Yael S. Hacohen
The Dove That Didn't Return
Published by Holy Cow! Press, 2024
Praise for The Dove That Didn't Return
Yael Hacohen’s The Dove That Didn’t Return is a transformative book. You may enter this collection thinking you know what it means to be a woman, a mother, a soldier, a witness. You may enter it thinking you know plenty about violence and loss, duty and commitment, tenderness and mercy. But you will leave this book with different wisdom. Hacohen’s unforgettable poems express— above all else, what it means to be human.
Sacred and profane, biblically infused yet utterly contemporary, Yael Hacohen’s beautiful, harrowing, war-torn, and soulful lyrics leave me shaken and uplifted. The Dove That Didn’t Return is timely and timeless.
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Between Sanctity and Sand
Between Sanctity and Sand
Published by Finishing Line Press, 2021
Praise for Between Sanctity and Sand
A quietude lives in Between Sanctity and Sand-through Yael Shoshana Hacohen's strong voice.
An heir to Yehuda Amichai, Yael Hacohen is a young poet with an old soul, and her harrowing, war-torn lyrics bring something utterly fresh into American poetry-a shocked memory of military life, a desert consciousness that hovers between the sacred and the profane, and an awe-inspiring sense of poetry that is both ancient and new. This short book is a gem.
What a revelatory and painful pleasure it is to read the fierce lyrics in Yael Hacohen's Between Sanctity and Sand; this formidable debut packs a punch, conjuring the terrors of war while retaining the tender humanity and intimacies of song.
Yael S. Hacohen's poems conjure, with vivid, soul-piercing immediacy, the view from behind a soldier's eyes, drawing on her experience as a commander in the Israeli military. In one poem, a young trainee feels the first awesome thrill of a weapon in her hand: "I could shoot like an angel./ I could hit a running target/ at six-hundred-fifty meters." Terrifying moments are rendered as if in time-lapse photography: "After he shoots, you want to shoot back, but you didn't/ put in the time. And now you can't get your breathing straight." The speaker of one of these poems even grieves her enemy: "Little boy, what could lead you to strap a bomb to your chest?" Hacohen neither shrinks from nor condemns war; she seek to comprehend it, to acknowledge its persistence. "Listen, even the olive tree/ needs to be beaten with a stick," she advises, which is perhaps to say you can love your enemy and still not have peace.