Deborah Gorlin is the author of three books of poems, BODILY COURSE, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, 1997; LIFE OF THE GARMENT, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize; and OPEN FIRE, Bauhan, 2023. A retired co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she served for many years as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals including Poetry; American Poetry Review; Bomb, Best Spiritual Writing 2000, Plume; On the Seawall; the Ekphrastic Review; Mass Poetry: the Hard Work of Hope; The Common; and Yetzirah.

Other poems on the web by Deborah Gorlin:
Two poems
"A Word from Death during the Pandemic"
"Sweet Seed in the Rock"
"No Uncertain Terms"
"Beautiful Worry"

Deborah Gorlin's Website.

About Open Fire:

"Meditation, investigation, imagination, sensation, fascination, revelation—this one extraordinary book has it all. Gorlin grips the material world in the tough, keen, metaphorically brilliant fist of her language. Enter where 'souls point down,' and where 'pure thought' is the 'satin lining in the heavy coat of feeling.' Enjoy with the war photographer Lee Miller the 'ironic desecration' of a soak 'In Hitler's bathtub.' Sing like Philomena, raped and mutilated by her sister's husband, turned into a nightingale. Follow the life and death of the fashionista Isabella Blow, whose sexuality was 'an accessory,' whose costumes were 'murder made gorgeous.' Notice how 'the flared cuffs' of Emily Dickinson's white dress are 'beginning wings.' Be a tree. Be masked like a family of crows scenting out decay,'their red subjects/ splayed like porn, cawing their broken/ syntax.' Recognize and accept our human condition: 'we are our own wolves / circling the campfire.' Become as ambiguous as the phrase 'open fire,' embodying savagery and safety at once—like this book."
—Alicia Ostriker

"Such vastness of mind animates Deborah Gorlin's sensuous, urgent, processual poems which gleam with time like the mouths of geodes. In Open Fire, Gorlin presses her voices through histories, myths, and personae, further accessing all of her life: '...joining its red skin, I will use my fear...' With surprising, secret turns in the syntax and line, she makes beauty, always, in the shiftful eye of death 'because never // again in time assembled into this human being...' This work is a flourishing. Intimate, daring, acquainted with death, and alive — alive to what comes and what has been. "
—Aracelis Girmay

"Like the harmony of the spheres, the music of Open Fire is elemental, emanating from heaving earth, from rent garments, from internal organs. Gorlin holds a tuning fork to flesh and runs forensics on myths in this richly physical collection — it's gorgeous!"
—Eula Biss