Susan Cohen | Women's Voices For Change

Susan Cohen ’s most recent book of poems, "A Different Wakeful Animal," won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and can be ordered here. She was a newspaper reporter, contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and professor at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism before earning an MFA from Pacific University. Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies, including the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and have received numerous honors, including the Rita Dove Poetry Award and the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: Celia Dropkin’s
“Adam” and “My Mother”

By Susan Cohen

I knew Yiddish was exquisitely expressive, with a particular affinity for proverbs and curses and jokes, and more words for “fool” than Hawaiians have for lava or the Inuit people for snow. I had no idea of the wealth of its poetry.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “In the Walnut Grove,”
“Pow Wow June,” and “View,”
by Kim Shuck

By Susan Cohen

Kim Shuck’s relationship to the reader seems essential to this voice, even more than her relationship to language. It’s as if she’s speaking directly into our ears, sitting next to us on a bench and resuming an intense conversation we’ve been having on and off for years.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “Me Too—The Fall of Man,”
by Cynthia Neely

By Susan Cohen

Cynthia Neely’s “Me Too—The Fall of Man” gives me the opportunity to consider multiple ways poets use imagination as craft.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: Four poems from Less Like a Dove
by Agi Mishol

By Susan Cohen

How can poetry so particular to Agi Mishol’s life—down to the name of the doctor who treated her father—touch mine so deeply?

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “La Mano,” by Alexandra Lytton Regalado

By Susan Cohen

This evocative narrative of motherhood almost did not emerge because the poet feared it was too sweet. (Do male poets worry as much about this when they write about their children? I wonder.)

Poetry

Tina Kelley’s “The Kids Play at the Shelter, Two Friday Nights After Little G Shot Himself Under the Boardwalk”

By Susan Cohen

Like an adolescent who demands to be seen and heard. This poem is meant to disturb, and it does—spectacularly.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “The Way Back,” by Francine Sterle

By Susan Cohen

Francine Sterle’s “The Way Back” enchanted me from the first time I read it. First, her lush lyricism. Then, the poem’s payoff, an ending that is emotional without being the least bit sentimental. What draws me back again and again, though, is the way she controls breath on the page.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “during the bombing of Kosovo,” by Alicia Ostriker

By Susan Cohen

Ostriker’s solution in "during the bombing of Kosovo" is to address the issue of timelessness itself—the way humans have slaughtered each other since the start.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “Patois,” by Lisa Allen Ortiz

By Susan Cohen

I call what Ortiz has done here semi-surreal because she presents enough concrete detail to ground us even as those flocks of words flit around dreamlike in their stunning aviary.