Veer - (Jean Valentine) by Cole Swensen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Cole Swensen is the author of 20 books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), long-listed for the Griffin Prize, and 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, and the National Poetry Series and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and twice for 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. Also a translator of poetry and art criticism from French, she has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation, the 2024 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association, and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. She divides her time between France and the US.