Poetry. Swensen's lyrics elicit the bright flare of spirit-- of that precious intangibility that enters a poem in the spaces where rational processes breaks down. With lines that flicker between the visual and the aural, shimmer across the spectral and the everyday, GOEST "documents a penetrating `intellectus'--light of the mind--by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent"--Anne Waldman. In "The Invention of Streetlights" the poet observes "Certain cells, it's said, can genereate light on their own," and the cluster of poems in this sonorous book also manage to give off their own meditative light.

Author City: PROVIDENCE, RI USA

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Cole Swensen is a poet and translator of French poetry, prose, and art criticism. She is the founding editor of La Presse and a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow. She teaches at Brown University and divides her time between Providence, RI, and Paris.

Reviews and Other Links
http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2005summer/swensen.shtml