Nina Kossman Poetry | Prominent American poet

Nina Kossman’s poetry is marked by a graceful blend of memory, myth, and emotional depth. Her work often explores themes of exile, identity, and the fragile boundaries between past and present. Drawing on her Russian-Jewish heritage, she writes with a voice that feels both intimate and universal, carrying echoes of displacement and the search for belonging. Kossman’s imagery is vivid—sometimes dreamlike, sometimes sharply realistic—yet always anchored in a quiet emotional intensity.

Her poems frequently move between tenderness and melancholy, revealing how personal history shapes one’s inner world. She also engages deeply with classical mythology, transforming ancient stories into modern reflections on desire, grief, and transformation. What makes her poetry memorable is its clarity of language paired with layers of subtle meaning. With each poem, Nina Kossman invites readers to pause, reflect, and listen to the quiet truths hidden beneath everyday experience.

Nina Kossman 

Words for the Road
What is a flower
that never opens?    
        
What is a word   
that remains unsaid?

What is a rock
that does not get thrown?     
      
What is an island
that remains uninhabited?

What is a thought                  
that remains unfocused?

What is a child
that remains unborn?

What is a homeland
that is forgotten?

What is an animal
that becomes extinct?

What is beauty
that is not set apart?

What are eyes
that do not see beauty?

What is a protest
that does not destroy
symbols that dot the landscape?

What is a landscape
that is made of symbols?

What is history
but new meanings
for symbols worn out by time?

Untitled
Avoid the lingering memory
of midnight blossom amidst the woods
and don't look at anyone closely:
mortality is contagious.
And when you fall for a human voice,
and it reminds you of godlike emptiness,
remember: what survives is the worst
of human intelligence.

Untitled 
Time had no claim on him
and beauty had no hold:
in the dried-out backyards of the mind
his soul flowered and observed 
the sun setting early in the morning glories,
their petals closing for a day-long sleep,
the dark, arriving full of shadows, concealing
the flowers' future in the opening leaves...
And who was he, to urge them to unfold,
if sleep was what they were meant for in this life, 
if their immortality came wrapped in somnolence,
when the air was made of witching words
and sprouted blue and purple petals
that folded into themselves and withered
before he had a chance to see them face to face?

Life Cycle of a Butterfly
Fortunate one,
born two days ago,
you have twelve more days to live,
a whole eternity,
depending on how you think about it,
but you don’t think
this way or that,
all you do is flap-flap
your pretty wings,
newborn butterfly,
you circle my lilac tree,
it, too, has only one month to bloom;
you don’t worry about mortality
nor stay in your room
to guard yourself from the flu,
you’re happy
to be alive this moment,
because this moment is life,
and that's all that matters.
Fortunate one,
born two days ago,
you have no memories
of being a helpless cocoon;
why can’t we be like you,
beautiful butterfly,
why can’t we flap our wings
and be thoughtless
like you.

Thetis to Achilles     
"What is it, she said,
 that strange mask you put on?
It sticks to your face
and you can't pull it off anymore,
no matter how hard you try.
“Not that you ever try to pull it off",
she mused after a brief silence.
"You're quite happy with this mask
which you like to think is your new self.
But even if you fool the entire world,
did you really think you could fool your mother?
I know you, I'm all too familiar
with that scrawny boy you want to forget.
 Now, with this shield, this helmet,
and this mask of a warrior —
even if everyone believes you're the tough guy,
the warrior, the real man, the hero,
the conqueror of the Trojans,
do not assume that I, too, will be fooled by it.
Do not come to your mother and act
like the hero that you are to the world,
Hector's killer, the Achilles of the myths
reinvented by old Homer.
Love can see underneath any shield or mask,
and if you prefer to believe
you are something that you are not,
why, you are free to do so, but—
I remember holding my boy by his pink heel,
I remember dipping my boy in the waters of the Styx,
I remember making my boy stronger than anyone—
and don't you tell me that I'm just a silly woman,
or that I don't know that you are that boy,
or that your vulnerable heel is the only real place on your whole body.
No use trying to fool your mother, tough guy.
She knows you better than you know yourself.
~ ~ ~

Untitled

A little reason carries us a little way.
The hero dies before the narrator
comes to a final stop. Applause!
The rider seeks his steed, the moralist—
his Book. The audience claps for HIM,
HIM again: “Those heroic shoulders, that earnest smile!
He is alive! He is back! He is resurrected!”
The squirming face takes over the scheming gesture.
Wrapped in expensive rags, the painted lovers
rewrite a prologue to that eventual disaster,
their love. The hero is one of them, or one
of them is he. His eyes the color of his strength;
his solitude, bitter. Applause is but the assurance
of a more total end, he murmurs as the audience claps.
He juggled life and death, taking part in neither.
His solitude is unrelieved; his reason, gone.

 
A Score of Fifteen

Here goes a watchful spider
And the sky fades.
In a frolicsome desert
You shall not be dust.
Hee-wee! Hee-wee!
So I say, wish dreams.
In a frolicsome desert,
In the great banal…
How fiery is thy heart, stupor.
How I love thee fade.
Heave steams, you heavers look great
On a finicky face of a faucet.
He who loves the obscure,
Does not love the flesh.
Hee-wee! Hee-wee!
Go spoon me a score of fifteen.
You can spoon me a score of fifteen.
Yes, you can.
 
I was born here, I lived here…
Now I live in a structure.
Why do I start when I finish?
Hee-wee! Hee-wee!
I am most happy without mice.
Merci. Whatever you say.
Hee-wee! Hee-wee!
You know how to deceive yourselves.
 
A line, a line:
A river of sudden intellect.
A line, a line…
A brain of exquisite promise.
Ho-ho.
One measure against the speed,
Another–to please you over to my form.
I love the past like a snake – its skin.
Wait, minute.
Add yourself to the hour.
Wait, wait.
 
Hee-wee! Hee-wee!
Little piggy in the grass:
A river of no promises.
 
Abstract causes do not benumb me.
I am most fragile when I am two.
Wish dreams: the fish and his funny pose.
 
Ho-ho!
How fiery is thy wisdom!
Go to the stone, then turn to the right.
When speaking to the stars,
Keep your mouth shut.
I hear little bells,
Softer and softer.
I have lived elsewhere,
I don’t remember birth.
Help me, piggy! O my heart’s original fervor!
O fish in the pond, o tongues of wings!
Sing to me, sleep’s humility.
I so wanted to wish.
But the sky fell ill with emotion,
And I fell into wormy grass.
 
Birds, let me hear my bones sing.
All birds are air.
All songs sing time.
Time ends when birds flutter.
I don’t want them to die!
 
I’ll arch my ankles, I’ll dance on my back.
I’ll beg Time to give me a hand.
O Time, tick-tock me back into sleep!
Deedle-dee deedle-dee deedle-dee-do.
 
All stories end.
All flowers melt.
I smell a secret.
And who are YOU?

Bio: 
Nina Kossman, born in the former Soviet Union, is a poet, prose writer, and playwright. She has authored 11 books, including four volumes of poetry [two in Russian and two in English], two collections of short prose, a memoir, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, and a novel. Her English-language poetry has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies and has been translated into twelve languages. Her work in her native language, Russian, was published in Russian-language literary magazines. She received grants from the Onassis Foundation and the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, an NEA fellowship, and the UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award. She was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. She lives in New York.