The Dove That Didn’t Return: Poems

A poet and female commander in the Israeli Defense Forces creates an original perspective from the war-torn front lines of the Middle East conflict.

The Dove That Didn’t Return tackles the canon of war poetry, an almost exclusively male-penned body of poems. In the book, biblical stories, verses, and fragments are rewritten through the eyes of a female lieutenant in the Israeli Army. It is a contemporary poetics on the revelations of war from an Israeli perspective never before told-a woman, and a soldier at that.

Yael S. Hacohen is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. She has received research/teaching fellowships from Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University. She has an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was an NYU Veterans Workshop Fellow, International Editor at Washington Square Literary Review, and Editor-in-Chief at Nine Lines Literary Review. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, LIT, Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly Magazine, Colorado Review, and many more. Hacohen published her chapbook Between Sanctity and Sand with Finishing Line Press in 2021. Hacohen served as a lieutenant in the 162nd Armored Division of the IDF.