‘In July on the California Coast’
— Hannah Cohen
how perfect, to be
destroyed by the thing you were named for.
I’ve come to know Cade’s work for its sharpness–if you haven’t read any of her essays, you are missing out on some rib cage-baring truths and pain. Her poems have narrative, a scene, development like a prose piece, but have their own beauty. The language is especially catastrophic and enveloping with strong ‘d’ sounds: see words “divorced”, “dissected”, and “deep”, which only reinforce the destruction caused by “dark water”.
However, the disasters in this poem aren’t just forces of nature, but rather ourselves. Consider the ending “Be mine / always. Until we’re breathing in the tide.” This poem is proof that we do exist in moments of come-apart and breaking.