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My poem, published some years ago in Words Dance magazine.

Happy National Poetry Month!

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FINISHING LINE PRESS CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY:

My Coney Island by Susan E. Oringel

$14.99, paper

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/my-coney-island-by-susan-e-oringel/

Susan E. Oringel is a poet and writer, a teacher of creative writing, and a psychologist in private practice in the New York Capital District. She has published in various literary journals and has also served as co-translator of a collection of Latin American poetry: Messengers of Rain, published by Groundwoods Press, 2002, 2011. Her chapbook manuscripts How The Body and My Coney Island were finalists in the Slapering Hol’ Press contest, 1997 and 2017 competitions. Fellowships and awards include Individual Artist award from the Albany-Schenectady League of Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an SOS award sponsored by the New York State Council of the Arts.

Coney Island is not only a vividly evoked place, but a history of the country and of a family. Issues of immigration, assimilation, and belonging thread subtly but clearly through these poems; the public and the personal inter- twine. Astutely, Oringel finds in the carnival rides and parades, the drag and burlesque queens and freak shows “places where old morality gave way….” and sees too the oceanfront as a place of escape from daily hard work, and “from what was, is, surely waiting.” Through the lives of struggle and dreams of a better future, Oringel’s empathetic gift finds “the will, indomitable,” in her mother in “La Vie en Gris,” and prays for the same in “poor everybody,” in the poem of that title. These are rich, sustaining poems.

–Joan Aleshire

PREORDER SHIPS JUNE 7, 2019

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/my-coney-island-by-susan-e-oringel/ #FLP #poetry #chapbook

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My poem, published 4 years ago in Words Dance Magazine...I’m looking up my old poems in celebration of National Poetry Month!

Poem continued here: “Heartless“ by Beatriz F. Fernandez published on Words Dance.

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Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.

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Celebrating at the Provost’s Office @fiu faculty authors’ reception in the campus Barnes and Noble bookstore!  My second chapbook, The Ocean Between Us, published by Backbone Press, can be purchased there or @backbonepress’s website:  http://backbonepress.org/.  This chapbook has poems about Puerto Rico and Florida, my two homes.

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Announcing forthcoming publication of my new poetry chapbook!

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I’m very proud to be included in a wonderful new issue of Whale Road Review!  

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Happy Birthday to me!  My contributor copies of Thirty West Publishing House’s poetry challenge arrived!  The winning pieces of the weekly challenges are published, along with others.  (Mine were sonnets) These are handbound chaplets by Josh Dale of TWPH.

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My friend Joss Whedon made this powerful short film. Take a look and consider standing with @plannedparenthood: ppaction.org/Unlocked

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Thirty West Publishing House produces hand-bound chaplets and chapbooks.  As I previously posted, they recently chose my poem "The Surest Poison" as winner of their sonnet challenge (part of their celebration of National Poetry Month) and now editor Josh Dale is publishing a chaplet of all the weekly challenge winners!  It will include work from four different writers and four different genres/forms, and will include my winning sonnet as well as a second sonnet "Blood Pacts."  Many thanks to TWPH for their support of poetry and writers!  I would like to learn to make hand-bound chaps like these!  In Josh's picture, you see some of the tools he uses and the resulting chapbooks.

P.S. If you look closely at the second picture, you will see that my two poems happened to fall in the middle pages of the chaplet!

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I just supported Pink Out to Protect Care at PP on @ThunderclapIt // @PPFA

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Sitting Behind the Wheel Makes Us Think We're in Control

by Rina Caparras

How foolish we are—driving under the stars inside a borrowed car, talking about the home we would share, the places we would go, the things we would do. Talking as if the path to the future was laid before our feet, talking as if we weren’t shuffling like blind little ants inside a petri dish. We could chase the moon all night and never get there. You could step on the gas, but we’d just bump on whatever’s in front of us— a car, an island, a tree, a child. It’s like that day I caught a firefly: I held it for so long, that it was dead by the time I unclasped my hands. The stars are kind, but everything that lives has to share their light.

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At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.

Warsan Shire (via upflyingwords)

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Three of my historical persona poems published by The Copperfield Review...check out their historical fiction author interviews!