[10/01/26] Cochrane, Mick: How to Sacrifice

The poems in Mick Cochrane's first collection are about baseball and memory, fatherhood and family, time and mortality. With humor and compassion, Mick celebrates unsung heroes, shines a light on quiet moments of heartache and grace, and explores the everyday terrors and joys of being alive. He reminds us why we should—always!—stop at a lemonade stand.

Mick Cochrane is the author of the novels Fitz, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, Sport, and Flesh Wounds, and his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in literary magazines including The Sun, Five Points, and The Cincinnati Review. As a professor at Canisius University, he has served as chair of the English Department, coordinator of the Canisius University Contemporary Writers Series, and faculty moderator of Quadrangle, the Canisius University magazine of literary and visual arts. His critical and creative interests include Raymond Carver, Bob Dylan, baseball literature, the art of biography, fiction, memoir, and poetry. How to Sacrifice is his first collection of poetry.

Praise for How to Sacrifice:

In this beautiful collection, Mick Cochrane exposes the divine living in the everyday and shows that there are oracles all around just waiting to be recognized.

John Berger said, “Stories are about battles and kings, poetry tends to the wounded.” Leonard Cohen sings about the cracks that let the light in: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering.” Mick’s poems speak to, and for, the wounded. The born wounded. At once I feel seen, busted, appreciated, uncovered—through his words my scars become monuments to battles survived.

Mick sings the praises of the everyman through the character actor Dabbs Greer. His poems are for the flannel and corduroy set, the ones wearing cargo shorts and Crocs, and include layers of advice from this world. You don’t leave a game early. You are still paying bills for your father. In the proper hands a wooden spoon becomes a scepter or a weapon. The world we are born into is not a world created for us.

For Mick, poetry is as much an uncovering as discovering. And in that the wisdom is recognized.

—Kevin Kling, author of The Dog Says How