Poetry Book 1

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After the Firestorm (Mayapple Press, 2011).  

Figuring consciousness not as a stream but as a body of water composed of layers of clarity and obscurity, Kolodny's wise poems ask "Do we risk more when we look/ or when we look away?" This question weds lyric poet and psychoanalyst, both of whom make shapes that hold experience so its depths and complexities can be seen into more fully.  After the Firestorm allows safe access to "the quieter beneath the quiet," and serves as in intelligent, courageous guide to "a place not human...without air," where "some terror has swum through..."

Transformed by the poet's compassionate vision, "the black shadow/ in the green water" becomes "a door held open." I urge the intrepid reader to enter it.

                                                                                                                      Brian Teare

Susan Kolodny gives one of the many voices in the title poem its say: "We don't suspect the griefs that await. Nor what is dormant, under the blackened earth." These poems and their author, a psychoanalyst, walk a difficult line between the sensory world and its dormant, invisible depths, where a neuroanatomy student observes, "The dissection proceeds but not/ to the layers we dream from." After the Firestorm showcases a brilliant observer of the natural world and her haunting, investigatory questions.

                                                                                                                    Janet Holmes 

Susan Kolodny's poems are gems of evocative perception...a highly accomplished poet

--deft, precise, and thoroughly engaging.

                                                                                                                   Steve Kowit