What Happened at Dinner, and After

!n these finely-wrought poems of longing and laughter, love and loss, the heart regards its seasons. Employing a reporter's keen eye and ear, Cooper enlivens his narratives of person and place with layers of telling detail-a beloved's final days spent struggling to remain close, a neighbor's wry musings on life and livestock, childhood memories that confuse, comfort or enlighten-rendering them each extraordinary yet strangely familiar. In an affectionate ode to his river town, a mist "silently sets its palm on the Delaware at dawn." In the final poem, a woman in an adjacent car at a traffic light reminds for a moment of a person once dear. "Then red became green and ... she left me the gift of watching her drive away." For these and other lingering images, I keep returning to the pleasures of this wise collection.
~~Juditha Dowd, author of Mango in Winter

These poems of love and laundry, bread and moonlight, illuminate the wonders of daily experience and human connection. Each poem invites the reader into Cooper's kitchen where he has prepared a exquisite meal and set the table for two. Pull up a chair and dig in!
~~John Smith, author of Even That Indigo

I love Warren Cooper's poems, their unsparing precision, the details of common lives risen to something of a prayer. Such worship of the ordinary, I am always in awe.
~~Skye Van Saun, Geraldine Dodge Foundation Poet and Director of the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival