Cole Swensen is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023) which was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, Art in Time (Nightboat Books, 2021), and a volume of critical essays, Noise that Stays Noise (U. of Michigan Press, 2011). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she co-edited the Norton anthology American Hybrid. Her work has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, the National Poetry Series, and the PEN USA Award in translation and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She taught for ten years on the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and twelve years in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University. A translator of poetry and art criticism from French, she divides her time between France and the US.

"I have been following Cole Swensen’s work for decades and this may be my favorite of her books. Veer is composed of three linked sets of prose poems which may at first appear to resemble those of Francis Ponge but which are more like skewed riddles or bent parables. Based on close observations they quickly veer towards the absurd or surreal. Best, perhaps, are the sonically perfect epigrams such as ‘for an egret is always an excess of stillness’ or ‘Exactitude, for instance, will follow a pencil for miles.’ I can’t wait for this book to appear."
—Rae Armentrout, author of Wobble and Partly: New and Selected Poems

"Swensen's section titles, TIC TAC TAO, start with the familiar game, but veer off the expected Toe, toward the ways of the universe. Similarly, the poems start by looking intently at an object, word, or other phenomenon, only to veer off into musings and speculations whose wit is as amazing as their scope. Read, enjoy, and take wing!"
—Rosmarie Waldrop