Susan Cohen MFA '13 to Release New Poetry Collection "Democracy of Fire"

Susan Cohen MFA '13 is set to release her third poetry collection, Democracy of Fire, on Sept. 30 with Broadstone Books.

Cohen's previous collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize and a finalist for the May Swenson Award, the Blue Lynx Prize, and the Richard Snyder Prize. Her first full-length book of poems, Throat Singing, was published in 2012 by Cherry Grove Collections. She has also written two chapbooks: Backstroking (Unfinished Monument Press; 2005), which won the Acorn-Rukeyser Prize; and Finding the Sweet Spot (Finishing Line Press; 2009).

Poetry faculty Ellen Bass has this to say about the new collection: 

A thread of elegy runs through Democracy of Fire, Susan Cohen’s wise and wonderful new poetry collection. Tenderly, precisely, these poems record a litany of the world’s ongoing losses: “Greenland’s ice sheet pooling like tears into the ocean,” elephants, beetles, democracies, “languages left behind like cloaks,” and “our own bones interred without ceremony.” Cohen shows us our interconnectedness, a reminder of both the beauty and value of what’s at stake. Yet, paradoxically, this vision makes Democracy of Fire a deeply comforting book. Of the planet Mercury she writes, “…a pinprick ablaze for longer than our species will exist…Between us and it, there’s a distance far beyond air, and beyond despair.”