Bess Cooley

media release: Bess Cooley’s Florence is an artful and touching collection of poems with piercing meditations on loss, time, and memory. Cooley’s speaker muses about how changes in the body and brain can alter identity, faced with their own body’s vulnerabilities and the difficulty of aiding a grandfather through dementia. Intimately linked with the speaker’s journey, the poems are a stunning portrayal of the wishes, regrets, and intricacies of a mind’s lifetime.

Bess Cooley grew up in Wisconsin, and is the author of the poetry collection Florence (Sundress Publications 2024). She is a winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, American Literary Review, The Journal, and Verse Daily, among other journals. She is co-founding editor of Peatsmoke Journal and teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.