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Swerve
by Laurie Blauner
Available Spring 2025
Twenty-one lyrical, hybrid essays constitute Swerve,
Laurie Blauner s second book of essays and memoir. Some of the topics
include teeth, imagination, stealing, art, drinking, luck, surveillance,
husbands, mannequins, ghosts, mothers, noise, sleep, nature, and
animals and our attractions toward and away from everything.
Some of the essays have appeared in various magazines, including the following:
Future Notes Under Stones from Tupelo Quarterly
Swerve from Thin Air Magazine
Curses for Crooked Teeth from LIT Magazine
You can hear Laurie reading from Swerve here.
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What
is between the real, felt, and imagined illuminates Laurie Blauner s
insightful hybrid essays. These pieces are alive with unexpected
transformations. Both amusing and profound, these essays reveal truths
about ourselves and our world. Courageous and stunning, Swerve shows us what we must leave in order to get us closer to what we want.
Rich Ives, author of A Servant s Map of the Body and RatBoy and Other Stories
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Imagine
a place of pure invention, glorious and effulgent, combined with a
voice spoken from privacy and the memoirist episodes of a life: hers,
ours, the lives of animals and trees this is Laurie Blauner soaring in
her new book of lyric essays, Swerve.
Always a writer of matchless ingenuity, Blauner s spiraling perspective
in these twenty-one essays becomes an inquiry into what it is to be
human. Are you made of clouds or breath? Do you feel fire? Ice? I am a
scarecrow left in a field wearing someone else s dress. Like the word
swerve itself, the book has many points of departure and return:
murmurations, mannequins and their misadventures, wildlife (accidental
and otherwise), kaleidoscopes and souvenirs, the ruined. Deeply
perceptive and perfectly crafted, these are elevated pieces. The mood
is alternately one of lightness, one of pathos. She unscrews one of her
hands as if that gesture proves her sensory deprivation. Then she
fastens it back again. I m going on a journey. With webs of language,
idea, and form, Blauner casts a spell. Mesmerizing and masterful.
Irresistible to dwell in this space.
Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, author of Soul, Ghost, My Absolute and The Absent
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