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.

Reviews

." . . 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)

"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)