Overview

The prose poems in Patrick Swaney's debut collection, Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World, are suspended between a world we think we know and a world where anything can happen. Manatees take over a bathtub, an egg becomes a kite, a man finds a warning in an empty lot and brings it home to raise with his wife. The absurdity at the heart of this collection is rooted in an impulse to examine the rituals of living. Using language that is disarmingly direct, these compact narratives consistently surprise and clarify. In their search for meaning, the poems find truths in the unexpected that remind us what we have in common. ""Patrick Swaney's warm, strange, precise poems are causing me to rethink my relationship with the line."" -Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk ""In the tradition of Russell Edson, whose work this book brings to mind, these prose poems never fail to disorient, surprise and delight. Sly and disarming, they are intellectual queries couched as fabulist vignettes, which, at their best, reveal our ordinary world as the strange, absurd, mysterious experience it truly is."" -Mark Cox, author of Knowing

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9781946303011

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PATRICK SWANEY is the author of Hand Over Hand Overthe Edge of the World (YesYes Books, 2025). His poems have appearedin Boulevard, Conduit, the Indiana Review and elsewhere. He is anassociate professor of English and writer-in-residence at CatawbaCollege and lives in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

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