Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry featuring Brad Buchanan and Susan Cohen, on Tuesday, January 10, 2023 at 7:00 p,m PST. Hosted by Stella Beratlis, city of Modesto poet laureate emeritus.
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SUSAN COHEN
Susan Cohen is a journalist and poet in Berkeley, California. She has been a newspaper reporter, a contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, and a faculty member of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California. In 2013, she earned an MFA in poetry. Her third full-length book of poems, Democracy of Fire, was released from Broadstone Books on September 30, 2022; it was a finalist for the Washington Prize, Wilder Prize, and Richard Snyder Prize,
Susan’s second book of poems, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. It also was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize, finalist for the May Swenson Award, Blue Lynx Prize, and Richard Snyder Prize.
Susan’s first full-length book of poems, Throat Singing, was published in 2012 by Cherry Grove Collections. She also wrote two chapbooks: Backstroking (Unfinished Monument Press; 2005), which won the Acorn-Rukeyser Prize; and Finding the Sweet Spot (Finishing Line Press; 2009).
About Democracy of Fire
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.”
—Ellen Bass, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets & author of Indigo
Brad Buchanan
Brad Buchanan’s writings have appeared in nearly 200 journals, and he has also published 4 book-length collections of poetry: his latest, CHIMERA, was just published in November 2022. The Miracle Shirker (Poets Corner Press, 2005), Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter (Roan Press, 2008), and The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative (Finishing Line Press, 2019) as well as two academic books. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Sacramento State University. He was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in February 2015, and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016, which involved temporary vision loss and disability, as well as an ongoing illness: chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease.
About CHIMERA
Brad Buchanan‘s painfully stunning new collection, CHIMERA, continues his explorations of the monstrosities that cancer can create in the lives of human beings as they struggle through invasive testing, treatments, recovery, and the hope of being cancer-free that stem cell transplants offer. Buchanan…documents, reports, questions, disputes both himself and the world cancer and chimerism force him to confront. He helps us see and feel in a most visceral way what it means—for him, for us, for those he loves and those who love him—to be engaged in this struggle. “Cancer is not your standard bully, / it will not back down if confronted / with sufficiently brave defiance. / It doesn’t have a nervous system / to mobilize or sympathize. / The only martial arts it knows/ are patience, stealth and resilience.” These poems will surprise you with their tenacity, empathy and ingenious language.
–Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of SPIDER SEASON (Cold River Press, 2016) and GRAVITATIONAL TUG (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020)
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