https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/work daily 1.0 2026-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497926406809-H01DS2VNAP8TP6XWGVBH/CohenCoverFINALNov102014.png Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497926825546-CGMVEH6UH59PKHW69B8X/Julia-Jules-Cohen-Collateral-Light.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497927071373-5JQPN9P57AWHZAL61UUQ/Cohen-J-Cover-with-Black-Border-250x388.jpg Books https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1787766410855-PYAOGRR26F3XL6E3E7CT/cover.png Books Why are some sentences impossible to speak aloud? When they become snared inside us, unsaid, how do they have such an impact on our relationships with others—and with ourselves? In Freak Lip, these sentences often relate to firsts: first period, first serious medical diagnosis, first sexual experience, first love. Cohen explores the often-isolating divide between what we easily express to ourselves internally and what’s unbearable to articulate to another person. Finally expelling Cohen’s own long-kept secret sentences in lyric essays that pair critical thought with everyday accumulations—dialogues with literary voices like Gertrude Stein, break-up emails, AirBnB reviews, and text-message threads—Freak Lip does more than document how the act of withholding jeopardizes our connection to others and ourselves. Refusing shame, it spills forth all that’s unspeakable—our blood, our sex, our bodies, our truths. When I read Julia Cohen’s Freak Lip I thought a lot about a sentence Adam Phillips wrote, “One goes to psychoanalysis, as one might go to poetry, for better words.” Cohen’s essays about childhood fears, living in an untamed body, and giving and receiving love unfold like enchanted logic puzzles. They are stories of moving from psychic isolation towards the great big embrace of it all, “how a sentence can spread across the ocean floor.” Expansive, a little spooky, sopping wet, and surprising. Language, for Cohen, is both a slippery f**khead and the portal through which we can be loved. A portal filled with hearts, foxes, pussies, maggots, memory, and Gertrude Stein. It’s a vulnerable book but not because she tells us secrets but because when I read it my own privacy quivered. As Cohen writes, “The lake sighs for us: the sound of loss we cannot make ourselves.” See? Better words. —Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors Freak Lip showcases Julia Cohen’s bright mind and generous spirit, in experimental essays that moved me to laughter, tears, and—most frequently—to a sense of utter marvel. Grief inhabits these pages, so too do joy, desire, shame, silliness. Encountering this emotional and intellectual multitude feels like waking up inside a flock of murmurating birds whose individual movements you cannot predict, but whose collective swooping creates an undeniable whole. “I know this shape,” you might think, as it swells and shrinks and shadows. “This shape is like a life.” —Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/chapbooks daily 0.75 2017-06-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497975294901-SFOXJ6PP9ZG08FYIJFGL/trouble_1024x1024.png CHAPBOOKS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497975616392-T3E75QUPUTGOXTQKNSMS/m_j3.jpg CHAPBOOKS https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497975709784-K0YVNG9CP1TRD97LTD3L/aa_b7c84828-e418-43bb-940f-719da9fbba73_1024x1024.jpg CHAPBOOKS https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/recent-work daily 0.75 2020-05-20 https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/about daily 0.75 2020-05-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594889852cba5e4f52a4fed4/1497973969104-M7B9WNLV64COCRIFTC7A/image-asset.jpeg About https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/reviews daily 0.75 2020-01-06 https://www.juliacohenwriter.com/new-page daily 0.75 2017-06-20