susan cohen
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Poetry News
THROAT SINGING WILL BE AVAILABLE IN MARCH FROM WORD TECH/CHERRY GROVE, AMAZON, BARNES&NOBLE, AND POWELL'S
WHAT SOME OTHER POETS HAVE SAID ABOUT THE BOOK: “The music of Susan Cohen's poems is close to that of Coleman Hawkins, the jazz saxophonist who ‘could make honey sting / and gravel sing.’ In poems about the world of family and the natural world, and the requirements for survival in either, Cohen writes with intelligence, clarity and deep understanding, always following the drift and pull of the feelings.” – Chana Bloch, author of Blood Honey “Susan Cohen’s poetry is like ‘the black-eyed seal/that breaks the surface, shiny/with news of its deeper life.’ Her book, Throat Singing, is a hymn to nature, art, and history. With each page, I stepped further into the forest, the museum, on a fantastic, rhythmic journey where a ‘gray sky/is a stone any bird can enter.’ Her delight in language play is wry, surprising, mixing pathos with humor, showing us those ‘turkey vultures’ with ‘not one/existential theory passed between them.’ In a world where ‘ants swarm a sparrow’s heart,’ Cohen writes of luck, ‘that lavish, bounding luck, that doggy grin.’ We are lucky to have this book.” – Susan Browne, author of Zephyr “Throat Singing is a collection intent on uncovering, with superb metaphor and acuity, the subtle everyday menaces and consolations of the world we live in. With a combination of artistry and investigative skill, Susan Cohen probes both life’s domestic tenderness and its restless incongruities. Rivers are ‘ferocious with silt.’ Van Gogh’s trees would ‘run if they could.’ Dogs know we’re ‘coming home to the wrong life.’ Cohen’s poems either deftly demonstrate the power of naming, or, as in ‘At the Holocaust Museum,’ find just the right narrative to acknowledge its inadequacy. Unstintingly, this book satisfies our quest for the poem that ‘surfaces, re-surfaces, and keeps glistening’.” – Jeanne Wagner, author of In the Body of Our Lives MORE 2011 POETRY CONTEST NEWS
I am a winner of the Atlanta Review International Publication Prize I am a finalist for the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, and the Arts and Letters Rumi poetry prize. I've been Broadsided!
Download a poster of my poem in response to the Japanese tsunami RITA DOVE POETRY PRIZE I've won the 2011 Rita Dove Poetry Prize from Salem College, judged by Allison Joseph. NEW PAGES, which publishes online reviews of poetry journals, mentioned my poem while praising the current issue of Southern Poetry Review. I'm delighted to be in such wonderful poetic company in SPR, and thrilled to have my poem singled out for mention by poet and reviewer Sima Rabinowitz: "One of poetry’s most useful, satisfying, and unique characteristics is the power to capture life’s small philosophical or metaphysical realities with a kind of precise, economical, focused – and uncanny – accuracy. These are the sorts of poems at which this small journal seems to excel. Poems that embody both physical and emotional immediacy. Masters of the art represented here include David Wagoner, Margaret Gibson, Carl Dennis, and Kelly Cherry, who are joined by more than two dozen others who clearly also excel in this arena. Southern Poetry Review is not, however, dedicated only to this approach. Susan Cohen’s “Cargador de Flores,” inspired by a painting of Diego Rivera, is a family poem of considerable appeal (“It’s him! ... this man who overlooked my childhood from a print / above my parents’ bed. He’s still burdened by blossoms / piled so high they shove his sombrero down over his brows.”)..." |
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