Chris O. Cook

Chris O. Cook was dragged up on Long Island, New York, starting in 1978. He received a BA in English from Kenyon College and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s worked as a costume-store stock boy, video-store know-it-all, mall-kiosk polltaker, locker-combination changer, standardized-test grader, and monorail conductor. He’s taught at the University of Iowa, Kirkwood College, Kendall College, North Park University, DePaul University, and Harper College. His work has appeared in Free Radicals: American Poets before Their First Books and The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. He currently lives in Chicago.

Chris O. Cook was honored to be the first poet interviewed by students for the San Francisco Humanities Review's "Writers at Work" series, offering a candid dialogue between students and writers. The interview is available online at http://www.sfhreview.com/waw.

Chris O Cook

$15.00

To Lose & to Pretend

"The challenge of witty poetry is to manage more than just a string of good jokes and keen observations, but by their juxtaposition to create an effect that is greater than the poem's best line. For Cook this must be particularly difficult, since his best lines are really, really good....To Lose & To Pretend is exciting and smart."
- Adam Robinson, reviewing for JMWW

“Chris Cook’s To Lose & To Pretend is evidence of a fine mind at work, a collection of poems that never settles for the obvious. His work probes the apathy and alienation of his generation, wielding poetics like a cudgel to extract the essential from the incoherence of pop culture vapidity that we have accepted as our metaphor. Startlingly honest, unafraid of humor, these poems force you to sit down and take notice.”
- Cheeni Rao

“Chris Cook is a true Original, in that he is a Classic.”
- Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Commandrine and Other Poems and Nylund, the Sarcographer

“The kaleidoscope of could have-would have-should have in Chris Cook’s poetry both dazzles and amazes, taking the reader on a journey into the buzz of pop culture and the silence left in its wake. Anything is possible in these poems, and yet there is an awareness of the limitations of the world, particularly the world that is artificially constructed. With the scope of Ginsberg and the sensibility of the Romantics, Cook’s poems are a place where listening to the rain counts as conversation, and the language eclipses the grating like rising dough.
-Megan Johnson, author of The Waiting, winner of the 2004 Iowa Poetry Prize