Treating subjects from landscape to sculpture to a 19th century technical encyclopedia, the poet is fascinated with light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury—things transparent, evanescent, impossible to grasp. Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with
As Cole Swensen argues in the introduction to this comprehensive new anthology, the long-acknowledged "fundamental division" between experimental and traditional is disappearing in American poetry in favor of hybrid approaches that blend trends from acces
