Self/Pity

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.

"Poet and playwright Hahn has a uniquely spiky sensibility and a wit at once decorous and subversive. In her sixth collection, she extends her startling, erotic, and wily inquiry into the endless skirmishes between the rampant mind and its house of flesh, blood, and bone by combining a droll metaphysics with lyrical science." --Booklist, starred review

"This new work by Triquarterly editor Hahn (Mother in Summer) begins and ends in the womb, its subject being the human body and its 'interior music.' The author is thus able to create (by means of alliteration and assonance) the sound of the event--so that the baby in the mother's belly can hear "the hum of himself" that we, the readers in the "outside world," overhear and grasp. How does this poet do it? By employing her musically gifted ear in various rhythmical ways, resulting in lines like 'The cradle understands its own/ determination. The heart/...forms its thump,/ thump, thump announcement.' The music of such lines is so unpredictable and intense that it becomes almost the poem's meaning. In the end, this book is both revealing and very satisfying." --Library Journal

"Susan Hahn's new book, Self/Pity, is beautiful, highly original, and brilliantly organized. Like her other books, it is full of inventive surprise, shifts of register, unexpected turns of idea and feeling and, also like her other books, with all this unexpectedness, there is no diffusion or scattering of effect. Self/Pity is powerfully centered so that each poem gathers and uses the strength of the others." --David Ferry