Veer

In Veer, award-winning poet Cole Swensen examines the everyday world through a lens that shifts perception, offering surprising, sometimes zany perspectives on things we often take for granted. These poems challenge the presumption that “nature” is an “other,” suggesting instead that we all—animal, plant, mineral—are seamlessly fused in the joint project of living.

A few years ago, Swensen returned to her native California and found herself in a much closer relationship with trees, wind, and crows. Their insistent presence drew her into a new kind of active attention—thinking into things rather than about them and looking with things rather than at them. That shift in perspective underlies the difference between traditional nature poetry and contemporary eco-poetics, reshaping Swensen’s work into a practice of collaboration and participation. Veer is a defiantly optimistic book, committed to the astonishing beauty and intensity of the world, despite the contemporary political and industrial forces determined to dismantle it.

Veer is to be the first collection published under Alice James Books’ newly established Jean Valentine Series, which honors the work of mid-career women poets who are reshaping the landscape of contemporary poetry. Known for her cool, omniscient voice and formally innovative work, Swensen brings to Veer the clarity and precision of a poet at the height of her craft. Organized in three parts, Tic, Tac, and Tao, these poems often twist logic and toy with the absurd in an attempt to engage the things of the surrounding world without appropriating them—allowing each their place at the table, as it were, when humans are making decisions that will greatly affect them.