Deborah Bogen

LET ME OPEN YOU A SWAN

What we have in Deborah Bogen's Let Me Open You a Swan is sublime poetry, the rare gift of a terrifying look into the shaping of a warrior poet and her work. Michelle Mitchell-Foust

Deborah Bogen's ravishing second book, Let Me Open You a Swan, brims with intellect and artistry. The sharp intelligence of these poems manifests itself in muscular analogies and in images that bristle with complexity...In Bogen, suffering cannot be transcended, and yet, while tribulation is fiercely present, it brings to the world an ironic and stubborn luster,a glint,a scintilla of light. Let Me Open You a Swan is a vibrant and wholly original work." Lynn Emanuel

Deborah Bogen's Let Me Open You a Swan is a book of distilled emotional grit. She sees clearly into the past with a fierce imagination that brings forward the body's cargo of mortality, the physical vs. the metaphysical. She intensifies and amplifies personal myth so that her endings turn us both inward and outward -- where our only solace, our chance at resolution might be this charged examination of our soul's situation --that knowledge like a small flame just in front of us. Christopher Buckley

Selected Works

poetry
Winner of the 2009 Antivenom from Elixir Press "What we have in Deborah Bogen's 'Let Me Open You a Swan' is sublime poetry, the rare gift of a terrifying look into the shaping of a warrior poet and her work. Michelle Mitchell-Foust.
Poetry
Here are some poems that are not in either book.
 Poetry
Landscape With Silos was a National Poetry Series Finalist and Winner of the 2005 XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize

"Deb Bogen writes poetry that is naked and necessary, unadorned and political, intelligent and genereous. The book brims with intelligence." ---Carol Frost
Living by the Children's Cemetery was Winner of the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook Competition

Judge Edward Hirsch commented that the book "provides a profound answer to the poet's own call for 'someting sinister, something/ fragile, something Bessie Smith/ could sing.'"