Rights Information

RIGHTS HELD: World

Reviews

Praise for Swims by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett.

If poetry has a value over and above what the market assigns, then perhaps the fluid line and deep currents of Swims can help resist environmental catastrophe.
Richard Lea, The Guardian

A clear-eyed ecological poem that washes off the urban world.
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times

This book refreshes like an icy dip, startling us from both comfort and despair. Burnett's poems invite the reader into the water with them; to take action, accept responsibility, and find joy: "it is all yours, this open possibility".
Emily Hasler, The Poetry Review

A revelatory poetics ... [Burnett] maps coordinates across time and geography, producing a luminous, hallucinatory effect of an endlessly drifting, spinning world.
Srishti Krishnamoorthy-Cavell, Poetry London

Language is at full spate here. We can see why the collection should be considered one long poem, working in the liminal space of merger and separation that matches both the acts of swimming and memory, marked by the pulse of consonantal music.
Andrew Jeffrey, Poetry School

Lush with lyric.
Claire Crowther, Magma

Swims ... reminds me that it is poets who are currently doing some of the keenest and most urgent thinking – and unthinking – about politics, philosophy, and ethics. These lyrical poems reimagine our human relationship to the water.
Nell Osborne, The Compass

Author Biography

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a poet and academic with a focus on innovative poetics. She holds a BA in English from Oxford, an MA and PhD in Contemporary Poetics from Royal Holloway, University of London, and studied performance at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York and Naropa. Creative publications include oh-zones, Her Body: The City, Exotic Birds and M (a poemfilm on John Clare with artist Brian Shields). She curates ecopoetics exhibitions and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Newman University in Birmingham.