Featured Poet

Featured Illinois Poet

Although this website's objective is simply to promote the art of poetry, its special focus is the rich bounty of work created by our state's poets past and present. Through features on the work of Illinois poets, the site will highlight the poetic legacy of Illinois and showcase the bevy of fine poets currently writing within the state.

Biographical Note

Susan HahnSusan Hahn

Susan Hahn's poems are voyages into the uncharted seas of self and other, and perhaps, self as other. Her poems embrace the equal risks of the known and the not, the vital current where the unknowable and the revelatory swirl into a heady torrent. That tide is the human tide, carrying us off toward some destination we can't yet imagine. Thus, things are always beginning in Hahn's poems, things incipient and underway in both flesh and idea. Her poems show us that being born is something that happens more than once in our human lives.

Susan Hahn is a poet, playwright and the Editor of TriQuarterly literary magazine. She has published five volumes of poetry: Harriet Rubin's Mother's Wooden Hand (1991), Incontinence (1993), Confession (1997), Holiday (2001), and Mother In Summer (2002). A sixth volume, Self/Pity, will be published in Spring 2005. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including several Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, and Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, The George Kent Prize from Poetry magazine, The Society of Midland Authors Award, two Pushcart Prizes and a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first play opens in February, 2005 at Circle Theatre in Forest Park, Illinois.

Susan Hahn's Poems

Perennial - HTML
Perennial - Audio

"Perennial"

Confession - HTML
 

"Confession"

Incontinence - HTML
Incontinence - Audio

"Incontinence"

Nijinksy's Dog - HTML
 

"Nijinksy's Dog"

O Baby O - HTML
O Baby O - Audio

"O Baby O"

 
Holiday - Audio

"Holiday"

 
Pity Dance for a Small Troupe - Audio

"Pity Dance for a Small Troupe"

 
Pity Song In Solo Voice without Accompaniment - Audio

"Pity Song In Solo Voice without Accompaniment"