“Today is yesterday with its hands over its eyes,” says Laurie Blauner in her second nonfiction book, titled Swerve, which is comprised of twenty one lyrical, hybrid essays. Topics include crooked teeth, imagination, stealing, art, drinking, luck, surveillance, husbands, mannequins, ghosts, mothers, noise, sleep, nature, and animals and our relationships with them.
These are passionate and exquisitely hewn poems, with image and voice at work together in what seem to be effortless constructions. In the digital age of poetry’s devaluation, Clinton’s rich and metaphorically complex work strives even at its most fantastical to touch the holy bear skull, which is poetry itself—a sacred vessel where each phrase makes its own shimmering world.
