CLOSE APART
by Robert Cowan

Published by Paloma Press
ISBN: 978-1-7323025-0-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942360

From Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie (Norton), Close Apart begins on a subway, in a community of passengers, with a child in distress, a city in blackout. It’s a generous, deeply empathetic book filled with characters, stories and a remarkable tenderness–for the suffering and vulnerability of children, for the flawed adults they become. A father’s delight in his daughter’s wacky imagination finds a surprising echo in Cowan’s brainy, sophisticated and witty speaker who can move from quantity theory to all manner of magical thinking and numerical rationalization in his restless questions, his attempts to make sense of a chaotic and troubling world.

Robert Cowan is a literature professor and dean at the City University of New York. He’s also the author of The Indo- German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Camden House, 2010) and Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College (Peter Lang, 2018). This is his first collection of poetry.