Translation Zone

"'Brian Cochran's poems are precise clusters of sounds through which meaning peeks; they are allegories that slip out of that category as soon as we try to fix them there; they are rivers meeting but not quite blending; they are hummingbirds bursting through the page; they are locations and glimpses; they are migrations of thought, sound, and feelings - 'a thousand voices in the wakened field'; they scrutinize differences ('Crows are big, but ravens are enormous, roughly the size of a red-tailed hawk.'); they move effortlessly from 'ellision' to 'ellison', all while attending to what is and what isn't there and here, wherever we are in the vastness of our particular geography. They are poems in prose, words distributed across the page, narrow columns, field guides, and letters. Through the medium of poetry, the poet channels the spirits of Jack Spicer, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Julia Alvarez, Philip Guston, and dreams of werewolves, and yet they are unmistakably by Brian Cochran. One might say these poems, in all their sensuous densities, are not for everyone, but I would say that they are just for you.'--John Yau, Contest Judge"--