Awarded the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award

Quite honestly, I think Cole Swensen is a genius and her work, among that of my immediate contemporaries, is absolutely vital to me. The inherent radiance of Try lights up not only the paintings, which are the poems' ostensible subject material, but layers of perception—Forrest Gander

Cole Swensen's beautifully exact and visionary meditations give the venerable art of ekphrasis a new meaning. Swensen sees with an uncanny X-ray vision that becomes the inward gaze. 'The difference,' as Gertrude Stein once put it, 'is spreading.'—Marjorie Perloff

Our speed of sight, the filmic surface of contemporary vision, our ability to pan, scan, splice, fragment, and make whole again, are made manifest in Try. By book’s end, we are ultimately caught in the gaze of looking at ourselves.—Gillian Conoley, Boston Review

Link to the book