About Sugar, David Orr has said: “Andrea Cohen’s ninth collection is elegantly precise—but this isn’t the precision of a meticulously arranged garden or tidy bookshelf. Rather, Cohen’s nimble, exacting lines are like guide ropes strung up the sides of an icy mountain: Her precision manages risk, and the risk leads to startling vistas. An entire relationship dynamic unfolds in the five monosyllables of ‘Proximity’: ‘She died / Of my wounds.’ In ‘Ghosting,’ the ambiguity of departure—the way in which lives and loves sometimes cease without concluding—is captured in all its shades of gray:  ‘Any ghost will / tell you— // the last thing / we mean // to do / is leave you.’ We sometimes think of poems as recreating experience, but Cohen’s work reminds us that poetry, at its most patient and compassionate, is also a way of discerning. Sugar brings us a step closer to the sun; it helps us to orient ourselves, but more than that, it helps us to see.”

Andrea Cohen's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including Sugar, The Sorrow Apartments, Everything, Nightshade, Unfathoming, Furs Not Mine, Kentucky Derby, Long Division, and The Cartographer's Vacation. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several residencies at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.