Poetry. In SWIMMING THE COLORADO, Denise banker's poems capture the reader for an intense existential journey from remembered childhood into an adulthood haunted by loss and grief but redeemed through nature by love. The lyrics—beautifully etched—are at turns provocative, sensuous, healing, and real. This is Banker's long-awaited first collection.

"Denise Banker's poems have an uncanny ability to be at once soothing and rattling, to speak to us like an old, long-loved friend while also lifting us from our comfort zones and tossing us to parts unknown. They chart a course that ranges from unfathomable grief to bright transcendence. I won't be prying myself loose from them anytime soon."—Meghan Daum

Author City: PORT TOWNSEND, WA USA

Denise Banker is the recipient of an Executive Director's Guest Fellowship from Civitella Ranieri Foundation Umbertide, Italy; was awarded the Gaffney/Academy of American Poets Award, the Louise VanSickle Award, and the Dudley Bailey Fellowship while she was earning a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has recently appeared in The ALAN Review, Prairie Schooner, The Midwest Quarterly, Natural Bridge, dirtcakes, literature and art in (re)spite of, and in several anthologies. She has taught English and creative writing at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln and Concordia University, Nebraska; and served as publicist for Copper Canyon Press. Currently, she is a bookseller at William James Booksellers in Port Townsend, Washington.