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Paul-Henry Campbell on the poem "Homage" in Volltext (Nr. 4/2023), Austrian literary magazine (Austria, December 2023):

In this poem, biography plays a haunting role: "the father in the son, that every death encourages" takes a stand on something that perhaps all the world's religions struggle with in their own way and that Shakespeare called "The chain of being." As this poem delicately expresses, it is about the insight that only patience, long patience with becoming, can give. Translated from the Spanish by Luisa Donnerberg, in this poem by Tomás Cohen we contemplate in awe what is gone and yet remains, what is closed and yet lies open before us in its muteness. This homage opens with an astonishment at our own carelessness: "late and celebrated / I would now be by your bedside." As if, in the impetuosity and drunkenness of celebration, one had neglected to stand beside those who are the origin and provenance; as if one had overlooked the chain from ancestors to the after-born, because the impatient soul was intoxicated, because it had to be intoxicated with the celebration of life.

Read the full review here: https://volltext.net/produkt/volltext-4-2023/

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Blurb of the book by the publishing house (Chile, December 2019):

This tree of intimate light has roots in childhood invoked as a key to the present; its branches, laden with the death of loved ones, sound with the "dioma / entrañable que te extraña, extranjero, pródigo”". In this book by Tomás Cohen the house menstruates, one can choose mother and be grandmother's father; his poems are populated by insects, fossils and composers. From Buddhism Cohen enters into communion with nature, evokes his native Pelluhue and his years in Kathmandu. His nomadic vignettes pass through Helsinki, Bach's organ in St. Katherin and an accident in Hamburg. Exposed to police repression, he questions "la injusticia encarnada en uno" and asks "muéstrame / lo peor que hayas hecho / para allí hermanarnos" in his Prologue at the end, which invites us to reread from the beginning.

Read the complete note here: https://bastante.cl/producto/un-arbol-de-luz-intimatomas-cohen/?currency=CLP

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Review of Un árbol de luz íntima by Leonardo Sanhueza in the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, Chile (January 6, 2020):

Like the tree of the title, the volume branches in several directions, from the trunk of childhood to the family. [...] The constant travels that occur in Cohen's book, from Chile to Germany, Finland and Nepal, share a vision strongly influenced by Buddhism. [...] The spiritual quest [...] of the poems thus clings to essential questions and dares to explore the possibility of communication between people and beings.

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Review by Juan Rodríguez of Un árbol de luz íntima (in dialogue with a book by Edgardo Cozarinsky). Edgardo Cozarinsky) in the online literary magazine Saposcat (Chile, 2020):

..in these poems there are children and adults, children, parents and grandparents; although the voice is always that of a child, even if it is that of the adult who was a child: "I portray from memory a child / of those in love with the old / the child I was, with millions of years in my hands."
What is a child? It is a person, or at least a human being; it is someone who is going to die. It is an uncertainty ("howling away also a flock / like shattered shadow, like dice thrown / until reaching the next generation," Cohen says), it is a body coming out of a body. A child is something we will cease to be, or not, when it is written: "and babbled, narrating Lazarus".
What does the poet -Cohen- open when he says he opens something that is like an old mahogany box, a box, he says, "without cigars / but always with fresh fragrance". Is it memory, is it the book we read, is it a box with photos?
Is it all the ghosts of childhood? "To go away like this, through dirt courts buried in pavement / checking the discharge of the bell / successful in my skin still - so to go away / kidnapped by my punctual ghosts / my childish anxieties and cries...", Cohen writes. They seem in fact, those anxieties and cries, the ghosts of an adult. Childhood, perhaps, is the fantasy world of adults; a way of seeing and speaking to oneself. Memory, let us remember, is imagination: "Come my child / to accompany his adult / (who is not his father, but his grave) / and give him the affection / that a prisoner gives to his bars".
A child, yes, is a body and it is not a body, it is something that will die: it is a possibility that will become real; and that in the meantime is remembered and reminds us. A philosopher said "friends, there are no friends"; we might ask, reading Cohen: children, are there no children?

Read the full review here: http://saposcat.cl/cuerpos-y-fantasmas-notas-al-margen-de-dos-poetas-juan-rodriguez-m/

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Review by Pascual Brodsky of Un árbol de luz íntima in Revista Lecturas (Chile, July 28, 2020):

Un árbol de luz íntima took me to a stream that runs through Gabriela Mistral's poetry, crossed by ocotes, poppies, traros, coyotes and pumas, and at the same time by angels, sphinxes, mystical bodies that disassociate themselves on the roads. Tomas Cohen slurps and opens other grooves to this slope, bordered by an intimacy with creatures, plants and minerals, with the need to sustain a pulse without justification; and on the other hand, the almost alien strangeness of being here only in passing.
[...] the writing of this book wants to detach itself from its "I", to make room for the beings and places that surround and sustain it. That is why he also refers to the residential Neruda, in which the verses are entangled and agglutinated as an echo of the world, the words extend their contours, they become like a region of experience that crosses time and appearance, but without tearing them from their secret. In a poem dedicated to "the dead mentor", the disconcerted voice rumbles before the separation with the other, and the body and its image alone are perceived as a hindrance, a kind of casing that one wishes to break.

Before the window of the coffin, the image of the other is not enough, it is his silence that seems to tear the one who is left alive, the impossible rhythm in the "cracked membrane of a drum". And in the end, it is the isolated and personal reflection in the window that one wants to disprove with touch and breath. It is the return to the bodies as sediments of time that these poems will insist on, indicated in the journey "from the eardrum to the shell", in which the ear is also preferred to the eye as the poetic organ. Remembering in the word what in it persists as a moan, the speaker discovers himself as an animal, and the poem as a tissue and creature.
Nor is it a light that illuminates in order to know. The song "secretly changes" the listener, perhaps in the double sense that "the procession goes inside"; and that the song points to something that persists elusive to words, and that is why it is a song that wants to be free of any imposition to "be clear", to communicate completely, to discover or confess itself.

Read the full review here: http://www.revistalecturas.cl/cancion-de-hoguera-partir-de-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-de-tomas-cohen-por-pascual-brodsky/

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Review by Matías Celedón on Un árbol de luz íntima in Vallejo y Co. (Peru, June 21, 2020):

...this Tree of intimate light [...], dedicated by the author to his parents and grandparents, in that order, sowing a sense of reading: from the beginning, the poet advances towards his roots, or if you will, he buries himself by going into the depths.

The image of a wooden box that opens, present in the form of coffins and in the thresholds suggested by the title that gathers the first of the four series of poems ("Goznes"), transmutes the leaves of the tree into pages containing doors and windows through which Cohen peeks out various faces, hunting insects or caressing fossils. The hinge is the hinge, a piece of hinged hardware with which the leaves of the doors and windows are attached to the hinge. These first pages of poems open like luminous passages, but of forbidden transit.
Cohen imagines the world he contemplates. He approaches inspiration like someone searching for a river. He observes by listening, he distinguishes the materials by their sounds. [Cohen works with the classical in a deliberate way, as a gesture of subversion to the empty rupture with the tradition of certain contemporary aesthetics. In the poem "No insectarium", he gathers in a transparent point of time his own natural history museum, where bugs climb up the bark and survive among the roots. There are in the miniature and in the delicate insects that inhabit this Tree..., images that crisp, words sensitive to touch.

In this book, Tomás Cohen invokes the voices that have moved his attentive and privileged listening in the middle of his journey. Let us toast to his roots under the luminous canopy of this growing tree.

Read the full review here: http://www.vallejoandcompany.com/sobre-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-2019-de-tomas-cohen/

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Tes Nehuén's review of Un árbol de luz íntima in the online poetry portal Poemas del Alma (June 16, 2020):

"Un árbol de luz íntima" by Tomás Cohen is a collection of poems of inner inquiry about childhood and the imprint that the experiences of the past have on the present. But it is written not from the contrition or the regret of what was lost, but from the resignation of the brevity of life and the desire to see beyond what we touch.

On this path of spiritual restlessness, the poet stumbles, and I say well, because this is a distinctive feature of the book, the way in which things appear. As we read, we can notice that the certainty of the voice fades and he seems to hesitate as he goes from one subject to the next, as if he were facing a path that has not been measured in advance. As if the only possible conviction were that of the journey, but the destination is absolutely unknown. And that is why, I say, the poet stumbles over things, names them, remembers them, and continues on his way, without stopping too long. Because what he really wants is to put together a kind of album, like Blake's so childish and so gloomy, that will allow him to reconstruct his identity.

Although there is a melancholy that hovers over the whole book, and leads to the idea that each day may be the last, each visit as the last farewell, as he says in one of the poems, this is not the feeling that prevails, rather it is a kind of detachment, bordering on coldness in certain fragments. And in that sense I have perceived that strangeness that foreignness brings and that gives so much pulse to the work of certain poets. How to write a book with forceful tributes to family members who have been left behind, either because death has imposed this distance, or because the writer's own foreignness has done it, without falling into the feeling of melancholy that always tinges this kind of poems. This seems to be one of the primary searches of this book.

This is a book that works with memory as a great net, where there are prismatic reflections, where the things that were are transformed according to the new look, where houses always lead to other houses, and within all of them there is room for a different world. This can also be read as a nod to the work of Blake, who gave so much importance to the universe, who fought so hard through his art to recognize other possible forms of life and language. And the identity of this collection of poems also seems to lie in this endeavor.

At this point we would have to point out that the way in which the poems are constructed is more electric. The poems are like sparks that explain situations, experiences, emotions of the past, but as I said, without dwelling too much on them. Images that overlap, until they constitute that album that allows the poet to have before his eyes a record of the subterfuge links that are interwoven in the various stages of life.

...structural symmetry, one of the most outstanding features of this book, announces the solid search of a well-formed poet.

Read the full review here: https://www.poemas-del-alma.com/blog/especiales/arbol-intima-tomas-cohen

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Greek translator Ati Solerti on Un árbol de luz íntima in the literature journal Vaxikon (Athens, 2020):

Tomas Cohen's new book entitled A Tree of Intimate Light is a journey for the mind that from the root of memory rises to the sky that nourishes it with emotions and the mirages it encounters. Cohen's writing enriches the idea of memory with metaphors about the loved ones we carry within, proposing an exchange of the roles they can play in our lives.

Read the full review here: www.vakxikon.gr/cohen-dentro/

Endorsement notes to the book, published by the publisher (January 2016):

In Redoble del ronroneo, Tomás Cohen debuts with an unusual mastery of alliteration. His is true lyrical poetry, and his sometimes dazzling verse is sustained with brains and emotion. Vivid imagery and resolved difficulty abound here, and invokes the best of the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra I and II. In addition, Redoble del ronroneo entertains without distraction - by no means secondary. This is an important first book.

- Armando Uribe

It is very rare to see how a poet immersed in his tradition discovers which are the lines that have not been exhausted in it and continues them, and this is precisely what happens in Redoble del ronroneo. I have been very pleasantly impressed by the way in which Neruda is 'used' to produce a text that is installed in what seems to be an 'abandoned' tradition of poetry in Spanish and that Tomás Cohen revitalizes very opportunely. I really enjoyed his poems, and I am happy to think that I will continue to read him for a long time to come.

- Patricio Pron

Although it may not seem so, Redoble del ronroneo is a book of love. Its passion is, however, paradoxical, since its object of desire is its own music - with rhythm in its roots. Undiminished by the echo of already consecrated voices, this debut manages to create a speech of its own and, dare I say it, unmistakable. The beauty of the difficult finds in the poetry of Tomás Cohen one of its best examples.

- Cristián Gómez Olivares

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Review to the publication of a selection of poems from Redoble del ronroneo translated into German in the magazine Edit Nr. 71, by Timo Brandt (in FixPoetry, German online literature magazine, 2017):

Tomás Cohen's poems (translated by Monika Rinck) make music with large and minimal objects, distinctive to the touch, to be felt with body and mind. In addition to paper and ink, one could have added the cautionary note that these texts "may contain traces of interiority," which would still be too little to say, for interiority is the main constituent here, whether one realizes it at the outset or not. It is precisely through the wide variety of the poems, ranging from song to the perception of an isolated "I", that the central motif is the spiritual, transcending all lines of embellishment. Cohen likes to circumnavigate the idea of a poem with illuminated analogical structures; he is a very subtle poet who, at the same time, does not hesitate to redirect our walk with word choices that take us to an unexpected place. Reading his texts is a harmonious and balanced poetic experience.

Read the full review here: https://www.fixpoetry.com/

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Note by Greek translator Ati Solerti on the poem "Andarivel (Postlude)" from A Tree of Intimate Light in the literature journal Vaxikon (Greece, 2017):

Tomas Cohen's writing knows how to listen to the extremes, the thin lines that distance and connect opposites in equilibrium on the infinite bridge of the universe. His gaze knows where to go to decipher every human beginning and end, he feels human nature and captures the signs of a common ancestry as in a ritual conversation with the God of rebirth. With sensitivity, logic and intuition, it also pushes our gaze into the depths of cyclical memories, into the blue of the horizon that separates and unites us, with the aim of liberating us. To reveal to us a new world that emerges around us, but after first expelling our former selves.

Read the full note here: http://www.vakxikon.gr/τομάς-κοέν-χιλή-από-το-ένα-άκρο-στο-άλλ/τομάς-κοέν-χιλή-από-το-ένα-άκρο-στο-άλλ/

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Jan Kuhlbrodt on the publication of a selection of poems from Redoble del ronroneo translated into German and published in the German magazine Edit (Nr. 71, Winter 2016/17):

Chilean poetry is world poetry. And it probably always has been, from the beginning, even when the Spanish conquistadors met the Indians; when wars, trade and languages intermingled. It is world poetry not in the sense that the poems of Chilean poets gush out of European literature manuals, but rather because it is nourished by contact with the world. And it is perhaps here that we find the link. From the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, as earthy as the potter's clay she describes, to the cosmopolitan texts of Pablo Neruda. Again and again he finds himself in the balance between popular poetry and the avant-garde. This opens up spaces for him in both geography and time.
The texts by Tomás Cohen presented here in Monika Rinck's congenial translation are a wonderful example. They make use of traditional and experimental material. We meet the puma, the sand and the shepherd. Archaic motifs that, stripped of their past, become fully present: "hoists torches against cavernous frescoes / and pecks flaming bush levels".

Read the full review here: https://www.editonline.de/shop/

Interview on Radio Cosmo, WDR, Berlin (Berlin, February 2020):

The program "Estación Sur" of Radio Cosmo, a Spanish-American radio station in Berlin, interviewed me in the context of the first presentation of my second book in Germany. I thank the team of Estación Sur, in particular Rubén Gómez del Barrio for his interest in my poetry. The interview includes a reading of some of my poems.

Listen to the full interview here: https://www1.wdr.de/radio/cosmo/programm/sendungen/estacionsur/cultura/-wdr-cosmo-estacion-sur-poemas-tomas-cohen-arbol-102.html

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Interview in Bío Bío TV (Chile, January 8, 2020):

Many thanks to Ana Josefa Silva and Marco Antonio de la Parra, both journalists, writers and excellent readers, for this interview for Bío Bío TV about my book 'Un árbol de luz íntima'.

See the full interview here: https://www.biobiochile.cl/biobiotv/programas/del-fin-del-mundo/2020/01/08/tomas-cohen-y-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-de-pelluhue-a-katmandu-y-hamburgo.shtml

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Interview in the Jüdische Algemeine Zeitung (Berlin, January 3, 2020):

Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg, actor, writer and brilliant conversationalist interviewed me for his series of portraits of relevant Jews in the German cultural scene.

Read the full interview here: https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/unsere-woche/herr-der-woerter/

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Interview in the magazine Ten Days A Week (Hamburg, June 10, 2019):

Cris Sebiger-Bertram, founder and writer of independent journalism website Tendaysaweek asked me in German and I answered in English. In this interview I share reflections on my poetics and tell the story behind the international reading series Hafen Lesung, which I co-founded in Hamburg. Tendaysaweek also published one of my poems ("What I gave is the only thing I keep") in its German translation by Monika Rinck. As a creative collaborator of the interview, Christoph Hoemann made a  vívideo portrait which includes a recording of my voice reading that poem.

Read the full interview here: http://tendaysaweek.de/little-art-affair/tomas-cohen/

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Interview for the Consulate of Chile in Hamburg (Chile-Germany, April 29, 2019):

Grateful to Piera Ignacia Sanchez and Erwan Varas from the Chilean Consulate in Hamburg for this interview in which I answer myself about what took me to Nepal and what I ended up doing in Germany. The photo is by Heike Blenk.

Read the full interview here: https://chile.gob.cl/hamburgo/noticias/entrevista-tomas-cohen-su-viaje-a-traves-de-la-literatura

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Interview in Crevice (May 23, 2017, Romania): how does visual art relate to your poetry? What is the impact of music on your writing? I answered Andra Rotaru these and other good questions for CREVICE, Romanian magazine for literature and multimedia. Included in the publication of the interview are images of some of my manuscripts and also a commentary on the principles behind the Found in Translation writer's collective and the Hafen Lesung reading series I co-direct in Hamburg.

Read the full interview here: https://crevice.ro/a-sense-of-perplexity-a-passion-for-freedom/

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Interview in Sivuvaalo (Finland, May 16, 2016):

"Multilingual literature invites us to an "art of suspicion" in which the act of reading is made less certain. It makes us aware of a multiplicity of perspectives of the world through the coexistence of different languages. It empowers us with mind-opening doubts." I shared these and other reflections in a video interview with Peruvian writer Roxana Crixólogo, from the international writers' collective Sivuvalo in Helsinki, Finland.

See the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/C1_a5Lk-3pE

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Interviewed by Marina Lopez Riudoms (Sweden, February 1, 2016):

I share this interview of Marina Lopez Riudoms, a Spanish academic based in Sweden, for her blog Perdida entre Culturas, in which I answer about my book "Redoble del ronroneo, my literary activism in Hamburg and my work at AsymptotAsymptote. Photo by Vika Yarmilko.

Read the full interview here: http://www.perdidaentreculturas.com/tomas-cohen-fundador-de-las-lecturas-puerto-de-hamburgo/

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Interviewed by Raquel Abend (New York, October 19, 2014):

I link to "La distancia con la lengua materna allega dones al poeta", an interview with Raquel Aben Van Dalen, a Venezuelan writer based in New York, for Expedientes Magenta, her series of interviews with Latin American writers. The photo is by Monika Sala.

Read the full interview here: http://raquelabendvandalen.com/2014/10/19/la-distancia-con-la-lengua-materna/

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Paul-Henry Campbell on the poem "Homage" in Volltext (Nr. 4/2023), Austrian literary magazine (Austria, December 2023):

In this poem, biography plays a haunting role: "the father in the son, that every death encourages" takes a stand on something that perhaps all the world's religions struggle with in their own way and that Shakespeare called "The chain of being." As this poem delicately expresses, it is about the insight that only patience, long patience with becoming, can give. Translated from the Spanish by Luisa Donnerberg, in this poem by Tomás Cohen we contemplate in awe what is gone and yet remains, what is closed and yet lies open before us in its muteness. This homage opens with an astonishment at our own carelessness: "late and celebrated / I would now be by your bedside." As if, in the impetuosity and drunkenness of celebration, one had neglected to stand beside those who are the origin and provenance; as if one had overlooked the chain from ancestors to the after-born, because the impatient soul was intoxicated, because it had to be intoxicated with the celebration of life.

Read the full review here: https://volltext.net/produkt/volltext-4-2023/

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Blurb of the book by the publishing house (Chile, December 2019):

This tree of intimate light has roots in childhood invoked as a key to the present; its branches, laden with the death of loved ones, sound with the "dioma / entrañable que te extraña, extranjero, pródigo”". In this book by Tomás Cohen the house menstruates, one can choose mother and be grandmother's father; his poems are populated by insects, fossils and composers. From Buddhism Cohen enters into communion with nature, evokes his native Pelluhue and his years in Kathmandu. His nomadic vignettes pass through Helsinki, Bach's organ in St. Katherin and an accident in Hamburg. Exposed to police repression, he questions "la injusticia encarnada en uno" and asks "muéstrame / lo peor que hayas hecho / para allí hermanarnos" in his Prologue at the end, which invites us to reread from the beginning.

Read the complete note here: https://bastante.cl/producto/un-arbol-de-luz-intimatomas-cohen/?currency=CLP

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Review of Un árbol de luz íntima by Leonardo Sanhueza in the newspaper Las Últimas Noticias, Chile (January 6, 2020):

Like the tree of the title, the volume branches in several directions, from the trunk of childhood to the family. [...] The constant travels that occur in Cohen's book, from Chile to Germany, Finland and Nepal, share a vision strongly influenced by Buddhism. [...] The spiritual quest [...] of the poems thus clings to essential questions and dares to explore the possibility of communication between people and beings.

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Review by Juan Rodríguez of Un árbol de luz íntima (in dialogue with a book by Edgardo Cozarinsky). Edgardo Cozarinsky) in the online literary magazine Saposcat (Chile, 2020):

..in these poems there are children and adults, children, parents and grandparents; although the voice is always that of a child, even if it is that of the adult who was a child: "I portray from memory a child / of those in love with the old / the child I was, with millions of years in my hands."
What is a child? It is a person, or at least a human being; it is someone who is going to die. It is an uncertainty ("howling away also a flock / like shattered shadow, like dice thrown / until reaching the next generation," Cohen says), it is a body coming out of a body. A child is something we will cease to be, or not, when it is written: "and babbled, narrating Lazarus".
What does the poet -Cohen- open when he says he opens something that is like an old mahogany box, a box, he says, "without cigars / but always with fresh fragrance". Is it memory, is it the book we read, is it a box with photos?
Is it all the ghosts of childhood? "To go away like this, through dirt courts buried in pavement / checking the discharge of the bell / successful in my skin still - so to go away / kidnapped by my punctual ghosts / my childish anxieties and cries...", Cohen writes. They seem in fact, those anxieties and cries, the ghosts of an adult. Childhood, perhaps, is the fantasy world of adults; a way of seeing and speaking to oneself. Memory, let us remember, is imagination: "Come my child / to accompany his adult / (who is not his father, but his grave) / and give him the affection / that a prisoner gives to his bars".
A child, yes, is a body and it is not a body, it is something that will die: it is a possibility that will become real; and that in the meantime is remembered and reminds us. A philosopher said "friends, there are no friends"; we might ask, reading Cohen: children, are there no children?

Read the full review here: http://saposcat.cl/cuerpos-y-fantasmas-notas-al-margen-de-dos-poetas-juan-rodriguez-m/

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Review by Pascual Brodsky of Un árbol de luz íntima in Revista Lecturas (Chile, July 28, 2020):

Un árbol de luz íntima took me to a stream that runs through Gabriela Mistral's poetry, crossed by ocotes, poppies, traros, coyotes and pumas, and at the same time by angels, sphinxes, mystical bodies that disassociate themselves on the roads. Tomas Cohen slurps and opens other grooves to this slope, bordered by an intimacy with creatures, plants and minerals, with the need to sustain a pulse without justification; and on the other hand, the almost alien strangeness of being here only in passing.
[...] the writing of this book wants to detach itself from its "I", to make room for the beings and places that surround and sustain it. That is why he also refers to the residential Neruda, in which the verses are entangled and agglutinated as an echo of the world, the words extend their contours, they become like a region of experience that crosses time and appearance, but without tearing them from their secret. In a poem dedicated to "the dead mentor", the disconcerted voice rumbles before the separation with the other, and the body and its image alone are perceived as a hindrance, a kind of casing that one wishes to break.

Before the window of the coffin, the image of the other is not enough, it is his silence that seems to tear the one who is left alive, the impossible rhythm in the "cracked membrane of a drum". And in the end, it is the isolated and personal reflection in the window that one wants to disprove with touch and breath. It is the return to the bodies as sediments of time that these poems will insist on, indicated in the journey "from the eardrum to the shell", in which the ear is also preferred to the eye as the poetic organ. Remembering in the word what in it persists as a moan, the speaker discovers himself as an animal, and the poem as a tissue and creature.
Nor is it a light that illuminates in order to know. The song "secretly changes" the listener, perhaps in the double sense that "the procession goes inside"; and that the song points to something that persists elusive to words, and that is why it is a song that wants to be free of any imposition to "be clear", to communicate completely, to discover or confess itself.

Read the full review here: http://www.revistalecturas.cl/cancion-de-hoguera-partir-de-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-de-tomas-cohen-por-pascual-brodsky/

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Review by Matías Celedón on Un árbol de luz íntima in Vallejo y Co. (Peru, June 21, 2020):

...this Tree of intimate light [...], dedicated by the author to his parents and grandparents, in that order, sowing a sense of reading: from the beginning, the poet advances towards his roots, or if you will, he buries himself by going into the depths.

The image of a wooden box that opens, present in the form of coffins and in the thresholds suggested by the title that gathers the first of the four series of poems ("Goznes"), transmutes the leaves of the tree into pages containing doors and windows through which Cohen peeks out various faces, hunting insects or caressing fossils. The hinge is the hinge, a piece of hinged hardware with which the leaves of the doors and windows are attached to the hinge. These first pages of poems open like luminous passages, but of forbidden transit.
Cohen imagines the world he contemplates. He approaches inspiration like someone searching for a river. He observes by listening, he distinguishes the materials by their sounds. [Cohen works with the classical in a deliberate way, as a gesture of subversion to the empty rupture with the tradition of certain contemporary aesthetics. In the poem "No insectarium", he gathers in a transparent point of time his own natural history museum, where bugs climb up the bark and survive among the roots. There are in the miniature and in the delicate insects that inhabit this Tree..., images that crisp, words sensitive to touch.

In this book, Tomás Cohen invokes the voices that have moved his attentive and privileged listening in the middle of his journey. Let us toast to his roots under the luminous canopy of this growing tree.

Read the full review here: http://www.vallejoandcompany.com/sobre-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-2019-de-tomas-cohen/

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Tes Nehuén's review of Un árbol de luz íntima in the online poetry portal Poemas del Alma (June 16, 2020):

"Un árbol de luz íntima" by Tomás Cohen is a collection of poems of inner inquiry about childhood and the imprint that the experiences of the past have on the present. But it is written not from the contrition or the regret of what was lost, but from the resignation of the brevity of life and the desire to see beyond what we touch.

On this path of spiritual restlessness, the poet stumbles, and I say well, because this is a distinctive feature of the book, the way in which things appear. As we read, we can notice that the certainty of the voice fades and he seems to hesitate as he goes from one subject to the next, as if he were facing a path that has not been measured in advance. As if the only possible conviction were that of the journey, but the destination is absolutely unknown. And that is why, I say, the poet stumbles over things, names them, remembers them, and continues on his way, without stopping too long. Because what he really wants is to put together a kind of album, like Blake's so childish and so gloomy, that will allow him to reconstruct his identity.

Although there is a melancholy that hovers over the whole book, and leads to the idea that each day may be the last, each visit as the last farewell, as he says in one of the poems, this is not the feeling that prevails, rather it is a kind of detachment, bordering on coldness in certain fragments. And in that sense I have perceived that strangeness that foreignness brings and that gives so much pulse to the work of certain poets. How to write a book with forceful tributes to family members who have been left behind, either because death has imposed this distance, or because the writer's own foreignness has done it, without falling into the feeling of melancholy that always tinges this kind of poems. This seems to be one of the primary searches of this book.

This is a book that works with memory as a great net, where there are prismatic reflections, where the things that were are transformed according to the new look, where houses always lead to other houses, and within all of them there is room for a different world. This can also be read as a nod to the work of Blake, who gave so much importance to the universe, who fought so hard through his art to recognize other possible forms of life and language. And the identity of this collection of poems also seems to lie in this endeavor.

At this point we would have to point out that the way in which the poems are constructed is more electric. The poems are like sparks that explain situations, experiences, emotions of the past, but as I said, without dwelling too much on them. Images that overlap, until they constitute that album that allows the poet to have before his eyes a record of the subterfuge links that are interwoven in the various stages of life.

...structural symmetry, one of the most outstanding features of this book, announces the solid search of a well-formed poet.

Read the full review here: https://www.poemas-del-alma.com/blog/especiales/arbol-intima-tomas-cohen

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Greek translator Ati Solerti on Un árbol de luz íntima in the literature journal Vaxikon (Athens, 2020):

Tomas Cohen's new book entitled A Tree of Intimate Light is a journey for the mind that from the root of memory rises to the sky that nourishes it with emotions and the mirages it encounters. Cohen's writing enriches the idea of memory with metaphors about the loved ones we carry within, proposing an exchange of the roles they can play in our lives.

Read the full review here: www.vakxikon.gr/cohen-dentro/

Endorsement notes to the book, published by the publisher (January 2016):

In Redoble del ronroneo, Tomás Cohen debuts with an unusual mastery of alliteration. His is true lyrical poetry, and his sometimes dazzling verse is sustained with brains and emotion. Vivid imagery and resolved difficulty abound here, and invokes the best of the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra I and II. In addition, Redoble del ronroneo entertains without distraction - by no means secondary. This is an important first book.

- Armando Uribe

It is very rare to see how a poet immersed in his tradition discovers which are the lines that have not been exhausted in it and continues them, and this is precisely what happens in Redoble del ronroneo. I have been very pleasantly impressed by the way in which Neruda is 'used' to produce a text that is installed in what seems to be an 'abandoned' tradition of poetry in Spanish and that Tomás Cohen revitalizes very opportunely. I really enjoyed his poems, and I am happy to think that I will continue to read him for a long time to come.

- Patricio Pron

Although it may not seem so, Redoble del ronroneo is a book of love. Its passion is, however, paradoxical, since its object of desire is its own music - with rhythm in its roots. Undiminished by the echo of already consecrated voices, this debut manages to create a speech of its own and, dare I say it, unmistakable. The beauty of the difficult finds in the poetry of Tomás Cohen one of its best examples.

- Cristián Gómez Olivares

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Review to the publication of a selection of poems from Redoble del ronroneo translated into German in the magazine Edit Nr. 71, by Timo Brandt (in FixPoetry, German online literature magazine, 2017):

Tomás Cohen's poems (translated by Monika Rinck) make music with large and minimal objects, distinctive to the touch, to be felt with body and mind. In addition to paper and ink, one could have added the cautionary note that these texts "may contain traces of interiority," which would still be too little to say, for interiority is the main constituent here, whether one realizes it at the outset or not. It is precisely through the wide variety of the poems, ranging from song to the perception of an isolated "I", that the central motif is the spiritual, transcending all lines of embellishment. Cohen likes to circumnavigate the idea of a poem with illuminated analogical structures; he is a very subtle poet who, at the same time, does not hesitate to redirect our walk with word choices that take us to an unexpected place. Reading his texts is a harmonious and balanced poetic experience.

Read the full review here: https://www.fixpoetry.com/

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Note by Greek translator Ati Solerti on the poem "Andarivel (Postlude)" from A Tree of Intimate Light in the literature journal Vaxikon (Greece, 2017):

Tomas Cohen's writing knows how to listen to the extremes, the thin lines that distance and connect opposites in equilibrium on the infinite bridge of the universe. His gaze knows where to go to decipher every human beginning and end, he feels human nature and captures the signs of a common ancestry as in a ritual conversation with the God of rebirth. With sensitivity, logic and intuition, it also pushes our gaze into the depths of cyclical memories, into the blue of the horizon that separates and unites us, with the aim of liberating us. To reveal to us a new world that emerges around us, but after first expelling our former selves.

Read the full note here: http://www.vakxikon.gr/τομάς-κοέν-χιλή-από-το-ένα-άκρο-στο-άλλ/τομάς-κοέν-χιλή-από-το-ένα-άκρο-στο-άλλ/

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Jan Kuhlbrodt on the publication of a selection of poems from Redoble del ronroneo translated into German and published in the German magazine Edit (Nr. 71, Winter 2016/17):

Chilean poetry is world poetry. And it probably always has been, from the beginning, even when the Spanish conquistadors met the Indians; when wars, trade and languages intermingled. It is world poetry not in the sense that the poems of Chilean poets gush out of European literature manuals, but rather because it is nourished by contact with the world. And it is perhaps here that we find the link. From the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, as earthy as the potter's clay she describes, to the cosmopolitan texts of Pablo Neruda. Again and again he finds himself in the balance between popular poetry and the avant-garde. This opens up spaces for him in both geography and time.
The texts by Tomás Cohen presented here in Monika Rinck's congenial translation are a wonderful example. They make use of traditional and experimental material. We meet the puma, the sand and the shepherd. Archaic motifs that, stripped of their past, become fully present: "hoists torches against cavernous frescoes / and pecks flaming bush levels".

Read the full review here: https://www.editonline.de/shop/

Interview on Radio Cosmo, WDR, Berlin (Berlin, February 2020):

The program "Estación Sur" of Radio Cosmo, a Spanish-American radio station in Berlin, interviewed me in the context of the first presentation of my second book in Germany. I thank the team of Estación Sur, in particular Rubén Gómez del Barrio for his interest in my poetry. The interview includes a reading of some of my poems.

Listen to the full interview here: https://www1.wdr.de/radio/cosmo/programm/sendungen/estacionsur/cultura/-wdr-cosmo-estacion-sur-poemas-tomas-cohen-arbol-102.html

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Interview in Bío Bío TV (Chile, January 8, 2020):

Many thanks to Ana Josefa Silva and Marco Antonio de la Parra, both journalists, writers and excellent readers, for this interview for Bío Bío TV about my book 'Un árbol de luz íntima'.

See the full interview here: https://www.biobiochile.cl/biobiotv/programas/del-fin-del-mundo/2020/01/08/tomas-cohen-y-un-arbol-de-luz-intima-de-pelluhue-a-katmandu-y-hamburgo.shtml

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Interview in the Jüdische Algemeine Zeitung (Berlin, January 3, 2020):

Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg, actor, writer and brilliant conversationalist interviewed me for his series of portraits of relevant Jews in the German cultural scene.

Read the full interview here: https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/unsere-woche/herr-der-woerter/

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Interview in the magazine Ten Days A Week (Hamburg, June 10, 2019):

Cris Sebiger-Bertram, founder and writer of independent journalism website Tendaysaweek asked me in German and I answered in English. In this interview I share reflections on my poetics and tell the story behind the international reading series Hafen Lesung, which I co-founded in Hamburg. Tendaysaweek also published one of my poems ("What I gave is the only thing I keep") in its German translation by Monika Rinck. As a creative collaborator of the interview, Christoph Hoemann made a  vívideo portrait which includes a recording of my voice reading that poem.

Read the full interview here: http://tendaysaweek.de/little-art-affair/tomas-cohen/

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Interview for the Consulate of Chile in Hamburg (Chile-Germany, April 29, 2019):

Grateful to Piera Ignacia Sanchez and Erwan Varas from the Chilean Consulate in Hamburg for this interview in which I answer myself about what took me to Nepal and what I ended up doing in Germany. The photo is by Heike Blenk.

Read the full interview here: https://chile.gob.cl/hamburgo/noticias/entrevista-tomas-cohen-su-viaje-a-traves-de-la-literatura

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Interview in Crevice (May 23, 2017, Romania): how does visual art relate to your poetry? What is the impact of music on your writing? I answered Andra Rotaru these and other good questions for CREVICE, Romanian magazine for literature and multimedia. Included in the publication of the interview are images of some of my manuscripts and also a commentary on the principles behind the Found in Translation writer's collective and the Hafen Lesung reading series I co-direct in Hamburg.

Read the full interview here: https://crevice.ro/a-sense-of-perplexity-a-passion-for-freedom/

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Interview in Sivuvaalo (Finland, May 16, 2016):

"Multilingual literature invites us to an "art of suspicion" in which the act of reading is made less certain. It makes us aware of a multiplicity of perspectives of the world through the coexistence of different languages. It empowers us with mind-opening doubts." I shared these and other reflections in a video interview with Peruvian writer Roxana Crixólogo, from the international writers' collective Sivuvalo in Helsinki, Finland.

See the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/C1_a5Lk-3pE

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Interviewed by Marina Lopez Riudoms (Sweden, February 1, 2016):

I share this interview of Marina Lopez Riudoms, a Spanish academic based in Sweden, for her blog Perdida entre Culturas, in which I answer about my book "Redoble del ronroneo, my literary activism in Hamburg and my work at AsymptotAsymptote. Photo by Vika Yarmilko.

Read the full interview here: http://www.perdidaentreculturas.com/tomas-cohen-fundador-de-las-lecturas-puerto-de-hamburgo/

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Interviewed by Raquel Abend (New York, October 19, 2014):

I link to "La distancia con la lengua materna allega dones al poeta", an interview with Raquel Aben Van Dalen, a Venezuelan writer based in New York, for Expedientes Magenta, her series of interviews with Latin American writers. The photo is by Monika Sala.

Read the full interview here: http://raquelabendvandalen.com/2014/10/19/la-distancia-con-la-lengua-materna/