Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
New Orleans Suite
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Sweet Curdle
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"Opulent Copulant: Scenes from the Musical" by Cathryn Cofell

A morning of gigantic, romantic, semantic proportion.
He in crisp shirt, silk tie, and baggy boxers is late
for work. She in wet hair and nylons has not been late
since March 1983 when a bartender named Frank asked
if he could walk her home and did.

She's got a couple of moody eggs. Career eggs.
Not content to lounge about in chiffon robes and satin
undies. Don't read Cosmo. Don't wait for the boys
to visit. These are come and go as they please eggs,
here's-my-card-eggs, don't-cramp-my-style-eggs.

He's got a locker room full of sperm. Big sperm.
Beefy sperm, slapping-each-other-on-the-ass-sperm,
tough as wet laundry. These boys make a good show
of going first, push and shove, tell big lies about
the size of their tails, push and shove without really
going anywhere, take their big fat stinky sweet time.

They've got a date with a body mechanic and his dipstick.
Call him Doctor Fix-it. He's prepped to perform
a lube job, fiddle with the couplings.
He's got her hood up, the sterile gloves on, a tube
of the good stuff poised at room temperature.
This old engine is tight, compact, a four-banger
with no room to move. This'll do ya, he says as he
slides the stick out, as if he isn't already calculating
the price of this scrap, fencing these junked parts.

Sweet Curdle is one of those rarities in contemporary poetry--a book that's virtually impossible to put down, being every bit as mesmerizing as a well-plotted novel. Each poem in this collection compels the reader to flip to the next as you accompany Cofell from one personal but utterly recognizable life experience to another: from the despair of childlessness, for example, to the complex joys and apprehensions of adoption; from love's strained dependencies to its richly realized physical passions; from the gorgeous throwaway recklessness of youth to the careful self-examinations of mid-life. Consistently engaging, Sweet Curdle becomes genuinely irresistible whenever Cofell's subtle wit--always nearby--comes out to play. Don't miss this one

-Marilyn Taylor

The poems in Cathryn Cofell's Sweet Curdle explore the intricate landscapes of motherhood. Cofell doesn't shy away from taboo--the body in all its betrayals and wonders, the darker side of parenting, or the erotic life of a marriage. These poems are primal, corporeal, with a ferocious intelligence informing each. Sweet Curdle is full of astonishing frank and compassionate poetry.

-Denise Duhamel

Finding a distinctive voice in poetry is a rarity, given how so much written seems an imitation of something seen so many times before. Reading Cathryn Cofell's Sweet Curdle, however, reveals immediately the sense of someone without pretense writing about real human concerns, using the art of poetry to engage the reader with her singular and perceptive sensibility. This collection contains poems of intense longing and love, a physical response to the world that is compelling, an offering of poems defined by power and grace, rewarding the reader with transformative glimpses of beauty and necessity.

-Dale Ritterbusch