These poems gather up the sensuous fruit, the curiosity and grace of the poet's living.

-Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Poet Laureate, 2016-2017

Writing with indirection, delicacy and deep affection, Cathleen Cohen is an artist who trusts the free hand and the unplanned, the poem's gradual reveal toward what it harbors. In the felt presence of the unspoken, these sensitive, compassionate and soft-spoken poems, their subtle shades glowing many-hued, are suffused with light like the watercolors that are her other medium of finding the world again, the beauty of what's fleeting, the iridescence of things, the energies of what "sparks and disperses."

-Eleanor Wilner

author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017

Sparks and Disperses touches reality and by this actual touching, reveals life in its exquisite brilliance and raw distress. Lines in these poems are delicate and robust; the superb brushwork of a poet whose heart & hand paint what John Keats would recognize as the joining of beauty with the truth of the imagination. Cathleen Cohen's life and poetry are a passionate expression of dedication to everything we need to live whole and meaningful lives.

-John Fox

The Institute for Poetic Medicine