Swan Hammer: an Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors

Order SWAN HAMMER here!

Winner of the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize

OUT NOW from Wheelbarrow Books & Michigan State University Press, 2022

Announcement from the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University

“Maggie Graber’s Swan Hammer is the kind of wild, hungry, ebullient, insolent, playful, sorrow-struck, yawping book of poems you did not know you needed until you notice the heap of rust at your feet knocked from the hinges on the door to your heart. And your heart peeking out and opening its mouth to sing along, and sing along, with Graber’s beautiful song.”

—ROSS GAY, winner of a 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

"Swan Hammer: An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors exposes the collision and co-existence of popular culture, sexual identity, the natural world, virtual reality, families, and the cosmos. There is a sonnet in the collection, there is humor, intimacy, there are odes and elegies, a poem called Pi Day. There is fluidity in time and space and voice. There is great pleasure and pain on these pages. There are so many things I love about this collection. I love how 'I Remember Nashville, the dueling piano bar' is not an homage to music, and how in 'At the Twilight of the Big Bang' it might be time for a new origin story. I love the way the poems look on the page. I love the honesty and vulnerability of this collection."

—SARAH BAGBY, owner of Watermark Books & Café in Wichita, Kansas

“Swan Hammer” builds a bridge between the possible and impossible, a path of mirrors and magic. Maggie Graber’s poems are “going for tattooed grace,” reveling in storms and dreams and roads well traveled. If “more than one of me is a Tradition,” this collection is a dog-eared guide to the universe you’ll want to explore well and often.”

—M. BRETT GAFFNEY, author of Feeding the Dead