Walk

Cole Swensen

These three disjunctive lyric sequences explore the work of three women who were/are inveterate walkers as well as writers.

“The walking body always exists entirely at its furthest forward boundary, and continually overflows it, and thus is always entering new territory—features it shares with writing. Each of these three poem sequences engages with the writings of a different woman writer/walker to trace three different experiences woven of the same three ingredients.”

COLE SWENSEN is the author of 14 volumes of poetry and a collection of critical essays. Her books have twice been finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and once for the National Book Award, and she has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award and the National Poetry Series. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she was the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the guest editor of BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2014. Also a translator, she has won the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation, and she is the founding editor of La Presse, a press specializing in French poetry in translation. She has taught at the University of Denver and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently teaches at Brown University.