Susan Hahn – författare

Charged with sensuality, ferocity, and despair, this sequence of poems follows the progress of a central character's passionate romance. Hahn's fevered book of human emotions becomes a powerful rumination on love, aging, and mutability in general. "Stitching together tropes about writing and technique, as well as hunting and the loss of sexual innocence, [Hahn] marks and exploits the body with surgical precision in order to explore the peripheries of the personal lyric. She wants to take poetry to the most tangible and sensual extremes. It's often uncomfortable, and yet as often results in a poetry of generous, piercing honesty, as if (to rewrite Bradford) it's by the body we are 'plainly told.'"--David Baker, Poetry

Confession, the companion to Incontinence, Susan Hahn's previous prize-winning book of poetry, continues the probing, visceral account of the relationship of a woman with her estranged husband and her inconstant lovers. Ingenious, disturbing, Confession will enhance an already substantial following for this exceptional poet. "Phoenix Poets is the most distinguished university press series going."--Alfred Corn "Compressed, controlled, circumscribed by the artist's discipline, the poems in Susan Hahn's Confession do not spill over; each is like a steadily held cup containing its pain."--Alicia Ostriker

Redolent of Chicago's ethnic culture, Susan Hahn's intensely personal lyrics emerge from the world of an extended Jewish family and its neighbors. The voices of these immigrants are imbued with the profound effects and memories of the journey "From a patrolled town in the Ukraine/to Baltimore on a boat, then a train to Chicago." Hahn's poetry is about love and the lack of love, about rejection, and about other forces—generational, political, social, and sexual—that overwhelm individuals and cause them to limit themselves both physically and psychologically.

Since its founding at Northwestern University in 1964, TriQuarterly has remained one of the most widely admired and important literary magazines in the country. Under the editorial direction of Susan Firestone Hahn, TriQuarterly continues to publish the best work of both established and new poets and fiction writers.Stuart DybekJohn BarthTess GallagherGail GoodwinCris MazzaKatherine MinMark WisniewskiTimothy DonnellyEamon GrennanMarilyn HackerBrian HenryAndrew HudginsCynthia HuntingtonSandra McPhersonTom SleighGary SotoVirgil SuarezDavid WagonerJoshua WeinerAlan WilliamsonSusan WoodDavid Ferry--InterviewHorrace--translated by David FerryCesare Pavese--translated by Geoffrey BrockClaire Malroux--translated by marilyn HackerCharles Baudelaire--translated by Kristin HennessyRobert WhittakerSandra M. GilbertGary AdelmanB.H. FairchildAllen GrossmanMark IrwinCampbell McGrathC. Dale YoungCarolyn AlessioKevin CaseyDavid EvanierGreg JohnsonJoe MenoLeslie PietrzykSharon SolwitzMark WinegardnerRafael CampoWensday CarltonGeri DoranSteve FayJesse Lee KerchevalTimothy LinHarriet MelroseJoseph MillarEdward NoblesD. NurkseMaureen SeatonDean ShavitReginald ShepherdRyan G. Van CleaveCharles Harper WebbEve WoodDean YoungJohn T. Lysaker

A young poet’s relationship with a predatory professor is explored through a diary, a play, and a novella dealing with themes of grief, trauma, and desire.Jennie Silver has been seduced, abused, and abandoned by Benedict Eck, a Midwestern literature professor known for being influenced by Hungarian émigré novelist Avigdor Element, and a notorious womanizer known for preying on vulnerable graduate students. In the process, Jennie keeps a diary and writes a play and a novella in her attempt to control her desperate, high-pitched emotions focused on a man she is uncontrollably drawn to and at the same time finds repugnant—a man who is one of the keepers and part of the legacy of Element’s bad behavior.Spanning a hundred years of history from when Nijinsky danced “The Afternoon of the Faun” in Paris in 1912, through World Wars I and II, to very close to the present, Losing Beck is not only a portrait of one woman’s relationship with one man, but an exploration of obsession, grief, desire, and the effects of historical trauma.“This triptych of narratives contains a plenitude of characters driven by overpowering emotions and dark motives . . . I was especially fascinated by the meticulous scrutiny of family relations, especially mother-daughter attachments, often dramatized against a backdrop of twentieth-century Jewish history.” —Laurence Goldstein, author of The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History

Holiday is a book of poems chiseled into both public and private calendar markers, where the unfinished self seeks, desperately and defiantly, resolution through either completion or negation. The poems are filled with unflinching irony and an intelligence that celebrates and laments personal, mythic, biblical, and historical events.

Losing Beck is the story of Jennie Silver, who is trying to get over a man who was greatly influenced by the renowned Hungarian emigré novelist Avigdor Element. Spanning a hundred years of history from when Nijinsky danced “The Afternoon of the Faun” in Paris in 1912, through World Wars I and II, to very close to the present, Jennie keeps a diary, writes a play and a novella in her attempt to control her desperate, high-pitched emotions focused on a man she is uncontrollably drawn to and at the same time finds repugnant. A man who is one of the keepers and part of the legacy of Element’s bad behavior.