Trying to Fool Death
Marvin Cohen
Edited by Colin Myers
July 6, 2023
ISBN 9798218191016 / Paperback / 306 pages / $20.99

This book gathers verse and dialogues drawn from Marvin's almost daily emails to a close circle of friends, transforming private correspondence into a sustained meditation on morality, friendship, and loss. Written from the perspective of Cohen's acute awareness of his mortality, the work circles around the living and the dying, memories, friendship, and lost friends. These pieces obsessively work and rework these themes, with a viewpoint varying from joyous to despairing, from the stark to the absurd.

Formally, the book delights in difficulty and play. Cohen embraces conundrums, contradiction, punning, extended lists, and elegant variation. He revels in long, complex titles for both dialogue and poetry, sometimes to the extent that these titles can be read as separate pieces. In his poems, he favors dense rhyme schemes and deliberate half-rhymes. He mostly forgoes meter, but he is happy to burst into verse in his dialogues. The result is a deeply intimate work, which treats language as a constant companion though death.

"In Marvin Cohen one senses the metaphysical thirst, as he questions the notion of reality, as he distorts accepted relationships of time and death, as he approaches dark subjects with the good-natured humour reminiscent of Benjamin Péret, and particularly as he demonstrates his extraordinary power over words and word associations that break down the expected ones."
— Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, 1984