Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Redivider, One Art, Anti-Heroin Chic, TAB Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Spillway 29, and Plainsongs. This book, her first full-length collection, was the winner of the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award. Versions of this book were named finalists for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize (2021), the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024). In 2021 she received a Parent Poet Fellowship for Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing’s summer conference. Ms. Coronel holds an M.S. Ed. in Applied Linguistics from the City University of New York (Queens College) and a B.A. in English from Indiana-University Bloomington.
PRAISE:
“The mandible of time opens & closes,” writes Susan Michele Coronel. “I flash forward to erase/ what’s lost.” In her debut full-length collection, In the Needle, a Woman, Coronel stitches together a creature called “time” to examine, not only her own lineage, but the legacy she will pass onto her daughters. Time truly is a creature — hungry and golden — “a copperhead seeking its yellow tail,” and one that is “thirsty for the past.” Retracing her family’s trauma back to the pogroms in Europe, as well as her own childhood of the ‘70s, we are transported to a pre-teen wood paneled “basement, tuning in to radio static that crackled under a dangling bulb . . . coating our tongues bright gold.” Donnie and Marie, Barbies, and Judy Blume’s Are You There, God, It’s Me Margaret? are stitched into this tale with a needle from the heart, and “in the needle, a woman.” The speaker (“this monster”) has withstood the untimely death of her brother, divorce, estrangement from her children, and “listens to Nick Cave and grinds stone with its teeth.” Susan Michele Coronel has written a memoir in verse, a muscular book with “hooves,” a collection that we all need to read.
–Jennifer Martelli, author of Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree
Compelling and remarkably honest, In the Needle, A Woman investigates both the softer and sharper edges of our unique emotional landscapes in a series of exciting, accessible poems that explore equally the strengths and frailties of the human condition in its varied aspects — personal identity, grief, relationships, family, and slowly mending hearts. Weaving together universal open-hearted narratives into a poignant collection, In the Needle, A Woman is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, reminding us of the beautiful complexities of being human.
–John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another
In gorgeous phrasing and rhythm, in the depths of song, and sometimes in the depths of grief, Susan Michele Coronel writes “my mouth opens / a fig of faith in a coppice of eucalyptus & cedar / I am the new eve” and indeed the poems here mark the beginning of what must be lived when the past’s cinders are spread across generations. Here are poems that sift through the grief of lost siblings, strained marriages, and the anxiety and joys of what comes next for the children, to discover what is left of what’s been passed down—the myths and the stories that save us: “Children always refuse, / but it’s still better to ask them to carry something /than to come to the table of the future empty-handed.”
–Julia Lisella, author of Our Lively Kingdom
An exploration of the feminine and all its iterations, In the Needle, a Woman encompasses the beauty and divinity found in the evolution from girlhood to teenager to young adult to adult now caring for the elders, while at the same time bearing witness to the mistakes we all make, the flaws we all have, the wishes and regrets all sewn together into the complexity of being human. An important read that reminds one of how essential our relationships with our feminine relatives, ancestors, and selves are to our sense of being and belonging.
–Anne Marie Wells, author of Survived By
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