfolding as being an act of grace that’s in unrelated individuals at once.

Alicia Cohen lives in Portland, Oregon. In addition to writing poetry and criticism she has shown work in the visual and performance arts, including a gallery installation and poem-opera entitled Northwest Inhabitation Log. Her first collection of poems, bEAR, was published by Handwritten Press (2000) and Debts and Obligations from O Books (2009) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She has taught literature at Reed College and Portland State University.