In Collateral Light, Julia Cohen struggles with the simultaneous sameness and impermanence of the self. She renders these themes through short poems (one or two pages) which include a lot of white space and the unusual choice to occasionally use a span of horizontal white space in place of a line break. At times, the poems themselves are full of imagery so disparate that they read as a list of non sequiturs: “Death is the opposite of dying slowly balloon balloon,” ends one section of “I Stared At Your Camera & Promptly Died.” Despite Cohen’s unique choices in imagery, form, and transitions, enough motifs reappear for the reader to better situate the speaker’s crisis: “& I say to my face in the plate’s glaze / This is the only life I have,” Cohen writes.

Stuck inside an intolerable first-person (“I can’t just sit here with feelings,” she writes in “Someday You’ll Be Replaced By Language & Then Nothing At All”), Cohen finds herself exploring masquerade through her relationships with other people and with language. “I put my face / inside your face,” the title poem opens, one of many references to faces. In “I Carry A Basket for the Fingers That Fall,” Cohen writes: “When I fork this light two bodies / blend into the face you held”, signifying the two people sharing a self via occupying the same face. Language also seems to occupy this need for inhabiting another; “It turns / out language / is the other people,” she writes in “We Clamor We Like The Sound Off.”

The central concerns of selfhood are often hidden beneath disjointed and unexpected imagery, which sometimes leads to a wish for greater continuity. Yet, it is simultaneously refreshing to see Cohen engaging with timeless questions of selfhood in a new vernacular.