Landscapes on a Train

Swensen explores the fault lines between seeing and saying, subject and object, and her investigation of perception deepens as the book “turns back on itself” in surprising ways… Swensen’s powers of description transform what could easily be an academic exercise into an aesthetic journey that for many readers will be worth taking for the sights and sounds alone.

These poems are conscious of their existence as bodies, and the particularity of their shape and position on the page allow the reader to examine the ways in which the image of the poem, as a kind of graphic work, colors our reading of the language… By pulling multiple genres into collaboration, Swensen, in the form of her verse, experiments with the different conceptual tools required in order to capture the motion of a landscape through language.