Contributors

Cole Swensen

Contributor History

Seven Poems, Conjunctions:21
Two Poems, Conjunctions:24
For M. Moore, Conjunctions:29
Herisau: Four Poems, Online 03-16-1998
Such Rich Hour, Conjunctions:32
Seven Hands, Conjunctions:35
A Dialogue, Conjunctions:35
Four Poems, Conjunctions:40
Ghosts, Conjunctions:48
Besides, of Bedouins (Hotel Lautréamont, 1992), Conjunctions:49
Two Poems, Conjunctions:50
Five Ghost Poems, Conjunctions:53
On Walks: Rousseau, Conjunctions:56
Landscapes on a Train, Conjunctions:59
Night Walks, Conjunctions:61
On Walking On, Conjunctions:63 (63:95-101)
From Amitier, Conjunctions:66
Quartet, Conjunctions:68
George Shiras: The Heart Is the Dark, Conjunctions:72

Biography

The author of many volumes of poetry, Cole Swensen is the founding editor of La Presse Books. She coedited the Norton anthology American Hybrid and guest-edited the first annual Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn). Her collections include On Walking On and Landscapes on a Train (both Nightboat Books). A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the PEN USA Award in translation, among others. She teaches at Brown University.

Connect

In Print

Conjunctions:76

Fortieth Anniversary Issue

Spring 2021
Edited by Bradford Morrow

Online

After the Eye Surgery,

by Jesse Kohn

July 21, 2021

“Well, technically batshit,” I’d tell him, and I’d remind him that, seeing as we were trapped in this cave—“Cave?” he’d say, and I’d say, “Yeah, the cave we’re recovering from eye surgery in,” and he’d say, “Oh right”—and that seeing as we’d be thus—“pardon the expression,” I’d say—interred for at least as long as it took to recover, that the cave would be, for all intents and purposes, what we’d have to mean, from here on out, by the word world; and thus bats, who were the only creatures still flitting in and out of the cave’s narrow apertures and thereby participating in the larger ecosystem and importing to an otherwise inhospitable environment the most basic elements needed to sustain life, their excretions would need to be, for the foreseeable future, what we’d have to mean when we’d say sun.

Five Poems

by Alex Braslavsky

July 14, 2021

And all manner of head swerves.
Three people flew past me, but did not see.
It’s not even clear what happens to the chicken on the bobsled.

Trails . . . that slither with their cake.
Will you have more?

The Holographer

by Julianna Baggott

May 26, 2021

I remember how, when we got word that it was okay to emerge, my parents opened the front door. My mother was holding an aluminum baseball bat, my father had a shovel. The three of us were in our hazmat suits. (Mine had grown a little taut. I was eleven years old and had gotten taller and rounder.) Our breaths were trapped in our masks.

How long had we been indoors? Time was hard to figure. It had been well over two years. But had it been three?