Witness Before the Fall by Emily Cosper

Witness Before the Fall unfolds in the liminal space between geography and memory, between the lush, sinking streets of New Orleans and the wide landscapes of the American West, between the ache of loss and the fleeting grace of beauty. In this debut collection, Emily Cosper traces the quickening of time that comes with age and the contradictions that rise in its wake. These #poems bear witness to a father’s slow decline, to a fabled American city both magical and heartbreaking, and to the ghosts and ancestors that hover in the periphery. Here, anxiety and wonder walk hand in hand, loss abounds even as gardens bloom, and creativity becomes a succor for sorrow. Witness Before the Fall is a meditation on #aging, #acceptance, and what we choose to hold close as everything else slips away.

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Emily Cosper lives and writes in New Orleans, a city she has called home for over 30 years. She is a Professor of English and an academic dean at a large community college in the city. Originally from the American West, she hopes someday to split her time between New Orleans and Taos.

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In Witness Before the Fall, Emily Cosper notices beauty and the decaying world around her. She ceaselessly examines the passage of time, with poems about New Orleans, the West and personal loss offering wisdom which demonstrates that inevitable passage. The poems here provide generous, often wrenching clarity where “the salt seeps through orange groves” and “the wildfires burn to the west/piney woods and rice paddies turn to ash” through an original and highly accurate point of view, ultimately offering readers quintessential truths as only poetry can.

–Gina Ferrara, author of AMISS

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I will forever treasure this debut collection, one of the most tenderly felt documents of la vie bohème de La Nouvelle-Orléans. With bittersweet, earned wisdom, Cosper says farewell to the “blackout charms” of the lush life, as one “in love with this sinking town” whose “phantom bruises dot the skin like points of interest or a forgotten friend,” but sees “through the fog hanging low across my brain like smoke on the highway.” These are the poems of a Carnival veteran, a Katrina survivor, and a grieving daughter, who has seen the costumes folded, and the scepters put away, leaving her knee-deep in her garden and the rich life that has grown around her many survivals. I’m grateful for these poems.

–Ed Skoog, author of Travelers Leaving for the City