Susanna Lang

Susanna Lang is a retired teacher who spent most of her career in the Chicago Public Schools, working with students who spoke a variety of first languages and found English to be a mystery, as she does herself. She is a poet and translator, and continues to lead poetry workshops throughout the Chicago area. Her reviews of poetry collections are available at Rhino Poetry. 

Besides My Soul Has No Corners, her translations include Words in Stone (1976) and The Origin of Language (1979) by Yves Bonnefoy, as well as Baalbek by Nohad Salameh (2021). She is working now with Hélène Dorion on a translation of Mes foréts (My Forests, 2019). Her translations have appeared in such publications as Asymptote, Delos, Tupelo Quarterly, The Literary Review, Transference, Columbia Journal, Ezra, Mayday and OOMPH! Journal. 

Susanna’s most recent collection of original poems is the chapbook Like This (2023). Other titles include Among Other Stones: Conversations with Yves Bonnefoy (2021), Travel Notes from the River Styx (2017), Tracing the Lines (2013), and Even Now (2008). Travel Notes from the River Styx was reviewed in Cider Press Review, in The Book Lover’s Boudoir and in Today’s Book of Poetry: “Today’s book of poetry’s first impression of Susanna Lang’s Travel Notes from the River Styx is of a haunting, a ghost trail, a ghost voice.  Or perhaps it is just affectionate trepidation.  But Lang’s poems get between your fingers and toes like mud or mist, flowing where they want.  These poems are not incantations but they are certainly precarious spells of some kind.”