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Yael S. Hacohen

The Dove That Didnt Return

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.

-Maggie Smith

 

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.

-Edward Hirsch

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Between Sanctity and Sand

Between Sanctity and Sand book cover

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.

-Yusef Komunyakaa

 

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.

-Edward Hirsch

 

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.

-Deborah Landau

 

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.

-Craig Morgan Teicher

Awards andPublicatons

Publications

Awards


Winner of the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award
Finalist
in 2021 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest.
Honorable Mention in the 43rd New Millennium Awards for Flash Fiction.

Semi-Finalist in the 2017 American Short(er) Fiction​  Prize.
Finalist in the 2017 Schlafly Micro-Fiction Contest.
Longlisted in the 2017 Fish Publishing Prize in Flash Fiction.

Finalist in the 2016 Consequence ‎Prize in Poetry.
Finalist in the 2015 Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize.
Finalist in the 2013 MSLexia Poetry Prize for Women.‎

Teffillah Ne'ilah, LIT 
Book Review for Poet Warrior: A Memoir, Colorado Review

The Flock
, New York Quarterly Magazine
Pillar of Cloud, New York Quarterly Magazine
Genesis, The Missouri Review, the BLAST series
Ironstone, a Sonnet, Comstock Review
The First Time Rockets Fall in Tel Aviv, Mudfish
PeacePrairie Schooner

A Letter to Whoever is Wearing My BootsTreehouse
What I Forgot from my WarsThe Poetry Review
The Weight of a Jericho 941,  The Poetry Review

Identity Card, Consequence ‎Literary Review.
I Never Saw a Wild Thing Sorry for Itself, Bellevue Literary Review.
Fortitude, Wrath Bearing Tree
Pre-Traumatic Stress, Wrath Bearing Tree
The First Time Rockets Fall in Tel Aviv, Nine Lines Review.
Chamal, Nine Lines Review.
Unexplained, Every Day Poets ‎Magazine.
Michal Doesn’t Like Ants, MSLexia Magazine.‎

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