Twenty-One by Katherine Barrett Swett

Twenty-one is a cycle of brief poems written in the year following the death of the author’s daughter

You will be humbled and altered by these spare, haunted, breathtaking poems. You will read them many times over-in awe. Katherine Barrett Swett‘s Twenty- One is a modern masterwork of art and the human heart. It is an important book that adds to poetry’s profound sounding of loss and grief.

–Emily Fragos

Katherine Swett‘s collection, Twenty-One, offers courageous poems navigating grief-that raw human state in which words can notoriously fail us-yet these poems not only succeed in giving voice to loss, they do so with arresting originality and fierce economy. Swett doesn’t waste a beat; her gaze remains fixed, and we see a resonant absence mirrored in every line: in the metaphor of a suddenly vulnerable “helmetless acorn,” or the daily ache that does not abate as “Most of the world carries on.”

–LB Thompson

In these searing, exquisite pages, documenting the unfathomable loss of a child, Swett writes, “I cannot sing-you alive.” But in these poems, short as exhaled breath, in which “summer’s last dragonfly shivers by,” “Vermeer’s maids slyly unlatch the windows,” and the long “electrified” hair of a girl in a red smocked dress is “floating like bees in the high grass,” the map of desolation is illuminated by a poet’s vision.

–Cynthia Zarin