Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Author Photo: Stacy Peters
$18 | 82 pages | ISBN: 978-1-946303-01-1
Poetry l Perfectbound | May 20, 2025
“Patrick Swaney’s warm, strange, precise poems are causing me to rethink my relationship with the line.”
—Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk
"In the tradition of Russell Edson, whose work this book brings to mind, the prose poems of Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World never fail to disorient, surprise and delight. Sly and disarming, they are intellectual queries couched as fabulist vignettes, which, at their best, reveal our ordinary world as the strange, absurd, mysterious experience it truly is."
—Mark Cox, author of Knowing
Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World
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About the book
The prose poems in Patrick Swaney’s debut collection, fittingly titled Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World, are suspended between a world we think we know and a world where anything can happen. Manatees take over a bathtub, an egg becomes a kite, a man finds a warning in an empty lot and brings it home to raise with his wife. The
absurdity at the heart of this collection is rooted in an impulse to examine the rituals of living. Delivered as compact narratives, using language that is disarmingly direct, these poems use the unexpected to reveal truths about the commonplace. Characters often navigate situations that seem built on a fundamental misunderstanding as they try to make sense of their place in a reality misaligned to their intentions. Swaney renders this reality with objective precision, allowing the situations and the characters, their flaws and blind spots included, to emerge fully realized. “If only we all weren’t alive so differently,” says one of these characters. If only. These poems, with their ability to surprise and clarify, help remind us of what we have in common.About the author
PATRICK SWANEY is the author of Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World (YesYes Books, 2025). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Conduit, the Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is an associate professor of English and writer-in-residence at Catawba College and lives in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
