Selected by John Koethe for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize

“Brian Swann’s poems have been whittled from the tree of life and the acuity of his imagination into shapes and stories lovely and wise. They are full of ‘blades of light,’ affirming the visible beauty and the invisible mysteries of our world. He is, as he says himself, ‘dazed by the everyday.’ I have not read a book of poems so reverent and so delicious for a long time.” —Mary Oliver