After dropping out of high school and getting kicked out of the house, a disenfranchised teen moves in with Gina, an underage sex-worker and the teen’s only friend. Throughout their time living together, they are sucked deeper and deeper into the quicksand of addiction, eventually finding themselves totally isolated. The only other people they interact with are Gina’s clients, who include Officer Krum of the Fernley Police Department, amongst other supposedly upstanding citizens. They are kept afloat by dreams of a lighter life in a landscape as different as could be from the desert in which they’ve (mis)spent their youths, and the enduring hope that they’re just a few lucky breaks away from a one-way ticket out of this town.
This second book from a promising new poet thrums with dark disaffection with suburbia, societal “norms,” and an American Dream that has become a nightmare. The poems are packed with pungent images, creative, high-octane wordplay, and unforgettable lines. This author likes to turn things, then turn them again, inside out. Sometimes sardonic, sometimes apocalyptic, the poems grab you, pull you in close, then leave you with a gut punch message leavened by humor and a sense that, in spite of the bitter everything, love still matters, and might be enough.
In Melina Cohen-Bramwell's Nevada, childhood is a broken promise and the future is not guaranteed. Nevada is a metaphor, a state of mind, something to survive and--if you're lucky--escape from. With the edgy irony and honesty of youth, unapologetically visceral and vivid, Nevada is painted with a seductive darkness tinged with hope, impossible to turn away from.
Melina Cohen-Bramwell's Nevada evokes the scorching desert air suffused with tender heartbreak. The spare, beautiful language glitters with internal rhyme, and loneliness, in this volume, lives in tandem with hope. Reading Nevada aloud to myself, I felt the words asking readers to believe – and to remember what belief has felt like – while chiding us for undue trust. Nevada summons the paradox that lives in each human heart, and it takes a writer like Cohen-Bramwell to break open this paradox and lay it bare.
Meet the Author
Melina Cohen-Bramwell he/him, dropped out of high school to join the circus but, as it soon became clear, was far better suited to a life of hermitage. He now communicates with the outside world primarily through scraps of paper covered in discarded lines that float out the window on breezy afternoons— and the occasional cohesive manuscript slipped in single pages under the door. If you wander about when the moon is high and the wind blows at just the right timbre, you might catch a glimpse of him darting in and out of the shadows in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also just so happens to be a biracial, gender-queer, spoonie. His play, Please Don’t Slow Me Down, had its world premiere at Little Boxes and Space 1308 in 2025. His play One of the Good Ones, received a reading in 2022 at Theatre Battery and another in PlayGround SF’s 2024 Free Play Festival. His play AL’S CULT premiered at PlayGround SF’s 2025 Free Play Festival. His book, Bar Fights with Sad Kids, is available from Finishing Line Press or an internet commerce site near you.
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