Finalist for the National Poetry Series

Cole Swensen's brilliant, witty riff on the history and meaning of opera as art form represents and refigures high passion and baroque exultation in the most minimal, condensed, and quiet of vocabularies and phrasal units. Oh is opera cool—the aria transformed into delicate echo—Marjorie Perloff

The minimalism of Oh refigures the extravagant grandeur of opera as part of Swensen’s rethinking of scale. Swensen uses the lens of fractal geometry to conduct of “respatialization” of the page through which she reconceives the capabilities of lyric and the potential for a rearticulation of the feminine…—Lynn Keller “Singing Spaces”

Link to the book