Self / Pity: Poems

Drawing on history, myth, folk rhymes, human physiology, and the psyche’s crevices, Susan Hahn’s Self/Pity is a relentless journey of the self through time, into the labyrinth of the present with its own stimuli and despairs. She strikes a delicate balance of contrast and collision between the various linked poems in this collection, which all deal with birth, the body, and the soul. As with her previous collections, the poems in Self/Pity can be read as a cohesive whole. From the simple prayer
To Jacob Four Months In The Womb
to the complex territory of the poem sequence
The Pornography of Pity,
in which Mother Goose, the Marquis de Sade, Godot, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, The Cat and the Fiddle, Zeus, and many others are called upon, Hahn creates a tour-de-force exploration of the book’s central themes.