Susan Cohen and Jeanne Wagner
Monday, April 23, at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
Susan Cohen has been a newspaper reporter, a contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, and a journalism professor at UC Berkeley. She’s won honors for both journalism and poetry, including the 2010 book award from the National Association of Science Writers and the 2011 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her new book Throat Singing, which was a finalist for Ashland Poetry Press’s Snyder prize and the ABZ first book prize, includes poems published by Atlanta Review, Poetry East, Poetry International, Puerto del Sol, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review and other journals, featured by Verse Daily, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Chana Bloch wrote about Throat Singing: “…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.”
The Woman Who Feels No Fear
Doctors report that a brain anomaly has left a woman without fear.
She pets scorpions and snarling dogs. Lightning fails
to torch her nerves. Let the elevator plunge —
nothing makes her organs lurch.
She cooks with butter, dives into the deep end.
We envy her — no spear in the heart,
no hornets in the gut
when her little girl is hours late and sirens shriek.
She’ll never turn a small dark mole
into a malignant mountain. Though,
if she lives long, it’s because death is just another bully
who doesn’t know what to do with her: woman
immune to wolves outside the tent.
And how she struts onto any stage, life of the party,
always game, flips off the boss or flirts with him
in the presence of his wife.
If we met her, we’d gather round, as if she lives
in a land-locked country and we must tell her
how it feels to be at sea.
We’d clutch our cocktails and inspect her eyes for vacancy,
suspecting she’s less like us than a dog is
who puddles every time there’s thunder.
Does she look upon the rest of us with mercy
or do we baffle her — the way we knock on wood,
our sweaty bargains with gods we half-believe in?
The army is interested in her brain. But as torturer she’d lack
imagination, not knowing what makes people shiver
besides the cold. Surely, she must feel the cold.
Jeanne Wagner is the recipient of several national awards, including the MacGuffin Poet Hunt, the Ann Stanford Prize, the Briar Cliff Review Award and the 2011 Inkwell Prize, judged by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared on the PBS website’s Poem of the Week, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Cincinnati Review and Mississippi Review, among others. She has four previous collections of poetry, including The Zen Piano-Mover, winner of the 2004 Stevens Manuscript Award. In the Body of Our Lives was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2011.
Doctor Frankenstein on Love
I gave him everything I love.
The high forehead,
which looks so endearing on babies,
on his face
became a frightening cliff-drop
of skull,
and the vacant eyes,
with their hint of lethal hurt,
were the same cornflower-blue irises
I plucked
from the beggared sockets
of the dead.
I thought we could live again,
like memory,
that we would rise from unrequited
flesh
as only bodies carefully stitched
from remnants can.
But he lurches like an old film
unspooling
and dreams in a language
not his own;
sometimes just the white amnesia
of a flower
makes him weep
