My Life on Film

Helen Degen Cohen was an authentic cineaste with an insatiable appetite for film, but especially the films of Fellini, Pasolini, Bresson, Ozu, Godard, Zhang Yimou, Bela Tarr, and Parajanov, all of whose work she celebrates, often ekphrastically, in My Life on Film, a posthumous collection of 53 poems. “My life on film,” she writes, “is everything / that has ever floated through me,” and we witness that parade in this volume that is truly an “insomnia of pictures.” Helen was passionate about art (both viewing it and creating it), but she also treasured life, and her love of life suffuses these beautifully crafted poems about the joy of watching great films. 

—Bill Yarrow, author of The Vig of Love