Robert Sward

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and UC Santa Cruz. A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. Among his 30 books are Four Incarnations (Coffee House Press), Heavenly Sex, God is in the Cracks (Black Moss Press), and Rosicrucian in the Basement. He is also the author of The Toronto Islands, a best-selling illustrated history of a close-knit community and historic area in the heart of Toronto.

Born and raised in Chicago, Sward served in the U.S. Navy in the combat zone during the Korean War and later worked for CBC Radio and as book reviewer and feature writer for The Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail.


All Books

Order Now

New and Selected Poems: 1957-2011

Robert Sward

Publication Date: October 1, 2011

$24.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-261-6

Description:

New and Selected Poems: 1957 – 2011 is culled from Robert Sward’s newest and best works, including both previously unpublished poems and selections from his 20+ books of poetry. It is the definitive Sward collection, exhibiting throughout his signature style: outwardly zany and fanciful, but inwardly serious, troubled, and questioning. They cover the territory Sward has tread so well – love, divorce, multiple marriage, aging, loss, and the challenge of bringing up children in a highly unstable world – in his lifelong search for the liberating illumination of IT.

News

Amy Shearn, Author of UNSEEN CITY, Has an Essay Published In the NY Times!

Married heterosexual motherhood in America, especially in the past two years, is a game no one wins. During the height of the pandemic, my mom-friend group chats roiled: I’m going to scream, typed women trying to do it all. I am seriously going to kill my husband and/or devour my young (hope they don’t subpoena this text thread) became a […]

Electric Lit’s BOOKTAILS creates mocktail for Thea Prieto’s FROM THE CAVES!

Curl up with a cocktail and Thea Prieto’s “From The Caves,” and walk the line between truth and myth, story and identity SEP 16, 2022 LINDSAY MERBAUM Winner of the Red Hen Press Novella Award, Thea Prieto’s From the Caves, portrays a nightmarish future, where a dwindling number of humans reside naked in caves, trapped between […]

Thea Prieto, author of FROM THE CAVES, will be at The Neverending Bookshop!

The Neverending Bookshop is thrilled to host local author Thea Prieto and her book “From the Caves”. Set in an environmental apocalypse, this lovely book follows four characters as they survive through the catastrophe in a cave. Thea will discuss her book, do a reading, and answer questions. For more information about Thea and her […]

Hasty Book List Interviews Thea Prieto, Author of FROM THE CAVES!

Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the […]

Thea Prieto, author of FROM THE CAVES, interview featured in Heavy Feather Review!

Thea Prieto’s debut From the Caves, winner of the Red Hen Novella Award, contains an entire post-apocalyptic world that is both empty and claustrophobic. In the core days of a blazing summer, four people fight for survival with only each other and their storytelling to drive them forward. Resources are catastrophically limited; the world is […]

Thea Prieto Describes the Writing Process of FROM THE CAVES in the Kenyon Review!

Jeff Alessandrelli-With the Covid-19 pandemic, there have obviously been dozens of books that haven’t received the shine they might have under normal circumstances. One new release that I hope gets all the attention and more is Thea Prieto’s novella From the Caves, winner of the Red Hen Press Novella Award. From the Caves exists in an ethereal place, […]

Thea Prieto (FROM THE CAVES) writes article for Poets & Writers!

For the past decade an international community of women and nonbinary writers have been working to claim space for themselves in an industry historically dominated by men. Known as Women Who Submit (WWS), the group supports and empowers its members to submit their work in spite of publishing’s inequities. Their achievements have been extraordinary: This […]

UNSEEN CITY featured in GBH!

Each month, Beyond The Page: A WGBH Book Club features a notable author, who takes part in a live Q&A with a WGBH personality to discuss the intricacies of that month’s novel. With each monthly book selection, we also ask the author for a list of reading recommendations. For its December edition, Beyond The Page selected Emily Gray […]

Rebecca McClanahan Interview with Laraine Herring

I met Rebecca McClanahan on Facebook. I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting her in person. I saw the cover of her new memoir in essays: In the Key of New York City, and because I’m starting to get braver at reaching out to people I want to know, I messaged her and […]

Rebecca McClanahan Interview at SOUNDINGS magazine with Sydney Elliot

A PDF of In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays by Rebecca McClanahan sits on my desk, held together with a big clip. The top page is stained with coffee and food and notes scribbled all over the surface. Squirrel, 9/11, cancer, God, cookies. When I first started reading the book, […]

Rebecca McClanahan Interview at Talking River Review with Jennifer Anderson

In her new book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, slated for release on September 1, 2020, Rebecca McClanahan recounts the decade that she and her husband lived in New York City. Not only are these essays individually rich in texture, they are expertly woven together to create a vibrant […]

Rebecca McClanahan Interview at Brevity Magazine with Nancy Geyer

In 1998, with a sublet lined up but without jobs, Rebecca McClanahan and her husband left North Carolina and moved to New York City. They were well into middle age. (“Isn’t that backwards?” asked one of McClanahan’s nieces. “Don’t most people go to New York when they’re young?”) Expecting to stay for two years, they […]

Amy Shearn, the author of UNSEEN CITY, has an article published on Forge.

“The news of the past few days has inspired a flurry of group texts and confused conversations among my friends and colleagues. And the general consensus is that no one knows how to feel right now…” To read the rest of her article, click the read more option below. And do not forget to check out UNSEEN CITY.

OK, So …: Episode 14 – Amy Shearn

Welcome to the Season Premiere and Episode 14 of “OK, So …”. This week, I sat down with Amy Shearn, Editor at Medium and author of three novels, including her newest “Unseen City”, which drops next Tuesday, September 29th from Red Hen Press. Amy and I talked about the new school year, growing up in […]

UNSEEN CITY is one of “6 Fall Books to Curl Up with All Season Long”

A librarian, a ghost, and New York city walk into a book—and there you have a recipe for what I never realized is my perfect novel, “Unseen City.” What can be described as a love letter to New York, Amy Shearn’s novel serves as a romantic, haunting story that weaves together the metropolitan behemoth’s past […]

Rebecca McClanahan Interview at The Rumpus with Julie Marie Wade

Nearly twenty years ago, I read an essay that has always stayed with me. The writer is reading a copy of Denise Levertov’s Evening Train, which she has checked out from the New York Public Library. As she reads and documents this experience for her reader, the writer finds herself engaging not only with the nuances of […]

Reviews

EcoLit Books Reviews Thea Prieto’s FROM THE CAVES!

The end of the world is not for the faint of heart, and neither is Thea Prieto’s bold and beautiful novella about four humans pushed to the limits of climate catastrophe. Echoing the style of myths and examining the power of storytelling, From the Caves is about Sky, a young man coming of age and learning how […]

FROM THE CAVES reviewed in The Rupture!

The cover art of Thea Prieto’s debut novella coupled with its title, From the Caves, invited this reviewer immediately to consider Plato’s famed Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s fire, however, is a projector of shadows, a dim replacement of the sun, while Prieto’s is so much more. The fires of From the Caves are creatures […]

Thea Prieto’s FROM THE CAVES is a staff pick at Bear Pond Books!

A fantastic novella of literary merit about a small family living in a cave after the climate apocalypse. Told in language that sings from the point of view of Sky, the youngest member who learns that responsibility is as necessary as the stories they tell each other to survive. The book is dark and bleak […]

FROM THE CAVES by Thea Prieto reviewed in Diagram 21.5!

Being an elder millennial (see: I refuse to use the term ‘geriatric’), I’ve come to accept that I no longer know any of the cool lingo that the kids these days use. That said, the first thing that comes to mind when reading Thea Prieto’s From the Caves is that it gives off “major A24 […]

FROM THE CAVES by Thea Prieto reviewed in Publishers Weekly!

In Prieto’s trenchant debut, the survivors of an apocalypse navigate a scorched land full of desolation and desperation. Among the enigmatic cast is Mark, a bossy young man; Tie, a compassionate pregnant woman; Teller, a wise old man with a limp; and Sky, an impressionable eight-year-old mourning the death of Green, formerly his mentor and […]

Rain Taxi shows off UNSEEN CITY in their recent magazine issue!

“Funny, spooky, sad, and yet hopeful, Amy Shearn’s UNSEEN CITY is at times a family drama, a ghost story, a commentary on race relations, an intense flirtation, and a love letter to Brooklyn.” -Carolyn Linck To read the full article, check out Rain Taxi’s most recent volume below! (Volume 26, Number 1 Spring 2021 #101)

Shelf Media Group reviews UNSEEN CITY by Amy Shearn!

The Past Meets the Present Shearn’s book, Unseen City, is an unexpected entry into an historical home and the contrast between life and death. Or, perhaps more fitting, the contrast between living and death. Told in 3rd person omniscient POV, Unseen City takes readers on a journey into the afterlife by way of Meg’s (the […]

Review of IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by River Teeth Journal.

“Perhaps the sheer amount of time devoted to the work is part of the magic. McClanahan’s essays were written in the 2000s, most in and around 9/11, when she and her husband decided to have a short-lived adventure in New York City and ended up staying for eleven years. A respected essayist, she could have rested on her […]

Review of IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by Kenyon Review

The subtitle “A Memoir in Essays” suggests that this memoir will follow a nontraditional narrative, and its unexpected movements are part of the reward. The narrative rises and falls with the crescendo of sirens and tumbles into the bass notes of buses. Would-be chapters function like solos. We begin in the middle of things that […]

Kirkus Reviews: Unseen City

A ghost story that focuses not on a single spirit but on an entire city whose layered history haunts its occupants. “Meg had the unsettling sense that she was seeing all the layers of the city transposed over one another, like scrims in a play going haywire.” Meg Rhys proudly carries her “Spinster Librarian card” […]

Foreword Reviews: Unseen City by Amy Shearn

Amy Shearn’s modern fable Unseen City is anchored by smart, sly humor. It delves into the layered social, psychological, and historical architecture of New York City, a place that’s paved over the bones of its dead, who are transmuted by needs of the living or clarified by their own unmet demands. Somewhere between the two poles lies […]

Publishers Weekly Review: Unseen City by Amy Shearn

Shearn’s luminous latest (after The Mermaid from Brooklyn) follows a self-avowed librarian spinster; a man researching the history of his father’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home; and the ghost of an orphaned girl from Civil War–era Manhattan. Meg Rhys lives in the perfect apartment: it’s rent-controlled, close to her job at the Brooklyn Library, and also home […]

Review of IN THE KEY OF NEW YORK CITY: A MEMOIR IN ESSAYS by PANK magazine

I’ve never lived in New York City, though I’ve always loved it from afar. Visits to friends in Brooklyn, a few work jaunts into Manhattan, a research trip one summer to the UN. The subway and sidewalks were always crowded, the department stores a wreck of frenzied humanity, and the streets in August reeked of […]