Susanna Lang

I want my poems to turn outward, towards other lives and other worlds, and the physical world we are all immersed in, rather than to recount my own small existence. This is how I understand the poetry of witness—witness not only to the injustices and bereavements that we should all find intolerable, but to the wonder of other lives. I want my poems to pay tribute to what we all live, and to what we all could lose. John Hersey said that “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.” I want my poems to be that kind of memory.