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Available wherever books are sold.
“Each story in Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s gorgeous new collection is a tour de force in subtlety and indirection. Everyday narratives become profound meditations upon how we process trauma, the indelible imprint of past experience upon the present, and the paradoxically fixed and fluid nature of memory. Philosophical, reflective, and attuned to the human spirit, these powerful tales will win your heart, and then ask you to wonder why.”
—Elizabeth Kadetsky, author of The Memory Eaters
Stories
Publisher: Wiseblood Books
The central motif and conflict that runs through Kilberg Cohen’s collection is that of endings. Some may be monumental endings, such as the end of a relationship in “Bottle of Wine,” or the end of life itself in “Appropriate Behavior.” Then again, some may be considered superficial endings, such as in “The Woman With the Longest Hair,” where a haircut is significant only to the characters involved. In the face of such endings, Garnett’s characters must decide whether they will be ruled by them, or whether, in spite of the ephemeral nature of all things, they will swarm to glory. Nearly all these stories have been previously published in some of the nation’s finest journals—from The Crab Orchard Review to The Michigan Quarterly Review. One of the stories in this collection, “Bad News,” won the Lawrence Foundation Prize for best story to appear in the journal that year.
Read an interview with Garnett in New City about writing Swarm to Glory
“The stories in Swarm to Glory are often suspenseful, always beautifully written, subtle, and witty. They are populated by unique characters who at the same time managed to remind me of people I know. Garnett Kilberg Cohen shows us the world we inhabit with startling clarity, beauty, and memorable strangeness. This collection is the work of a very gifted writer at the apex of her lyrical and psychological powers.”
“Reading a Garnett Kilberg Cohen story is like chatting across a small table with a voluble, smart, sly, warm-hearted friend. A wicked strain of humor fortifies the often vulnerable protagonists, rendering them formidable as well as dear. What they do and what they think is unpredictable and illuminating. Kilberg Cohen’s third book of stories, it is a delight.”
A Collection of Linked Stories
Mayapple Press
How We Move the Air tells the story of musician Jake Doyle’s suicide and how, over time, it affected those who knew him. In seven linked stories, Garnett Kilberg Cohen explores the complex ways in which people choose to remember—or not remember—the past.
“A musician commits suicide ( maybe, maybe not) and astonishment, grief, bemusement, and the refusal to believe create a lively commotion. Garnett Kilberg Cohen is an attentive and sympathetic guide to a candid and less than traumatized collection of family and friends, whose voices she captures with a perfectly tuned ear, and a complex appreciation for conflicting emotions.”
“I have been an admirer of Garnett Cohen’s fiction since reading her first beautifully crafted collection, Lost Women, Banished Souls. In the time since the publication of that book, Cohen’s stories have deservedly won several prizes, and her always artful writing has matured from deep insight into a kind of wisdom that the short story form seems particularly suited to. Her new collection of linked stories is her best work to date.”
“This is a sly book with a mystery at its heart. A husband, brother, father, lover, uncle, friend, killed himself years ago, or was he making a piece of art whose content and consequence were his death? In the end it doesn’t really matter. The living matter, and so we see all the effects of this man’s act rippling through the lives of his intimate decades later, for they are the book’s narrators, a chorus that shows Garnett Kilberg Cohen to be a choirmaster of voice and point of view. Funny, clever, evocative, and heartfelt, How We Move the Air is impossible to put down.”
Stories
University of Missouri Press
In Lost Women, Banished Souls, Garnett Kilberg Cohen captures the voices of a variety of women who share one main characteristic—the sense of loss. Although most of these women are like the ones we see every day without giving much thought to the undercurrents of their lives, Cohen shows us how women who appear ordinary on the surface often live extraordinary private lives. With the activities and relationships of her stories’ characters, Cohen demonstrates how fragile life is, how everyday decisions can change the direction of one’s life, and how much more painful our failures of ourselves can be than our failures to meet others’ expectations.
These stories also explore such social issues as domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, and child-rearing after divorce. Cohen’s language ranges from lyrical evocations of the past to the informal, conversational style of folk tradition.
“Reading these stories is like listening to a sweet, companionable voice, downhomeish, as if one were sharing a swing seat and lemonade on the front porch of a good friend.”
Finishing Line Press
Poetry chapbook
“In language charged with elegance simplicity, and a gripping honesty, Garnett Kilburg Cohen gifts us with poems of overwhelming compassion. Each detail comfort even as it fractures. Here is violence, weariness and lucidity — a matchbox full of disassembled pieces “bellies swollen hard as crystal balls.” The overall effect is of an existence that’s been dismantled and stitched tenderly back together; a chiaroscuro of romantic love, motherhood, survival; power in understatement; fragility below the surface; every conscious woman’s life: beautiful and dear.”
“Kilburg Cohen has documented what is in the looping, and sometimes loopy hearts of teenaged mothers, soured lovers and difficult children with all the vivid pains in desperate choice of family life acknowledged. Full of brave metaphor, twists, and rich, brutal details, Passion Tour describes the world to rarely seen in poetry, but one that we immediately recognize: that of painful choices, of everyday work of womanhood, and of humor and intellect, despite it all. A sometimes jolting, always moving collection; a page turner.”