Irene Cooper
Writer, Creative Facilitator, Enthusiast
Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt for Independent Book Review
Winner, North Street Prize, First for Genre Fiction, Winning Writers
Finalist, 2023 Next Generation indie Book Awards
In her new psychological thriller, FOUND, Irene Cooper’s characters encroach upon one another’s territories and disturb the ground. Eleanor is pushed out of her private dark to face the violence others read about, and sometimes, even unwittingly, perpetrate. Like Eleanor, we look for a villain, quietly suspecting trouble is closer than imagined—maybe, if we admit it, within ourselves.
“A gut-wrenching and poignant exploration of trauma, grief, and impossible choices” ~ Independent Book Review
Available now from Atmosphere Press and from wherever books may be ordered.
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COMMITTAL
Poet-Friendly spy-fy by Irene Cooper, from VA Press
—a darkly funny, unlikely buddy story of humans and machines and the earth. It's about dominion over the body, it’s about identity, and it's funny (bears repeating).
Irene Cooper writes with a poet’s ear for language and an empath’s insights into our deepest human needs. Her character, Luci Sykes—abandoned by her mother, lobotomized by her father—is a 21st century Frankenstein, brilliant and determined to end the world. Committal, set in the near future, is by turns surreal and wrenching. ~Beth Alvarado, Jillian in the Borderlands
Cooper’s high-tech debut thriller offers an electrifying premise and a series of wildly imaginative twists. ~ Publishers Weekly
Read a Review of COMMITTAL
Read an Interview with Jessica Caroline for JMWW
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spare change,Finalist for the STAFFORD/HALL AWARD FOR Poetry, Oregon Book Awards
Irene Cooper’s debut poetry collection, spare change, is a book that holds at its center the multiplicities of grief (“permission to speak/to the open wound” of a dead brother, a family fractured by alcoholism, abuses of power, even the routine wonder of raising children) inside language that refuses sentimentality and is, instead, experiential. In a world where honesty is surprising (and figuratively, and sometimes literally, death-defying), here is a writer who insists on the truth, demanding that we attend to the turns, the edges, the possible slippages of individual words. It is work and it is worth it. Take heart in this daring. When I read these poems I feel I am in the presence of presence (“to believe/to loiter”) – which is to say the muck of it: love. ~ TC Tolbert
With spare change, Irene Cooper unravels the layers of grief that accompany death. These poems witness and reflect. They mourn, but rarely do they lean into an expected sentimentality. Instead, there is a tenderness here that allows the past to interrogate a present and a future. The beauty of this book is that there is no one story, and there are several truths. Cooper brilliantly demonstrates the continuum of life, death, and the traces of ourselves we will all leave behind. ~ Malcolm Tariq
Art by Madeline Cooper
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