Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman, 2023) and Art in Time (Nightboat, 2021). Previous volumes have won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series and have been finalists for the National Book Award and twice for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism, she divides her time between France and the US.
Literary Curiosities
Spring 2024
Story Problems
after Coleridge Say you walked into an orchard, say you cut the apples in half, say there was a line of trees silhouetted, all apples, against a horizon, and then […]
Walking with Poets
Nov/Dec 2015
William Blake
To a country, we move slowly to an answer in a clock, or to a given tower, to walk towers over in a glaze of field said William Blake to rest unnamed reshaped the face one […]
Walking with Poets
Nov/Dec 2015
from “Henry David Thoreau: ‘Walking'”
Listening to ice crack itself across winter—it was the winter of 1845, and the Second Great Awakening was ending all over New England in which someone coming down a road […]
Walking with Poets
Nov/Dec 2015
Thomas De Quincey
inveterately, the quintessential walker of the streets of London, wrote toward the end of his life that “the human face tyrannized” his dreams, which is not in strange weather, which […]
Walking with Poets
Nov/Dec 2015
Gérard de Nerval
What is the wander, what aimless shelter, what within a very small room. Or we could call it a city. Or we could build a city in which you could […]
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen is the author of fifteen books of poetry. She has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Award, once for the National Book Award, and has […]