Hannah Cohen
ISBN: 978-1-949099-17-1
21 pages
In Hannah Cohen's beautiful, haunting Year of the Scapegoat, faith, lineage, and history tangle at their tough roots: God, father, and negation. Here, despite deep estrangement and loss, the speakers of this collection go on, interrogating their existential purpose as their relationships to complicated figures both familiar and spiritual shift over time. Faith is burden in Year of the Scapegoat, but it is also survival, as the speaker of the poem "This is Not a Kaddish" so powerfully puts it: "Even in a month / of dying, the stupid birds outside / my door pray."
— Rachel Mennies, author of The Naomi Letters
The poems in Hannah Cohen's Year of the Scapegoat speak with the deadpan defiance of a sacrificial daughter and the unflinching skepticism of a recovering believer. In this chapbook, father and God become the same empty space, the same pulsating abandonment. But those deadbeats are a dead heart still beating. "Are you a metaphor, // or did I make you into one?" she asks. The inheritance of absence is a barbed one that never stops hurting or drawing blood. "I am ghost and ghosting and ghosted. I haunt myself," Cohen says. These beautifully wry poems are a reclamation of identity and heritage from the hungry mouths of fear and faithlessness. They are both unapologetic and aching.
— Lindsay Lusby, author of Catechesis: a postpastoral
Glass Poetry Press
Precision · Vision · Inclusion
Year of the Scapegoat
Cover by Liorah Tchiprout
$8.50
Sample poem from Year of the Scapegoat:
Daughterland
To be eldest is to be the sentence
before the trial.
Even the exodus left me to wreck
and conquer.
All for a heritage
of lack.
I've ruined, drunk, and promised.
Botched my anthems.
I was not born here,
I could never.
I've had my own zip code
for years now.
I am tired.
Mine is a country
of excisions.
A citizen unother.
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Hannah Cohen resides in Virginia with her two cats. She's a graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Bad Anatomy (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). Hannah co-edits the online literary journal Cotton Xenomorph. Publications include Pigeonholes, Qu Lit Mag, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cherry Tree, Entropy, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and has spoken on several literary panels and roundtables. She was a Best of the Net 2018 finalist and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
