Cole Swensen

There Are Girls like Lions

The hand is second only to language in defining the human being, and its constant presence makes it a ready reminder of our humanity, with all its privileges and obligations. In this dazzling collection, Cole Swensen explores the hand from any angle approachable by language and art. Her hope: to exhaust the hand as subject matter; her joy: the fact that she couldn’t. These short poems reveal the hand from a hundred different perspectives. Incorporating sign language, drawing manuals, paintings from the 14th to the 20th century, shadow puppets, imagined histories, positions (the “hand as a boatless sail”), and professions (“the hand as window in which the panes infinitesimal”), Cole Swensen’s fine hand is “that which augments” our understanding and appreciation of “this freak wing,” this “wheel that comforts none” yet remains “a fruit the size and shape of the heart.”

The Book of a Hundred Hands

Gravesend, which takes its name from the English town at the mouth of the Thames, revisits the genre of the ghost story and, through fragmentation, juxtaposition, and allusion, powerfully summons the uncanny, the spectral presence. Cole Swensen delves into ancient fables, the Bible, medieval records, Victorian ghost stories, contemporary interviews, and more to explore the effects of the ghostly on our daily lives, at times returning to the notion of "gravesend," implicitly asking if all ends in the grave or if death itself has an end. Swensen's focus on language shapes these visitations--glimp.

Gravesend

A reprinting of the successful title by Sun Moon Press, winner of the 2000 Gertrude Stein Award.

Noon

Park

Esteemed poet Cole Swensen's ninth collection is haunted by vision and transfixed by light.

Goest

Issues of narrative sequence and time float through the collection but are always subordinate to the play and rule of language on the page.

Poems

The collection is loosely based on the calendar illuminations from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the well-known book of hours, and uses them to explore the ways that the arts - visual and verbal - interact with history, at times prefiguring it, at times shaping it, and at times offering wry commentary or commiseration."--BOOK JACKET.

Such Rich Hour

First published in 1997 by Sun & Moon Press, Noon was chosen by Rae Armantrout as the 2000 winner of the Gertrude Stein Award (formerly known as the New American Poetry Series Awards), an annual competition. Swensen’s Noon is a stunning meditative mix of lyrical and prosaic poetry in constant motion.

Seth Abramson

Jesse Damiani

An anthology of experimental, innovative, cross-genre writing

Best American Experimental Writing

John King

Zachary Lazar

Adam Peterson

David Macey

Chris Tarry

Michael Thurston

Andrew McKay

Shane McCrae

Meghan O'Rourke

Alex Stein

Jeffrey Yang

Sesshu Foster

Robert Polito

Tamas Dobozy

H. L. Hix

James Richardson

Tom Sleigh

Judith Skillman

Josh Billings

Jeffery Allen

Sarah Barber

Dan Beachy-Quick

Priscilla Becker

Callista Buchen

Drew Calvert

James Capozzi

Kelly Cherry

Ruth Curry

Weston Cutter

Steve Davenport

Laura Engel

Avital Gad-Cykman

Kathleen Graber

Myronn Hardy

Henry Israeli

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Yahia Lababidi

Laurie Lamon

Kevin Lutz

John Marvin

Diane Mehta

Kathryn Nuernberger

Fani Papageorgiou

Elahzar Rao

F. Daniel Rzicznek

Craig Teicher

Jacob White

Wyatt Williams

Paul-Victor Winters

Marion Wyce

The Rat's Nest

Praise for Cole Swensen: "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry." ---Library Journal "Engaging and delightful." ---Publishers Weekly A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. Ezra Pound famously said that literature is "news that stays news," but recent experiments in poetry and the sciences allow us to enlarge the statement to bring information theory and biology to bear on the issue---in particular, how the information theory–based model of self-organization from noise offers a way to look at language as an art material as well as a mode of communication. This concept directs these essays on poetry by contemporary poet Cole Swensen. Noise That Stays Noise covers a variety of subjects relevant to contemporary poetry and will give the general reader a broad notion of the issues that inform discourse around poetry today. Space---the conceptual geometry of poetry and its concrete mise-en-page---is an underlying theme of this collection, sometimes approached directly through the work of other twentieth-century poets, sometimes more obliquely through considerations of the role of the visual arts in contemporary poetry. This question of space and the shapes it includes and acquires offers a different way to look at some familiar writers, such as Mallarmé and Olson, and a way to introduce several more recent writers who may not yet be known to the general public.

Essays

Noise That Stays Noise

New Math

National Book Award finalist Cole Swensen's fascinating meditation on the nature of glass, windows, perception.

The Glass Age

"A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson--I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless. Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly place her among the finest post-avant poets we now have."—Ron Silliman, author of The Age of Huts (compleat)

Ours

Rod Smith

Emmanuel Hocquard

Poetry. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith. This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystallize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory's particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.

The Invention of Glass

A poetry-essay meditation on the cultural and physical forces of the river

Gave

Thomas Nozkowski

"Thomas Nozkowski, images; Cole Swensen, poems"--Cover.

Flare

Shari DeGraw

Poetry. Art. GREENSWARD looks at the interaction between animals, humans, and gardens. Often playful, it explores the question of whether animals other than humans have an aesthetic sense, posits that they do, and suggests that they develop it through watching humans garden. The short sections of poetry and prose, sometimes plainspoken, sometimes poised precariously on the line between sense and non-sense, are dovetailed into engravings of 18th century gardens by the artist John Roque. Graphic artist Shari DeGraw and poet Cole Swensen collaborated on excerpting elements from the garden maps and playing with scale and patterning to create a conversation between the visual and verbal elements. Two well-known 18th century garden designers also make cameo appearances, giving the text a historical sweep from the heyday of the English landscape garden to the present. Publication of this title made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Greensward

Cole Swensen

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