The Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) is is hosting award-winning author, playwright, and poet Susan Hahn to the store on Thursday, May 16 at 6:30 pm to discuss her new book of poetry, Corner Office. Multi-talented Hahn returns to poetry after two novels with a book-length poem in three voices, Man, Woman, and Earth, that reflects her experience as a playwright. Ms. Hahn will be happy to sign her work! This event is free with registration, to register, please visit book store’s website or CLICK HERE.
Edward Hirsch says, “There are three recurring speakers in Susan Hahn’s quirky, wistful fantasia, a book-length meditation on lost power, the story of man and woman, the earth as it once was, how it might have been, what we’ve done to it. Corner Office is a dramatic poem that manages to be both contemporary and archetypal.”
In praise for her earlier works, David Kirby from the Chicago Tribune says, “Reviewers of Hahn’s earlier books have linked her work to that of the confessional poets of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with the lurid, tell-all poems of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Plath. The resemblance is there, but Hahn can’t be written off as a mere neo-confessional, because her poetry is much more deeply rooted in the American mindset than that. For the Gothic viewpoint accounts for everything the founding fathers overlooked: terror, perversity, strangeness, a sense of not knowing where one is or how one got there. It is a way of viewing the world that continues to affect American writing and that appears in works by such recent authors as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. And now we can add Susan Hahn’s name to that list.”
Susan Hahn is the author of ten books of poetry, two produced plays, and two novels. Among her awards for writing are a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, Pushcart prizes, The Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry, and numerous Illinois Arts Council Fellowships and Literary Awards. She was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Hemingway Foundation, the editor of Triquarterly literary magazine for fourteen years, and the co-founder of Triquarterly Books. Learn more at www.susanhahnauthor.com.
Indeed, the comparison between her lifestyle and those in the detention facility were totally different. Pryor was from wealthy suburb, a background unfathomable to the girls she found herself living with—many of whom came from foster homes or were homeless and had lived on the streets. Pryor had become pregnant during a long term relationship with her boyfriend. Others had been raped and sexually abused. Feeling abandoned by her parents (her mom visited twice, her father once—family and friends were told she was ill and at the Mayo Clinic), Pryor learned to forge friendships with the other women who were locked up with her.
Shelf Life 