Irene Cooper
Writer, Creative Facilitator, Enthusiast
even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety
Coming September 2024 | Preorder HERE
Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt for Independent Book Review
GET FOUND NOW FROM YOUR FAVORITE BOOK RETAILER! Or ORDER HERE!
COMMITTAL
a novel by Irene Cooper from Va Press
Cover Design by Brigitte Lewis
—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
SPARE CHANGE, A COLLECTION OF POEMS FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS, Finalist for STAFFORD/HALL AWARD FOR POETRY, Oregon Book Awards
Cover Design Brigitte Lewis
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
