Books by Robert Cowan

We live in an era of global anxiety, so it's no surprise that we also seek transcendence of our material circumstances. This book explores the immanence-transcendence problem in works of French, German, Italian, and Russian literature and philosophy, with the aim of helping us navigate our global future.

"At the heart of Rob Cowan's hybrid new book Elsewhen is the void, which functions-in the deadpan tongue-in-cheek tone that animates this collection-as a kind of simultaneous self portrait and ars poetica. Cowan's meditations arise out of an almost jovial irony and despair as the speaker in these poems leaps between raunch and high abstraction, sampling logos, allegory, politics, wordplay, philosophy, and history. These poems destabilize convention as they carry us down unexpected detours, from the Belt Parkway to a collection of bardos and other liminal states." -Catherine Barnett "Robert Cowan's collection Elsewhen is a delight of culture, sharpness and emotions. A patchwork of scenes, places and peoples, a transparency of history and histories, Elsewhen is a refreshing and necessary read, bathed in the warm light of a long-awaited humanistic sunrise." -Sébastien Doubinsky¿"If the poetry of wit were ever to make a comeback in our age of winsome elegy and compulsory subversion, Robert Cowan would be its maestro. Not here the sex and flowers sopping up the poetic page or the "something kinda bad happened to me once" that earned James Tate's contempt. Cowan steps up in his second collection with poems that are fresh and wide-ranging, ever-attentive to the world around him and executed in a quick-stepping idiom he owns. Here you will find poems that vibrate with spot-on observation and natural sophistication that pay readers the compliment of recognizing their own acuity and amplifying their imaginations." -David Rigsbee

CLOSE APART by Robert CowanPublished by Paloma Press ISBN: 978-1-7323025-0-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942360From 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.

Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College is an insightful collection that problematizes the assumptions of instructors and powerfully engages the intersectionality of students, appealing the readers across the educational spectrum.