Close Apart

CLOSE APART by Robert CowanPublished by Paloma Press ISBN: 978-1-7323025-0-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942360From Donna Masini author of 4:30 Movie (Norton) Close Apart begins on a subway in a community of passengers with a child in distress a city in blackout. Its a generous deeply empathetic book filled with characters stories and a remarkable tenderness--for the suffering and vulnerability of children for the flawed adults they become. A fathers delight in his daughters wacky imagination finds a surprising echo in Cowans brainy sophisticated and witty speaker who can move from quantity theory to all manner of magical thinking and numerical rationalization in his restless questions his attempts to make sense of a chaotic and troubling world.Robert Cowan is a literature professor and dean at the City University of New York. Hes also the author of The Indo- German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies 1765-1885 (Camden House 2010) and Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College (Peter Lang 2018). This is his first collection of poetry.