Eleanor Swanson

Eleanor Swanson

Eleanor Swanson holds a PhD from the University of Denver. Her poems have been featured in The Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, the Denver Quarterly, the Bloomsbury Review, the American Poetry Journal, and other publications. Her first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, won the Ruth Stevens Award, and her second collection, Trembling in the Bones, was reissued in 2013 (3: A Taos Press). Her third collection is Memory’s Rooms (Conundrum Press). She has published a novel and two collections of short stories. Her second collection, Exiles and Expatriates, won the 2014 Press Americana Prize. She mentors incarcerated men at the Sterling Correctional Facility. Eleanor encourages people to donate to the National Resources Defense Counsel

Poetry, like cartography, can condense
the world aesthetically, until we see
that the last line of my poem is not ambiguous,
but lucid, perfectly lucid: “More delicate than
the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.”

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