Julia Cohen and Mathias Svalina are American poets whose collaborative writing emerged from the experimental small-press culture of the late 2000s. Together they produced several chapbooks, including When We Broke the Microscope, Chugwater, and Sugar Means Yes, while each developed an independent body of poetry, prose, and hybrid writing.
Their collaborations belong to a wider tradition of experimental poetry in which authorship itself becomes part of the form. Two writers share images, syntax, narrative pressure, and surprise without reducing the poem to a single stable voice.
Julia Cohen
Julia Cohen is a poet, lyric essayist, professor, and editor. Her books include the poetry collections Triggermoon Triggermoon and Collateral Light, the lyric-essay collection I Was Not Born, and the essay collection Freak Lip. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in publications including Boston Review, BOMB, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, and New England Review.
Cohen’s writing often works through emotional uncertainty, intimacy, memory, illness, desire, and the instability of narrative. I Was Not Born combines lyric verse, prose poems, narrative fragments, and psychoanalytic material in a sustained examination of love, crisis, and recovery.
She earned a BA from Wesleyan University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from the University of Denver. Her academic work has included teaching literature and creative writing as well as advocacy for public higher education.
Mathias Svalina
Mathias Svalina is a poet and writer whose books include Destruction Myth, I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, Wastoid, and The Wine-Dark Sea. His writing is known for surreal narratives, dream logic, absurd transformations, and the emotional charge produced when impossible events are described in direct, ordinary language.
Svalina has also worked as an editor with Octopus Books. His literary practice extends beyond conventional publication through the Dream Delivery Service, a project he began in 2014. He writes individualized dream poems for subscribers and delivers them by bicycle before dawn or sends them by mail, turning poetic composition into a daily public ritual.
The Dream Delivery Service has traveled through multiple American cities and has been presented in connection with literary and arts institutions. The project brings together writing, performance, repetition, physical movement, and the intimacy of receiving a text made for a particular reader.
Collaborative poetry
Cohen and Svalina wrote multiple collaborative chapbooks during the period when both were active in Denver’s literary community. When We Broke the Microscope was published by Small Fires Press, and other collaborative projects followed through independent presses devoted to contemporary poetry.
Their shared poems use collaboration as a source of instability. Images can change direction before they settle into explanation; narrative fragments behave like dreams; domestic details, illness, landscape, animals, and strange objects enter a common imaginative field. The result is a voice shaped by exchange rather than individual confession.
For a broader view of writers working through hybrid and collaborative forms, explore contemporary poets.
Further reading
Browse the poets directory for additional writers and literary traditions.