“Swensen’s poetry embodies a form of poetic, political, and ontological guerrilla warfare—it embodies a commitment to other possibilities of thought, of language, of the world.
—Jean-Philippe Cazier in Diacritik
“Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”
—Anne Waldman
"Her poetry is like Dickinson without the syncopation, but with something of Traherne's sublime orderliness: numinous, in fact."
—John Ashbery, The Times Literary Supplement
"It is poetry that honestly admits the inchoate, affirms mystery, and responds to successive readings: it is alive."
—The Volta
NEWS:
Art à temps, Habib Tengour’s translation of Art in Time (Nightboat, 2021) is short-listed for the Prix Mallarmé de la traduction.
Veer—just out from Alice James Books
Upcoming Bay Area readings at North Bay Letterpress Arts on June 21 with Kit Robinson & Orinda Community Church on July 25 with Amanda Nadleberg, curated by Elizabeth Robinson, and at a City Lights group reading to celebrate Maxine Chernoff’s new book Diary : Poems.
"In Veer, deer bloom, irises stampede, and the secret language of dust motes is unlocked by animal hum. This book, through Swensen’s keen alertness and humor, will not change how you fit into the world, but it will change how you choose to engage with it."
—Wroxy, Plethora, a Literati Poetry Newsletter
Poem & essay at the PSA “In Their Own Words” site
Library Journal starred review
Interview with 48 Hills
Article in The Pacific Sun