Deborah Bogen

Poet and Novelist

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IN CASE OF SUDDEN FREE FALL

click here to get to Jacar order pg - then click 2017 and scroll down to Free Fall

LET ME OPEN YOU A SWAN

LANDSCAPE WITH SILOS

THE WITCH OF LEPER COVE

E-mail Me

what are you working on?

POETRY

IN CASE OF SUDDEN FREE FALL

Chosen by Helene Cordona for the 2017 Jacar Press Poetry Book Award, "Free Fall" contains a suite of poems chosen by Jericho Brown for the 2016 New Letters Poetry Prize.

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
"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

Landscape With Silos

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

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.'"

UPCOMING READINGS

Free Assiciation Reading Series at Al[habet City, 40 North Ave. Pittsburgh

March 5, 2023, 3:30 p.m.

Pittsburgh Festival of the Book, Theology School on Higland Ave.

May 13, 2023

Hemingways at White Whale Bookstore, Pittsburgh

June 27, 2023

New Jersey Literacy Series,

Spet 10, 2023

a preview

Bodies

I've been thinking about your body.And the

box they put it in. Wondering if you're still in

there. If a hand under the lip of the box might

be a way of climbing in, or being in there with

you--

because once we were sisters. We thought our

bodies were eternal. And, sweetheart, isn't

that every girl's mistake? My hands ache to

touch your face, to brush the bangs from your

eyes. When they took you, when they closed

the lid on the box, I wished I was a button on

your blouse.

Some other work:

I hope you have time to check Supersition Review which features four new ekphrstic poems, as well as the art that was the trigger. The artist, Akiba Emanuel, (father of poet Lynn Emanuel) painted dynamic and disturbing paintings in response to the Holocaust and his work is worth your time. Click on the link below and it will take you into the issue.

Superstition Review Issue 12

here are the poems written in response to Akiba Emanuel's amazing paintings.

Join us to Find a Cure for Crohn's and Colitis

reading in Paris - fun!

WHO YOU ARE READING??

"Noose and Hook", Lynn Emanuel's new book is enthralling. She has a center section called "The Mongrelogues" you will not want to miss. For more poetry try BH Fairchild's "Usher" and Merwin's "The Shadow of Sirius". For Prose - I just discovered Robertson Davies, "The Deptford Trilogy." As of book one this is a keeper - more soon. I also recommend Cathy Day's "Circus in Winter." It's really marvelous -- complicated, fascinating and artful. I recommend it highly. You will be glad to read it, and be loaning it to your friends when you're done. Who should I be reading?

WEIRD REVISION TECHNIQUE

You've been working on a poem. There's something there. You're pretty sure there's something there. I mean, there must be a reason you are coming back to this one. But you're feeling stuck. Try this. Read your poem out loud - work on it for a bit if anything comes to mind. THEN get out a copy of HOWL (you own Howl, right?) and stand up in your living room or office or wherever you are - and read a big part of HOWL outloud. At full voice. I like to use Section II - the Moloch section. I tell you - this will move things around in your head. Then go back to your poem. If you have a good tip on revision send it to me at dbbogen@aol.com.