The Glass Age2007

“Inspired by postimpressionist painter Pierre Bonnard . . . Swensen crafts poems that incorporate language play and collage.” —<em>Library Journal</em> “Swensen’s recent thematic book-length sequences . . . combine scholarly meticulousness with a postmodern flair for dislocation, cementing Swensen’s reputation as an important experimental writer.” —<em>Publishers Weekly</em> “Cole Swensen’s <em>The Glass Age</em> is a masterwork . . . A remarkably adept, even facile craftsperson—I know of no poet who makes the most stunning verbal effects on the page look more effortless . . . Her critical assumptions, literary strategies and approach to the text clearly places her among the finest post-avant poets we now have.” —Ron Silliman “Seeing is believing sometimes, but believing is almost always seeing, at least according to Cole Swensen’s long meditation on glass, windows, vision, and various writers and artists who have used these in their work, especially Bonnard, Apollinaire, Wittgenstein, Hammershøi, Saki, and the Lumière brothers. Swensen provides us with an invaluable postmodern retrofit of Keats’s magic casements.” —John Ashbery