Everything Here

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."