COG ISSUE 17

COG, ISSUE # 17

About our cover artist: Jorge Palacios spent four years in the Marine Corps. His passion for art drove him to become a tattoo artist and he now works at 831 INK in Monterey, CA. Jorge is also Game Design Art student at Cogswell College and hopes to one day work in the film or the game industry. Jorge's favorite medium has always been graphite and paper. His art can vary at times but mainly focuses on realism, portraits and animals.

For more of his work follow him on Instagram: @Wargod_ink or on LinkedIn

COG's 2019-2020 Poetry Judge Anaïs Duplan

2019'S WINNING
COG POETRY AWARDS POEMS

by Catherine Kyle
CLICK TO READ

This poem ["Triptych"] blows me away. The surety of the voice––its short sentences, its compacted syntax––make the material transformations of “Triptych” all the more powerful. The phrase “hair numen” was enough to make me shoot forward in my chair, to get my face as close to my screen as possible, as if to make sure what I’d just read was really there. Suddenly a simple proposition (that there are clouds in the sky, that it rains) is wonderfully bizarre. So too, the blurred boundaries between the great beast that is the sky, the curled cat, a loaf of bread, a hollow throat, an empty marriage, the loss of trust, and the ineffable nature of being are all presented as next steps in a grand, inevitable, and yet delightfully simple sequence. I admire poets who make language their own, not succumbing to someone else’s diction or voice. “Triptych” was written by a poet who is unafraid of their command over language and uses that command to expose the mystery of life: how does it come about? What is its essential nature? “Still, / I incant,” says the speaker, despite all that is impossible to see and understand. Still, there is reason for poetry.

-Anaïs Duplan