SWIRL

(Paperback)

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"Susan McCabe's Swirl is a constantly provocative and often wildly inventive debut collection of poetry. Edgy and wise, sly and disarming, these poems are both cinemagraphic and kaliedescopic in their workings. Profoundly gestural and always powerful, Swirl introduces to American poetry a memorable and compelling new voice."

--David St. John

"Every sentence in Susan McCabe's gorgeous poems is a sounding. Her lines haunt the far side of memory--for "remembering is learning," though of the most difficult kind; without its shadow side, "there is no presence." Aswirl with the necessarily figurative conjurations of hidden, internal objects, Swirl mingles melancholy and metaphor to form a full-fledged yet emotionally bottomless reality. This poet doesn't force anything: she is always already at the heart of imaginative fecundity, expanding, morphing like a "creature / drowning in blue whose limbs / loosen and pitch hooks." She both searches the shadows with relentless honesty and joys in language. Her gift to the reader is immense."

--Calvin Bedient

Author Bio

Susan McCabe is currently an assistant professor of modern and contemporary poetics at University of Southern California. She has published her poetry in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Fence, Volt, and Sonora Review. Her first critical book, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, was published by Penn State Press in 1994. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Cinematic Modernism: The Embodied Poetry of Stein, W.C. Williams, H.D. and Marianne Moore."