Susan E. Oringel has announced that her poetry chapbook My Coney Island will be published this June by Finishing Line Press.
My Coney Island is a trip through Coney, the lives of her parents (who were raised there ten blocks from each other, but who never met until Susan’s father came home from the war), 9-11, and other losses, and her coming to terms with my parents’ lives and deaths. As Joan Aleshire remarked, “For Susan Oringel, Coney Island is not only a vividly evoked place, but a history of the country and of a family.”
You can pre-order at Finishing Line Press website. The pre-publication order period is from February 12-April 12, 2019 and the press run will be determined by the number of pre-publication orders, but you can order any time!
For Susan Oringel, Coney Island is not only a vividly evoked place, but a history of the country and of a family. Issues of immigration, assimilation, and belonging thread subtly but clearly through these poems; the public and the personal inter-twine. Astutely, Oringel finds in the carnival rides and parades, the drag and burlesque queens and freak shows “places where old morality gave way….”and sees too the oceanfront as a place of escape from daily hard work, and“from what was, is, surely waiting.” Through the lives of struggle and dreams of a better future, Oringel’s empathetic gift finds “the will, indomitable,” in her mother in “La Vie en Gris,” and prays for the same in “poor everybody,” in the poem of that title. These are rich, sustaining poems.
– Joan Aleshire
Susan E. Oringel is a poet and writer, a teacher of creative writing, and a psychologist in private practice in the NY Capital District. A graduate of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program, she has published in various literary journals such as Blueline, The Maryland Poetry Review (second prize in the Egan Memorial Poetry Contest), snowapple, crania, the writers community news, and the National Council of Teachers of English English Journal. She has also served as co-translator of a collection of Latin American poetry: Messengers of Rain, published by Groundwoods Press, 2002 and 2011. Her chapbook manuscripts How The Body and My Coney Island were finalists in the Slapering Hol’ Press 1997 and 2017 competitions. Fellowships and awards include Individual Artist award from the Albany-Schenectady League of Arts, a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and an SOS award sponsored by the New York State Council of the Arts. She most recently taught creative writing at Hudson Valley Community College for fourteen years and previously taught writing at Empire State College and Schenectady Community College.
