Cole Swensen and Norma Cole read from new work
City Lights and Alice James Books celebrate the publication of
Veer
by Cole Swensen
published by Alice James Books
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.
Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023) which was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021), and a volume of critical essays, Noise that Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she co-edited the Norton anthology American Hybrid. Her work has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the PEN USA Award in translation and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She taught for ten years on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and twelve years in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University. A translator of poetry and art criticism from French, she divides her time between France and the US.
Norma Cole is a poet, visual artist, and translator. Her most recent collections are Alibi Lullaby (Omnidawn, 2025), Fate News (Omnidawn, 2018), and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988-2008 (City Lights, 2009). Her many awards include a Wallace Gerbode Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, and the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. She has translated Danielle Collobert’s Journals (1989), Anne Portugal’s Nude (2001), and Fouad Gabriel Haffah’s The Spirit of God and the Properties of Nitrogen (2004).
Praise for the work of Cole Swensen
“I have been following Cole Swensen’s work for decades and this may be my favorite of her books. Veer is composed of three linked sets of prose poems which may at first appear to resemble those of Francis Ponge but which are more like skewed riddles or bent parables. Based on close observations they quickly veer towards the absurd or surreal. Best, perhaps, are the sonically perfect epigrams such as ‘for an egret is always an excess of stillness’ or ‘Exactitude, for instance, will follow a pencil for miles.’ I can’t wait for this book to appear.” —Rae Armentrout, author of Wobble and Partly: New and Selected Poems
“Swensen’s section titles, TIC TAC TAO, start with the familiar game, but veer off the expected Toe, toward the ways of the universe. Similarly, the poems start by looking intently at an object, word, or other phenomenon, only to veer off into musings and speculations whose wit is as amazing as their scope. Read, enjoy, and take wing!” —Rosmarie Waldrop
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation