Susan Cohen's third and newest book of poems is Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Books; 2022). A former journalist, award-winning science writer, and contributing writer to the Washington Post Magazine, she received an MFA from Pacific University. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, many anthologies, and recently won the Red Wheelbarrow Prize and the Annual Poetry Prize from Terrain.org. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Other poems by Susan Cohen in Verse Daily:
December 22, 2005:   "Two Ways" " When I find a bird this morning..."

Books by Susan Cohen:

Other poems on the web by Susan Cohen:
Two poems
Five poems
Two poems
Two poems
"Poem with an Embedded Line"
"Omens Being Bad"
"Afterlife"
"Bright Clutter"
"I Imagine Myself Grateful"
"Anthropometry"
"Canine"

Susan Cohen's Website.

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

"At this historical, political and ecological moment, with democracy and our earth aflame, could there be a more timely or relevant collection than Susan Cohen's powerful, wise and deeply humane book of poetry, DEMOCRACY OF FIRE? Here, the many losses we experience both daily and across time—losses both cultural and personal—are mitigated by the act of memory and a faith in, well, the facts of our world and our capacity for intimate reckonings. Once again, Susan Cohen has shown herself to be one of the most compassionate recorders of our complicated times."
—David St. John

"Susan Cohen shows how science and poetry can interact, not in opposition, but with insight and wonder. Attentive to visual detail, these poems are rhythmically alive and play with language, finding 'inside languages, a lung and its lunge for breath.' They create micro-arenas where human limitation, adaptation, evolution, and climate change are handled with care. Replete with dense, rich sounds—'marbled salamander, Cranwell's horned frog, newt with neon stripes'—they are also willing to embrace mystery: 'if you can learn to love the fist of darkness, let it close around you.'"
—Arthur Sze