Houston, Texas – August 14, 2024 – Press Release:
Saint Julian Press is proud to announce that Elizabeth Cohen’s new book of poetry, Mermaids of Albuquerque, will be published on November 15, 2024. In Mermaids of Albuquerque, Cohen leaps off a trope of geological time, a past sea in the basin of Albuquerque, and finds there a fresh trough of poetry. These poems come to us flush with magic, with an imagined past, and a love for the city of her origin.
Elizabeth’s poems, her fresh, bold and original voice and evocative imagery, along with her tenderness, allowed me to travel with her to many lands. In the end, Mermaids of Albuquerque transformed me into another version of myself, my heart, a wildflower.
—Amirah Al Wassif
How to Bury a Curious Girl
The world in these poems is the world we all live in but just a little different, just a little odder or brighter or bolder or further afield. I love a book that helps me see the world with marveling eyes.
—Camille T. Dungy
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
Elizabeth Cohen makes the natural and human landscapes of New Mexico her own in these joyful, richly grounded poems. It feels right that a poet of delight in the ordinary—birds and flowers, “diamonds of shiny, invincible sand”—should spring from the ‘Land of Enchantment.’
—Campbell McGrath
Nouns and Verbs
In every poem, we can sense Cohen’s genuine joy for nature and wildlife, for the Chachalaca’s “raucous” song and the dancing honey bees, for the Albuquerque desert, and mourning doves, all congregating to remind us that “the world is just dying / to do better than yesterday.” Read these poems, for they “build an altar / to all things ending, and all things / beginning again.
—Octavio Quintanilla
The Book of Wounded Sparrows
Elizabeth Cohen is a writer who lives in Albuquerque. She is the author of the poetry collections Bird Light, The Patron Saint of Cauliflower, Martini Tattoo, and The Economist’s Daughter, the memoir The Family on Beartown Road, and the short story collection The Hypothetical Girl. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.
A special thank you goes to Santa Fe artist Alexandra Eldridge for allowing us to use an image of her work, "Sea Goddess," a 47x31" photo-based painting, for the front cover. To learn more about her work, read her biography.
Publication Date: November 8, 2024
Paperback: $20.00
Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Language: English
Paperback: 94 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-39-6
