“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