Etching the Ghost

Poet and painter Cathleen Cohen artfully paints a compelling sequence of scenes and portraits encompassing joy freedom violence trauma and the challenge of facing mortality: ones own as well as that of lost or faltering beloveds. In Cohens skillful hands poems become an occasion for questioning - How long will we last / as witness as echo? - and for cherishing what the speaker tries to ... hold then release / into brushstrokes. Cohen vividly depicts a search for healing and wholeness promising If air shatters / into fault lines and shards / I will reach / to collect what flies out / and give voice. Cohens book deftly weaves a multifaceted tapestry of lived experiences through poems that will break your heart and stir your soul. - Dilruba Ahmed author of Bring Now the AngelCathleen Cohen writes of trying to paint this landscape / without myself in it distilling a familiar ideal of aesthetic objectivity of abstraction released from realistic depiction. Yet even as she imagines the line / sketching itself Cohen is sharply aware of a deeper ineradicable subjectivity a jitter a twitch glints and shards / I cant obscure. In poems that anatomize abuse as a knot I cant / unknot Cohen demonstrates how art transforms the devastating into the crucial. Thus cant unknot becomes cant obscure. Thus my stiffening tongue loosens to speak eloquently. I love distortions Cohen writes - and how essential to our human understanding are the supposed distortions of subjective art.- Nathalie F. Anderson author of StainCathleen Cohen picked up a pen. The point ? To tell the truth. She picked up a brush. Two different arts. Two different methods of working but what looks simple is more complex than you might think. As a matter of fact dont think. Feel and know. Some people will avoid the truth by calling it Art. By saying its beautiful. They wont be wrong but they could go for more. Cohen just says it as it is in words and in watercolors. Dont miss her! Dont miss this book.- Fran Quinn---Painters create using the syntax of tone line mass and space. Layering is a key element particularly in watercolors. Images may retreat or surface through layers of paint. Compositions may be clearly mapped or obscured. Such dynamics animate the work of Cathleen Cohen painter and writer.Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County PA. She created the We the Poets project of ArtWell an arts education nonprofit that has served thousands of children. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy.In Etching the Ghost Cohen presents painting as a lens and an instrument a way to view life and make meaning. This collection explores the images that accompany one painter while she makes art teaches and raises family. Violence also speaks through these poems. But painting (like poetry) is also a vessel which can hold trauma as it is absorbed and transformed.