In “Veer,” her 20th poetry collection, Bay Area native Cole Swensen reimagines everyday life through unexpected and often playful shifts in perspective. She invites readers to reconsider the boundaries between humans and nature in poems that suggest that people, animals, plants and inanimate matter are part of the same interconnected process of living.
Swensen, whose previous titles include 2023’s “And And And” and 2021’s “Art in Time,” says all her books begin in same way, with “a desire to explore a particular situation or aspect of the world.”
“Often one project conditions the next, which is true in this case; I’m continuing to write about specific, often small, aspects of the concrete world with what I hope is an activist attention,” says Swensen, who launches “Veer” (Alice James Books, 100 pages, $21.95, May 12, 2026) this month at City Lights in San Francisco and Book Passage in Corte Madera.
Swensen, 70, splits her time between France and the United States. A former John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow, she taught for a decade at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recently retired as professor emerita at Brown University.
The pandemic and a return to her hometown of Kentfield in Marin County helped spark the poems that became “Veer.”
“I hadn’t lived [there] for 30 years,” Swensen says. “With COVID and everything shut down, I had time to explore—particularly Mount Tamalpais and the Marin Municipal Water District.”
Taking a natural shift based on subject matter, her approach to poetry writing differed this time around. Living in California between 2020 and 2023, she reconnected with the landscape in a new way.
“Much of my previous work is based on research, on reading and reflection; these pieces, on the other hand, began with the simple observation of something specific out in the world, and that outward focus began to feel more and more like participation in the world rather than observation of it,” she says.
That process gave way to a fitting word—“veer”—for the collection she was assembling.
“[T]he act of writing felt like following a thing or situation along a path that would then suddenly take a sharp turn into another direction, often an illogical or absurdist one,” she explains.
Veer has three sections: “Tic,” “Tac” and “Tao.” Swensen says its structure is both practical and architectural. The breaks, she says, “function “like landings on a staircase,” helping guide readers through the collection while creating “stability without, necessarily, symmetry.”
With their focus on the ecology of the Golden State, the poems in “Veer” prompt readers to consider ideas both small and large, personal and universal that concern the environment and themselves—and address, however abstractly— environmental crises and policies.
“Poetry can’t make policy, but it can perhaps present angles that might not be available to other modes of discourse, and one is a quality of attention that is particular to poetry,” she says.
“I think there’s a kind of active attention—an activist attention—that unusual or unprecedented language can incite and that can cause people to dwell upon pertinent questions and situations in a penetrating way,” she adds.
Swensen looks forward to reading her work in the company of fellow contemporary poets Norma Cole at City Lights at an event that will livestream, and Gillian Conoley and Forrest Gander at Book Passage. She’s also glad her release events are taking place in Bay Area book havens.
“Both are such important cultural landmarks, and each, in its own way, has contributed so much to the literary history of a region uncommonly rich in literary history,” she says.
Cole Swensen appears at 7 p.m. May 18 at City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco and 11 a.m. May 30 at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.