Landscapes on a Train

Influenced by the history of landscape painting, Cole Swensen’s new book is an experiment in seriality, in the different approach and scope that language must take to record the way that fluctuations of minutiae transform a whole. These poems meditate on what it is simply to look at the world, without judgment, without intervention, without appropriation. Swensen’s lyric observations, lilting and delicate, distill the act of seeing. “Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman