The Glass Age
Cole Swensen
The post-impressionist Pierre Bonnard painted, among other things, dozens of windows. Using these paintings as a starting point, this extended poem celebrates glass from many perspectives, ultimately evoking both the clarity and the fragility of our age in the minimalist style that has won Cole Swensen such acclaim.
"Inspired by postimpressionist painter Pierre Bonnard . . . Swensen crafts poems that incorporate language play and collage."
—Library Journal
"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."
—Publishers Weekly
"Cole Swensen's The Glass Age 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
about the author
Cole Swensen is the author of ten previous books of poetry including Goest, which was a National Book Award Finalist. She has also won the
San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and a National Poetry Series selection, as well as grants for translating
and writing, and a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. She is on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and divides her time between Iowa, Washington DC, and Paris.
Author photo by Guy Bennet
two poems from The Glass Age
electronic press kit (pdf file)
a video interview with cole swensen in the continental review
