In this beautiful book, Elizabeth Cohen gives us a true and moving portrait of the love and courage of a family. Elizabeth, a member of the “sandwich generation”—people caught in the middle, simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents—is the mother of Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and responsible for both. Hers is the story of a woman’s struggle to keep her family whole, to raise her child in a house of laughter and love, and to keep her father from hiding the house keys in his slippers. In this story full of everyday triumphs, first steps, and elderly confusion, Ava, a baby, finds each new picture, each new word, each new song, something to learn greedily, joyfully. Daddy is a man in his twilight years for whom time moves slowly and lessons are not learned but quietly, frustratingly forgotten. Elizabeth, a suddenly single mother with a career and a mortgage and a hamper of laundry, finds her world spiraling out of control yet full of beauty. Faced with mounting disasters, she chooses to confront life head-on. Written in wonderful prose and imbued with an unquenchable spirit, The House on Beartown Road takes us on a journey through the remarkable landscape that is family.

The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting

Biographies & Memoirs

Cohen, Elizabeth

Community & Culture

Random House]

FROZEN: Through the Eyes of a Child, Triumph Over Abuse is written to enlighten the reader regarding what daily emotional and physical trauma happens to abused children. How can a child survive when her shattered family fails to protect her? How can an abused child believe she is loved? How does the child deal with multiple losses, the betrayals, the lies, the blame that she must endure from the abusers? What words can express the child's conflict when the man who sexually abuses her is her daddy who she is supposed to love? What has happened to that child of abuse, is a deep-rooted feeling of "not being good enough." It's a tremendous insecurity which prevails throughout the child's life. Other symptoms manifest such as a fear of closeness. Abused children often grow up choosing emotionally unavailable partners, repeating the cycle of abuse that is familiar to them. Yet, again it confirms that "Families don't work." Imagine a father on top of his seven or eight year-old daughter (or son) slowly attempting to penetrate his child. It's a horrific image, right? That's exactly what too many children endure and have to learn to cope with from their fathers, step-fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, babysitters, and even mothers. Most of the time, sexual abuse is committed by someone who the child trusts. Children are forced to develop coping strategies to survive the trauma and violation that often haunts them for years, affecting every aspect of their lives. It's very common for survivors to have dissociative amnesia. The brain attempts to bury the traumatic event, preventing the memory out until the person is able to handle the reality of what happened to him or her. Now, however, the Child's Victims Act in New York, allows for child victims of sexual abuse to provide an outlet and legal means for the survivors when they do speak out. Other state laws just say, "Sorry we can't help you. There's a statute of limitations; too much time has gone by. It's too late for you!" Tragically, it seems that, all too often, the laws protect the perpetrators and not the victims. Hopefully, all the US states will adopt NY's Child's Victims Act. In reality, we are only victims if we choose to perceive ourselves as victims! We must not be defined based upon our circumstances or by our family of origin! Only we have the power. We must use our power to define ourselves!

Frozen Through the Eyes of a Child: Triumph Over Abuse

Self-Help

Motivational

BookBaby

'Daddy walks around, dropping pieces of language behind him, the baby following, picking them up. He asks for 'the liquid substance from the spigot'. She asks for 'wawa'. He wants a tissue to wipe his 'blowing device'. She says 'Wipe, Mummy' and points to her runny nose. The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X-On his way out of life, Daddy has passed her the keys.' Soon after her daughter's first birthday, her husband walked out of their rambling old house in the country, leaving Elizabeth to come to terms with his absence and her new role as carer to a growing, demanding child, and a shrinking, demanding father. Elizabeth has no choice but to be the rock at the centre of her new, unusual family. Amidst the chaos of the house on Beartown Road, she discovers a new beauty in being in the middle of two universal stages of life and learning. She watches the growth of her baby Ava, hungrily learning about the world around her, and at the other extreme her father, trying to hold on to the fragments of his memory, fighting a losing battle against forgetting, but despite it all, capable of learning. And she begins to learn about herself, as someone who is strong, courageous and capable of looking after her family. Beautifully written, this book is a homage to the reality of family life.

The House on Beartown Road: Library Edition

Memoirs

Blackstone Pub

Business & Money

Blackstone Audiobooks

A New York Times Notable Book The Family on Beartown Road is Elizabeth Cohen’s true and moving portrait of love and courage. Elizabeth, a member of the “sandwich generation”—those caught in the middle, simultaneously caring for their children and for their aging parents—is the mother of baby Ava and the daughter of Daddy, and responsible for both. In this story full of everyday triumphs, first steps, and an elder’s confusion, Ava finds each new picture, each new word, each new song, something to learn greedily, joyfully. Daddy is a man in his twilight years, for whom time moves slowly and lessons are not learned but quietly, frustratingly forgotten. Elizabeth, a suddenly single mother with a career and a mortgage and a hamperful of laundry, finds her world spiraling out of control. Faced with mounting disasters, she chooses to confront life head-on, and to see the unique beauty in each and every moment. Imbued with an unquenchable spirit, The Family on Beartown Road takes us on a journey through the remarkable landscape that is family.

The Family on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Love and Courage

Parenting & Relationships

Random House Trade Paperbacks

The Culture of Violence presents a broad interdisciplinary approach to the subject of violence as it arises in the media, the lives of children and their families, and in the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman, Ida Applebroog, Mel Chin, Kristin Oppenheim, Lucinda Devlin, Gregory Green, Leon Golub, Richard Misrach and Sue Williams. Organized around thematic categories that traverse class and gender, and that range from political to personal expressions of violence, including terrorism and hate crimes, government-sanctioned execution, youth and gang violence, street crime and domestic violence, The Culture of Violence includes a conversation on violence and culture in medieval epics and contemporary media, and a proscriptive essay on coping with family violence.

The Culture of Violence

Arts & Photography

Green, Gregory

Jenkins, Henry

Canada, Geoffrey

Kruger, Barbara

POSNER, Helaine

Golub, Leon

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix

Diggs, Peggy

Coe, Sue

Applebroog, Ida

Wilson, Marion

CAIN, James

Harper, Sharon

Talley, Michael

Chin, Mel

Harkavy, Donna

Leininger, Michael

B, Beth

Cole, Willie

Davlin, Luninda

Kaplowitz, Jane

McCallum, Bradley

Oppenheim, Kristin

Tisdale, Daniel

History & Criticism

University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Elizabeth Cohen's ambitious newest book of poems, The Patron Saint of Cauliflower, explores both safety and danger; twinning domesticity with apocalyptic fantasies.
In this book of poems that pairs the love and safety of a mother's kitchen with the dark and impending disasters that inhabit our world today, Cohen writes of the “pure muscle” of the cabbage; the “stand-up act” of the artichoke and her love of chocolate (“it’s a cowgirl thing”). Yet the whimsy of food has a darker side here, in which poems parse the despair of places where there is a lack of it and ways we live on a planet that may not, in fact, be able to sustain us and our ways in the long run. “The children of Aleppo are eating grass,” she writes, in her poem “if rabbits had hands,”, which ends the image of their toys, including one doll “missing a leg.”
These powerful poems, which are written in the form of prayers and spells, refrigerator notes and descriptions of imaginary saints, go the distance between love and fear, plenty and deficiency, stopping along the way for a bite of cake or freshly prepared guacamole. They examine the magic and even holiness of food, while preparing the reader for the most desperate sides of our human experience.

The Patron Saint of Cauliflower

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Saint Julian Press, Inc.

Book by Barrett, Valerie, Cohen, Elizabeth

Chocolate Heaven

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Barrett, Valerie

Desserts

World Pubns

Love meets technology with a dash of quirk in this collection of highly original short stories An aspiring actress meets an Icelandic Yak farmer on a matchmaking Web site. An online forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle for an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and an elementary school teacher living in Japan. A deer and a polar bear flirt via Skype. In The Hypothetical Girl a menagerie of characters graze and jockey, play and hook up in the online dating world with mixed and sometimes dark results. Flirting and communicating in chat rooms, through texts, e-mails, and IMs, they grope their way through a virtual maze of potential mates, falling in and out of what they think and hope may be true love. With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird. The Hypothetical Girl captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection.

The Hypothetical Girl: Stories

United States

Other Press

Elizabeth Cohen's Wonder Electric opens in the wonder of domestic spaces where, "in this republic / of tamed energy, you can read / by pointed ghost light," situating us in the idea of home while deftly warning of the forces beyond it. There is both "always a celebration / of violins in D Major happening / somewhere...under the wingspan / of every moment, every day" and there is always a force undoing us. With heartbreaking wryness, Cohen walks readers through an array of mysteries and losses-climate change, the empty nest, suicidal whales, deer season, the mystery of dogs, fierce love for a daughter, a pandemic, loneliness, the loss of those we love. Again and again, Cohen plumbs the empty spaces inside us, counting among her tools for survival, "my bandage of poetry / when night comes flying in, like a thrown knife." Elizabeth Cohen is a poet of tremendous imagination and skill, each poem its own catalog of surprises-this chapbook an utter delight that left me heart-frayed and full. -Kerrin McCadden is the author of American Wake (Black Sparrow Press, 2021)With luminous language and charged imagery, Elizabeth Cohen's Wonder Electric suffuses "the dark heart of the plague," its unemployed and sick, the N-95 mask and warnings from the surgeon general, quarantine and candidates lined up in this, "our open semi-automatic season in America."-Paola Corso, Poet and Author of Vertical BridgesIt's easy to be a prisoner of Elizabeth Cohen's poems. They are full of air and light, of the current crazy and the need to stop and pay attention to the cotidiano (as we call it here in my querida México).-Mark Statman, Poet, Translator, and Author of That Train Again

Wonder Electric

Kelsay Books

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Books by Cohen, Elizabeth