Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-64, 65-67).
Summary:
""I'm staying among strangers," Susan Cohen declares in the "Letter Home" that opens her new volume of poems. A page or two later, in a description of two people viewing a painting, "our heads bent / to the same work of understanding the world," she admits "Still, I have no idea what you are seeing." This sense of isolation and detachment, and the corresponding longing for place and connection, run through these poems, which weave together several strands of observation. Her background as a science journalist informs several poems reflecting on lessons from "science news": the previously unknown glow of amphibians illuminating "how much we cannot see, and yet we stomp everywhere," while the lost legs of ancient snakes remind us "some prospect is no longer within reach." She envies the jellyfish for "living without architecture, outside of history." Yet she also writes love poems from the vantage of long marriage, and studies Yiddish as a way back into memory, heritage, and history. And yes, she surveys the contemporary horrors of school shootings, racial violence, and environmental catastrophe, but reserves her most important lesson for her closing image, which also furnished the book with its title: amidst the ruins of yet another California forest fire, she observes how "the flames choose what to burn / in this raging democracy of fire," leaving the survivors to set aside their differences in recognition of their "shared citizenship of flesh. / Here's to the live and kicking, / those with hungers and with thirsts.""-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.