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: 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry Sunday: “Patois,” by Lisa Allen Ortiz

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