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

Marvin Bell Tribute

By Susan Cohen

I wrote this poem to be included in a tribute volume for Marvin Bell, who died last month at 83. “Dead Woman Poem for Marvin Bell” honors him as an exceptional teacher of poetry and also purloins his invented form—what he called his Dead Man poems. —Susan Cohen

Poetry

“Jackhammering Limestone” by Erika Meitner

By Susan Cohen

The things that matter to the poet—her own body, her children, a country on the brink of the Trump administration, and the injured planet—all appear to be under siege, just like her eardrums. The poem smacks of catastrophe far beyond the speaker’s self-described “mid-life crisis.”

Poetry

“The Laughter of Women,” by Lisel Mueller

By Susan Cohen

"Poetry, for me, is the answer to how does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events," Lisel Mueller explained to an interviewer after 'Alive Together: New and Selected Poems' won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.

Poetry

Catherine Abbey Hodges:
“Glosa on Lines from Peter Everwine”

By Susan Cohen

Catherine Abbey Hodges points us to the work of her friend and mentor, Peter Everwine, in what is both elegy and homage in an uncommon, traditional form called a glosa or glossa—which aims to take something good and incorporate it into something also good but different.

Poetry

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s “White Flesh, Yellow Dust” and “Memorial”

By Susan Cohen

The question I found myself asking every day of my life in Israel is how can we see each other’s humanity, our mutuality, the beautiful synergies possible between our cultures? The question became a poem, a poem that is still a question and maybe a call.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “Lamentation for the Children,”
by Beverly Burch

By Susan Cohen

Lamentation for the Children Children come, bringing bliss and wretchedness. They come ready to be bruised. Chain us with the soft tentacles of their openness. Leave us pierced and threaded, bound for time with thorns, singing behind the palings of love. Like children. Though we are not. Don’t look back, not once, at the trembling in your arms,…

Poetry

Poetry Sunday: “Dear S—” by Alexandra van de Kamp

By Susan Cohen

Like the best of trips, Alexandra van de Kamp’s “Dear S—” exposes us to both the strange we find alluring and the strange we find disturbing, and by the end we are looking at the world in a slightly different way.

Poetry

Poetry Sunday:
“Bamboo, the Dance,” by Marilyn Chin

By Susan Cohen

Marilyn Chin, who was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, has spent a 30-year career fusing cultures, exploring how her ancestry meets her personal, political, and poetic life.

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: “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.