Photo credit: Matt Gold

c o l e   s w e n s e n

. . . her investigations into the phenomenology of perception have that same power good philosophy does: she turns the reader’s assumptions inside out, as gently as she can, and shows them the sun.

Paul Scott Stanfield, ​Ploughshares

"Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating 'intellectus'—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent,                      transcendent.”   Anne Waldman

"Her poetry is like Dickinson without the syncopation . . . numinous, in fact."  John Ashbery, The Times Literary Supplement

​"Highly esteemed, always challenging, sometimes austere, Swensen has a career marked by projects, book-length poems  spurred by clear formal goals."  Publishers Weekly