Shortly after Leonard Cohen died, I was wandering through a Half-Price Books when I stumbled upon a couple of his books of poetry. I picked up 2006’s Book of Longing as tribute to the artist. Fortuitously, NPR’s Terry Gross recently re-released a 2006 interview with Cohen about this very book. I listened to the interview concurrently with my own reading and wrestling with the text. The context for the book that the interview provided was helpful: Cohen wrote a large chunk of Longing while living at a Zen […]