Performance and Authenticity in Catherine Cohen's God I Feel Modern Tonight

Defining the Thematic Claim

Catherine Cohen’s debut poetry collection, God I Feel Modern Tonight, centers on a fraught negotiation between the self as performed and the self as felt. The speaker—a young woman in New York navigating comedy, dating, and a compulsive online presence—constantly stages her life for invisible audiences: social media followers, lovers, therapists, and even the reader. Yet beneath the punchlines and polished anecdotes lies a tangled knot of anxiety, jealousy, and longing for something real. The collection’s central claim is that authenticity in the modern era is not a stable state but a theatrical effect—one that is both desperately sought and knowingly faked. Cohen’s poems propose that the performance is inescapable, yet they also leave room for moments where the mask slips, revealing a genuine ache.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

The theme of performance versus authenticity can be tracked through three distinct narrative veins: the speaker’s relationship with social media and public image, her interactions with therapy and self-improvement, and her romantic and sexual encounters. Each domain forces a different kind of role-playing, and each reveals a different fissure between the curated and the real.

1. Social Media and the Curated Self

From the opening poem, the speaker frames tweeting as an act that makes anything political. She admits that her work “is not good but is online, which matters” – a darkly comic acknowledgment that visibility has replaced quality as a measure of worth. In “poem I wrote after I woke up at 6 a.m. as a joke,” she looks forward to checking her phone and to hearing her daughter’s first podcast, as if the future itself will be delivered through screens. The phone symbol becomes a prop that allows her to perform being busy, being connected, being modern.

Later, in “poem I wrote after I listened to my Spotify top songs of 2019,” a personalized algorithmic recap undoes her therapy progress, showing how data-driven self-knowledge can be more destabilizing than revealing. The speaker describes trying “unlearning jealousy in 2015” and trying “barre class” – a litany of performed self-care that fails to produce genuine change. In “road trip poem #20,” the speaker notes that a company that gave her free sunglasses has unfollowed her on Instagram, a minor slight that registers as a major betrayal. The social-media performance demands constant approval, and its withdrawal feels personal.

In “poem I wrote after I ruined the bathroom at Au Bon Pain,” the speaker confesses that she watches Instagram to see her camp friend’s fiancé wakeboard. Instagram is a voyeuristic stage where she consumes the performances of others while implicitly curating her own. The irony is that she mocks the very platform she depends on, a contradiction that runs through the collection.

2. Therapy as a Stage for Resistance

Therapy sessions appear repeatedly as spaces where the speaker is asked to be real, but she resists with jokes, deflection, and intellectual skepticism. In the second poem, she asks her therapist why she should want to grow, and the therapist replies that she will suffer less. The speaker’s internal retort – “what is she trying to prove?” – reveals a performer’s fear: that if she stops suffering, she will lose her material. The therapist character represents the demand for authenticity, but the speaker treats that demand as another script she can refuse to follow.

In “poem I wrote after I listened to my Spotify top songs of 2019,” a pill that “makes it harder to cum” is greeted with sarcastic enthusiasm, a joke that deflects from the real pain of antidepressants not working. In “poem I wrote after my lover quoted Zoolander towards me,” the speaker recalls a therapist who told her “you can’t gain weight if you don’t put food in your mouth” – a cruelly literal “advice” that makes a mockery of genuine help. Therapy itself becomes a performance, with the speaker playing the difficult patient to protect herself from actually changing.

3. Romance and the Hyperbolic Self

In romantic contexts, the speaker performs a heightened version of desire and devotion. In “road trip poem #17,” during sex she tells her partner each time is “one for the record books”; he counters that nothing can be special if everything is. This exchange exposes the inflation at the heart of her romantic performance – she tries to make every moment extraordinary, but her partner calls out the impossibility. The poem shows a rare moment where the performance is named and challenged by another character.

In “modern love poem,” she bluntly states that she should think about the government but just wants her lover to tell her that “fucking me / is the end of the world.” The hyperbole is intentional, a conscious demand for theatrical validation. She doesn’t want genuine intimacy; she wants a line from a disaster movie. The ex-boyfriend character haunts her as a sixth sense: “one time I wanted so bad / to fall in love that I did it” (from poem 53). She admits she can perform falling in love, manufacturing the feeling to match the scenario.

Character and Symbol Connections

Characters

The Speaker is the ultimate performer, constantly narrating her own life with self-deprecating one-liners. She is aware of her own act but cannot drop it entirely.
The Lover/Partner occasionally punctures the performance, as when he refuses to validate every sex act as “record-breaking.” He represents a demand for a more measured, genuine interaction.
The Ex-Boyfriend exists as a psychic residue; the speaker claims a “sixth sense” that he is engaged, suggesting that even after the relationship ends, she continues to perform a narrative around him.
The Therapist is the professional auditor of authenticity, but the speaker treats her advice as another script to be resisted.
The Friend appears in road-trip poems as a companion who shares in the performance of road-trip freedom; the two of them agree that sunset is better than sunrise because after sunrise you have to face the day – a shared existential joke.
The Stranger appears in the first poem, where the speaker sighs loudly until a stranger asks if she is okay. The sigh is a public bid for attention, and the stranger becomes her audience.

Symbols

Beaded Bag – The speaker is “stuck on the C train with my beaded bag.” The bag is a fashionable accessory, a performance of taste, but it also traps her, suggesting that the trappings of feminine style are both ornamental and restrictive.
Subway C Train – A liminal, communal space where strangers perform for each other (the man bragging about his sound system). It is a setting that forces contact with the unfiltered city, but the speaker immediately imagines checking her phone to escape.
Phone / Smartphone – The ultimate stage manager. The speaker anticipates checking her phone with genuine excitement, and later mourns being unfollowed. The phone mediates her sense of self-worth.
Cold Brew Coffee – Appears in “poem I wrote after I crummed” as a purchased object that signals ironic self-care: she buys a cold brew after waking up at 2 p.m. feeling like falling in love. The cold brew is a prop for the performance of being a functional modern person.

Complexity and Contradiction

The most sophisticated aspect of Cohen’s treatment of performance and authenticity is that the poems themselves are acts. The collection is written in a confessional, stand-up-comedy style that feels authentic – raw, embarrassed, specific. Yet the speaker is keenly aware that she is performing for the reader. The final chapter, “A Note About the Author,” is presented in prose as a real author biography listing Cohen’s comedy residencies, podcast, and acting credits. This factual appendix collapses the distance between speaker and author, suggesting that even the “real” Catherine Cohen is a performed identity – a comedian whose vulnerability on stage is both genuine and rehearsed.

Cohen undercuts her own critiques of performance by indulging in them. She mocks Instagram but posts. She jokes about therapy but keeps going. She calls out the impossibility of authentic romantic connection but keeps desiring it. The collection never resolves the tension because it refuses to pretend resolution is possible. The contradiction becomes the point: modernity demands we perform, we know we are performing, and the closest we get to authenticity is admitting the performance – which is itself a performance.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the speaker use humor to perform authenticity, and when does that performance break down?

Humor functions as a shield: she makes jokes about anxiety, depression, and jealousy to appear in control. The breakdown occurs in poems like “road trip poem #3,” where she admits she wants to be famous for being “the first person who never feels bad again” – a line too raw to be funny. The joke vanishes when the desire is stated without irony.

2. Why does the speaker resist her therapist’s advice to grow?

Growth would mean suffering less, and suffering is the speaker’s material – both for her poems and for her self-narrative. She views the therapeutic demand for authenticity as just another role she is supposed to play: the “improved” patient. By resisting, she preserves her identity as a performer of angst.

3. In what ways does social media act as both a stage and a trap in the collection?

Social media is a stage because the speaker curates her life for followers, but it is a trap because she cannot stop watching others’ performances or measuring her worth by likes and follows. The company unfollowing her on Instagram (road trip poem #20) shows how the stage can suddenly exclude her, causing real distress.

4. The lover says “nothing can be special if everything is.” How does this line encapsulate the book’s conflict?

The speaker tries to make every moment extraordinary by narrating it as such, but her lover’s objection introduces a standard of genuineness: you cannot authentically value everything. The line forces her to confront that her romantic performance may be empty. It reveals the cost of constant hyperbole.

5. Does the “Note About the Author” strengthen or undermine the collection’s exploration of authenticity?

It strengthens it by blurring the boundary between the speaker and Catherine Cohen. The biography presents the author as a successful comedian – exactly the kind of public persona the speaker critiques. Rather than offering a “real” escape from performance, the note extends the performance into the paratext, suggesting that even the author’s “true” biography is another act for public consumption. The collection ends not with a revelation of an authentic self, but with a wink at the impossibility of ever achieving one.