Everything Here by Billie Swift
Title: Everything Here
Author: Billie Swift
ISBN: 978-1-943977-62-8
Publication Date: 09/19/2019
Retail Price: $12.00
5.83 x 8.27” Paperback; 34 Pages
Distributed by Ingram and Sibling Rivalry Press
Author is available for appearances and interviews
Publisher Contact: [email protected]
Trade, library, and educational discounts available
Desk copies available for educators
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BILLIE SWIFT’s Everything Here meditates on the mythologies of the banal with a calibrated ambivalence. The “here” of Swift’s poems rebuffs and bolsters the eye’s ability to document, the body’s ability to believe the swelter of its sensate world: “Compare this to flight. / The flight will be my hand / pushing through the dark, / the feel of nothing / against my palm.” The speakers “hold [their] mutual / eternities, [their] shared bits of air,” unafraid to point toward your favorite star and proclaim it less than alive. Swift’s poems share a fabulous muzzle, parsing one hundred tabletops, one hundred jays, one hundred trees, in sharp, precise language. Everything Here is a lissome spell for an othered quotidian, each poem a way to “stay / still, wanting to be that important.”
“EVERYTHING HERE reminds us that a stanza is a room, and from room to room we walk through this house of the book with all of its windows and swarming shadows. A restless witness lives here, recording the world around us as she names then renames its objects, transforming what was once familiar into something peculiar: 'The bird will be / a blue colored pencil.' Billie Swift encourages the reader to pick up the bird and draw in the white space of the poems, in the starkly unsaid, which hovers like a strange atmosphere though it is never estranging, 'hum of cool and clock. The click / of dog.' These poems carry whatever longings were there in that far off field bringing them here closer to you.” —Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me To Talk About The Interior
BILLIE SWIFT lives in Seattle, Washington, where she is the owner and operator of Open Books: A Poem Emporium. She received an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.