Tell Me What To Do, by Lynn Glicklich Cohen

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Tell Me What To Do is a visceral and unflinching poetry collection that explores the complexities of familial attachments that both damage and sustain. From a childhood in a mansion where “bruises barely hinted at the depth of harm,” the speaker learned that hunger meant virtue, pain meant love, and solitude meant safety. Now she recounts her adult struggles with eating disorders, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation while finding refuge in the one relationship she trusts: the love of her dogs. Revisiting her upbringing alongside her mother’s decline into dementia and eventual death, the speaker attempts to understand not what happened, but what it made of her. The poems move between past and present without offering resolution or redemption. The speaker examines how early deprivation shaped her adult attempts at control—the years of fasting and restriction, six years of sobriety followed by a return to drinking, the choice to remain “childless by choice, unpartnered by preference.” In unflinching detail, she documents the mundane erosions of a life: mouse infestations, memory care facilities, the “chronic why-am-I-alive hangover” that persists even in sobriety, the careful choreography of sleeping in separate rooms from a lover she cannot fully let in. These poems refuse to separate suffering from privilege, showing instead how wealth could not purchase safety, how a girl could be both overfed and starving. At the heart of the collection is the speaker’s relationship with her dogs—not as symbols of unconditional love, but as the only beings she allows to see her completely, even as she knows they will leave her devastated. Against this guaranteed loss, she measures her own failures: the life she believes she has squandered, the person she fears she has always been. Yet the poems also capture unexpected moments of care—a brother shoveling snow, a sister feeding Great Danes with bare hands, the speaker herself massaging her mother’s head through white hair. By the collection’s end, she has not answered her questions so much as learned to live with them, practicing a hard-won acceptance through small daily practices of feeding birds, sweeping decks, filling the space that is hers to fill. Lynn Glicklich Cohen is a poet, Rolfer and perennial cellist. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poetry has been published in Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Front Range Review, Grand Journal, Oberon, ONE ART, The Midwest Quarterly, The Phoenix, The Red Wheelbarrow, St. Katherine’s Review, Thin Air Magazine, Trampoline, Whistling Shade, and others. She lives in Milwaukee, WI.