Gave (Omnidawn Pocket) - Softcover

Swensen, Cole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1632430371 ISBN 13: 9781632430373

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2017

Synopsis

A river is a rift that joins what it divides, and so, logically, mythically, it’s always a river that cuts this life off from every other. A river determines every layer of all the lives along its entire length―the industry, the agriculture, the cultural possibilities, the historical imperatives, the reigning aesthetics, and so much more that cannot be or simply never happens to be traced. This account of a river attempts to embrace them all.

About this title

About the Author:

COLE SWENSEN’s work has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the New American Writing Award, and the National Poetry Series, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Also a translator, she won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. She lives in Paris and Providence, Rhode Island.

Review:

"Swensen has long been fascinated, it would seem, on the medieval histories and landscapes of France, specifically on how humans have attempted to domesticate the landscape (from her engagement with a variety of elements from the Medieval period and into the Victorian, from gardens to architecture to painting to gravesites). In Gave, Swensen composes an intriguing structural binary through the narrative, utilizing prose poems that are more informative against poems constructed out of fragments and staggered lines in a curious echo of work by Susan Howe (but blended, as opposed to the more defined lineations between Howe's prose and collage-poems)."--Rob McLennan (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

." . . Cole Swensen's 'Gave' is a provocative, direct, and profoundly exhilarating book of poems that transform the isolated, beautiful image of a French river into a universal metaphor for humanity's transcendent impulse to make a living habitat of eternity. Swensen's poems expand imaginative possibility as she invents new opportunities for spiritual growth through courageous aesthetic innovation."--Sonja James "Journal News" (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)

About this edition

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1632430371
• ISBN 13: 9781632430373
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64