Swoon

What does it mean to be a woman—a lover, mother and artist? In Swoon, Redel tackles the question of Eros as it animates domestic life. These are poems unafraid to embrace the sweetness of difficulty and the difficult sweetness of intimacy. Using short and extended lyric, prose poem, circular narrative, Redel refuses formal categorization, demanding of poetry a complex and textured vision of the female experience. Swoon is a robustly sexy, intelligent, daring book of poems.

The New York Times

While some books can be read in a single sitting, this isn't one of them. Redel's characters don't walk the line between appetite and everything else so much as they dash back and forth across it, warming the pages so that readers who take up Swoon are likely to drop it from time to time and blow on their fingers as though they've grabbed a hot skillet. — David Kirby

Victoria Redel teaches in the creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Vermont College. She is the author of the book of poems Already the World, which won the Wick Poetry Prize; a collection of stories, Where the Road Bottoms Out; and, most recently, the novel Loverboy, which won the Gable Novel Award and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 2001.