Why do some words, some sentences seem impossible to speak aloud? Trapped inside us, unsaid, how is it possible they have such impact on our lives anyway-on our relationships? On our ability to share intimacy and vulnerability with others? Do our unsaid sentences sentence us-to death, to hard time-unless we run? And caught in a race against time, against death, and inevitable endings, could it still be possible, enroute, to create a little space, enough openness, for a bit of love? Folding the essay's form with everyday accumulations-communications with women writers, absent and present, break-up emails, AirBnB reviews, and text-message threads-Freak Lip does more than document, it swells impossible words that ever-press into the point, edging up and down the blade, resisting the urge to burst, but just barely, it lets the blood we want to talk about and the sex we want to have-body forth. Innovative Prose, No. 5 Selected by Katie Jean Shinkle
Julia Cohen is the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. She is the author of three previous books, I Was Not Born (Noemi Press), Collateral Light (Brooklyn Arts Press), and Triggermoon Triggermoon (Black Lawrence Press). Her work appears in journals like the Georgia Review, The Southeast Review, Fugue, and The Bennington Review. She co-curates, with Abby Hagler, a poetry interview series at Tarpaulin Sky Magazine.
Good Timing & Gertrude Stein Freak Lip & The Dancing Ape Geniuses of Love Inappropriate Shock Everything Else Epilogue: Private Joy
"When I read Julia Cohen's Freak Lip I thought a lot about a sentence Adam Phillips wrote, "One goes to psychoanalysis, as one might go to poetry, for better words." Cohen's essays about childhood fears, living in an untamed body, and giving and receiving love unfold like enchanted logic puzzles. They are stories of moving from psychic isolation towards the great big embrace of it all, 'how a sentence can spread across the ocean floor.' Expansive, a little spooky, sopping wet, and surprising. Language, for Cohen, is both a slippery f**khead and the portal through which we can be loved. A portal filled with hearts, foxes, pussies, maggots, memory, and Gertrude Stein. It's a vulnerable book but not because she tells us secrets but because when I read it my own privacy quivered. As Cohen writes, 'The lake sighs for us: the sound of loss we cannot make ourselves.' See? Better words.' -Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors "Freak Lip showcases Julia Cohen's bright mind and generous spirit, in experimental essays that moved me to laughter, tears, and-most frequently-to a sense of utter marvel. Grief inhabits these pages, so too do joy, desire, shame, silliness. Encountering this emotional and intellectual multitude feels like waking up inside a flock of murmurating birds whose individual movements you cannot predict, but whose collective swooping creates an undeniable whole. 'I know this shape,"' you might think, as it swells and shrinks and shadows. 'This shape is like a life.'" -Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons
