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Suzannah Gail Collins

I am the author of a poetry chapbook, I Will Meet You at the River, (as Suzannah Gilman), frequent traveler, and a licensed attorney who represented victims of domestic violence under a grant from the U.S. Dept. of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. My poetry, essays, fiction, and nonfiction have in such in such publications as The Florida Review, Pearl Magazine, Calyx Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Pearl Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Slow Trains, The Cafe Review, and The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. I competed in flash fiction slams, winning every time. I won Literary Death Match on my 50th birthday. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry, I now concentrate on blogging for The Gloria Sirens and writing fiction. I have four children, four daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren. I live with my husband, the poet Billy Collins, in Florida.

I call. You’re stone. / One day you’ll look and find I’m gone. – Poetry of the Pashtun Women

[The landays] lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love… the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.