Swimming Grand Canyon and Other Poems by Rebecca Lawton – NWVS #160

Truth flows through these poems like a cold deep river, and human love for hard things settles on that river like late sun, casting a steely sheen over all of it. Read Swimming Grand Canyon to be there—on the restless river, and deep in the knowing heart.

–Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

Rebecca Lawton’s poems jump off the page. She is achingly alive and heartbreakingly present in Swimming Grand Canyon, “living mortgage free” in her life as a river guide. We travel with her, meeting the characters with whom she shares the risks of that life. I love the immediacy of her narratives, her lively verbs, and her open heart.

 —Elizabeth C. Herron, author of Insistent Grace

Rebecca Lawton’s Swimming Grand Canyon has the inviting rhythm of a river trip, quickly going from names on a map to the “first rapids” to “there is no turning back.” These poems have something of that cobble-essence, in spite of the losses she describes, finding “we are far richer than we thought we’d be.” What Lawton places in our hands is a rare gift, smoothed and polished.

–Arthur Dawson, author of Where the World Begins: Sonoma Mountain Stories and Images