"There's such quiet and fierce intelligence across these poems, as Swensen moves through perception and mapping, turns and sudden turns, offering a new variation on her detailed explorations across landscapes, including gardens, paintings and graveyards." --Rob McLennan "Transporting without being pushy, Swensen's poetry is itself a kind of holiday. It invites readers to get off the clock. 'How time wanes,' Swensen writes, wonderingly, 'when the mind strays.'" --Diane Josefowicz "The poems roam adventurously through nature, a hike undertaken by someone who dares dive into streams, delve into the minds of crows, scamper up tree trunks, or edge daringly close to the sun." --Lou Fancher, 48hills "That sense of possibility--of poetry as a space where the logical can give way to the luminous--defines Veer. It's a collection that doesn't just describe the world but illuminates our embeddedness, and invites readers to follow along as it swerves into new terrain, where the unexpected is welcome, and essential." --Kary Hess, Pacific Sun "Swensen's insightfully idiosyncratic prose lyrics connect readers to their surroundings in new and surprising ways, reintroducing things and investing them with a prescient awareness and intelligence.
" --Library Journal Starred Review "In Veer, deer bloom, irises stampede, and the secret language of dust motes are unlocked by animal hum. This book, through Swensen's keen alertness and humor, will not change how you fit into the world--but it will change how you choose to engage with it." --Wroxy, Literati Bookstore Staff Picks "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 Previous Praise: "One of the most assured voices in contemporary poetry." --Library Journal.