Coffee for Meg Paperback – December 5, 2025

Jonathan Cohen is a natural storyteller with an eye for the lyrical moment: what he calls the “irradiating gleam” that can illuminate a “secret world.” He finds those gleams in diverse places:an empty RV camp in the Adirondacks; a summer wedding interrupted by a fire alarm; memoriesof a relative who played the horses and told the kids about knife fights. He is equallycomfortable ruminating on his own experiences or entering the mind of Sam Melville, a radicalbomber from the 1960s, killed in the uprising at Attica. Alert to the music of the colloquial andthe subtle magic of the everyday, Cohen’s poems are — like the Chet Baker songs he admires —wry, rueful, and enchanting.—Sam Magavern, author, Primo Levi’s Universe, Ovid’s Creek,and Noah’s ArkCoffee for Meg is a luminous collection brimming with lyrical language, vivid imagery, and sharp insight. It is both an elegy to the past and a reflection on the fragility of the present. Cohen’s poems paint a world filled with ghosts and fragments of memory, revealing how the past shapes the present, often in moments we barely notice at the time, when fleeting experiences take on myth-like qualities.—Adele Evershed, author, Turbulence in Small Places, A History of Hand Thrown Walls Read more