About

I am a poet, translator, book reviewer, and journalist. See my homepage, my Google profile, and I am also on Facebook.

My translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed’s book Little Promises is published in a bilingual edition by Mayapple Press. In its Hebrew original, this collection of intense erotic poetry won the 1992 AKUM prize in Israel. My translation of one of the poems in Little Promises was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Novelist Tsipi Keller says , “It is hard to speak of Rachel Eshed’s poetry without mentioning ‘fire’ : her poems virtually burn on the page, and David Cooper’s renditions not only do justice to the the original but magnify its richness.”

I am the author of my two poetry collections, Glued To The Sky and JFK: Lines of Fire (PulpBits, 2003). PulpBits went out of business in March 2007, but by clicking on their titles you can view and download free PDF files of these ebooks.

Glued To The Sky includes both narrative and lyric poems concerning group identity and gender issues in a wide variety of forms .

JFK: Lines of Fire is a sequence of dramatic documentary vignettes culled from the literature concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.

I also review books for New York Journal of Books.

My interests include Poetry, Literary Fiction, Modern Art, Jazz, Art House and foreign Cinema, Sex, Judaism, History, and Liberal Politics. I’m married to absract painter Shoshana Cooper, and we share our home with Sasson, a Peterbald cat. My Jewish identity is very strong, and on most Saturday mornings and early afternoons you would probably find Shoshana and me at our local synagogue , Park Slope Jewish Center. For those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator I am an INFP or maybe an XNFP since the I is not very pronounced. I have non-hyperactive ADD ( the quiet version) and am fairly even tempered.

In addition to non-hyperactive ADD I am also a prostate cancer survivor and have allergies, asthma, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and primary lower limb lymphedema. Lymphedema occurs when the lymphatic system is unable to adequately drain lymph fluid from an affected and thus swollen limb. I control my condition by performing a time consuming maintenance regimen which includes keeping to a low fat, very low sodium diet, sleeping in a soft cast with velcro straps that I can tighten to the correct degree of compression, wearing thigh high compression stockings in the daytime, showering in the evening before putting on the cast, performing a form of gentle self- massage to open the lymph vessels, prescribed breathing and floor exercises wearing the cast before going to bed at night, and repeating the exercises in the morning. I usually eat breakfast before exercising–it’s well into the morning before I can actually start my day. Performing the evening part of the regimen precludes going out at night and has curtailed our social life somewhat.

Shoshana and I both look forward to the day two years from now when she can retire from her day job, leave its stresses behind, and be a full time artist. I also look forward to the day when medical science finds cures for my various chronic ailments, especially lymphedema.

Original work that appears in this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.