At Element

Poetry. "As Schwartz posits in his introduction, true nature poetry is not that which stands outside nature and addresses it, but that which recognizes that we speak, always and inevitably, from within it. Acting upon this insight, he has created a nature poetry that upends all previous understandings of the term through an engagement with language that underscores it as an act of nature. Full of startling observations and illuminating non sequiturs, AT ELEMENT is composed of disarmingly simple assertions that build into complex, irreducible, and unparaphrasable towers of idea and impression. Often warm, often charming, they emanate a generosity and an intimacy so penetrating that they make the generous and the intimate modes of thought in their own right." Cole Swensen"As the world swiftly disarticulates, AT ELEMENT provides an intensely considered poetry of witness. Turn by turn 'imbedded in the book' and spoken 'from within the thing, ' AT ELEMENT navigates the wasteland of Eros' impoverishment, and retrieves its fundamental fire." Rikki Ducornet"The poet wanders through these poems, lost in the forest of correspondences, excited by the loss, observing, essaying, conversing with ethereal figures, a flaneur of the present drifting through the brightly lit city or the dark halls of sleep with equal acuity and bewilderment, beholden to the senses but also what's beyond them. In these profound and strange poems, we have 'a refutation / of the post-human... / spellbound in / uncompleted waters.'" Eleni Sikelianos"