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Book Cover for: Gravesend: Volume 36, Cole Swensen

Gravesend: Volume 36

Cole Swensen

Finalist:L.A. Times Book Prize -Poetry (2012)
"Ghosts appear in place of whatever a given people will not face" (p. 65)

The poems in Gravesend explore ghosts as instances of collective grief and guilt, as cultural constructs evolved to elide or to absorb a given society's actions, as well as, at times, to fill the gaps between such actions and the desires and intentions of its individual citizens. Tracing the changing nature of the ghostly in the western world from antiquity to today, the collection focuses particularly on the ghosts created by the European expansion of the 16th through 20th centuries, using the town of Gravesend, the seaport at the mouth of the Thames through which countless emigrants passed, as an emblem of theambiguous threshold between one life and another, in all the many meanings of that phrase.

Book Details

  • Publisher: University of California Press
  • Publish Date: Jul 9th, 2012
  • Pages: 96
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.90in - 0.50in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9780520273177
  • Categories: American - General

About the Author

Cole Swensen is the author of twelve previous books of poetry, including the acclaimed Ours (UC Press). She is also coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry and teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

More books by Cole Swensen

Book Cover for: And And And, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Ode to a Cemetery: Bethany Eden Jacobson, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Landscapes on a Train, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Noise That Stays Noise: Essays, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Ours: Volume 24, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Art in Time, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Goest, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: On Walking on, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Try, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Such Rich Hour, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: The Glass Age, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: The Book of a Hundred Hands, Cole Swensen
Book Cover for: Gave, Cole Swensen

Praise for this book

"A book-length meditation on ghosts and ghost stories in Swensen's haunting style."-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/23/2012 12:00:00 AM)
"It is poetry that honestly admits the inchoate, affirms mystery and responds to successive readings: it is alive."-- "The Volta" (5/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)