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The Swing at the Edge of the World by Lea Graham

Name: The Swing at the Edge of the World by Lea Graham
SKU: 141695
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Original price was: $17.99.Current price is: $15.99.

Lea Graham circumnavigates the world in this book. “We burned maps,” she says, but who needs them when immersed in this wanderlust, moving from Romania to London to Tapachula to Poland or is it Ravenna? Dreams fold into nightmares into life, and there are some things that we can’t get away from, like “Hotel California” in Ecuador, Galway, Bulgaria, and, of course, “the self the self the self.” Graham asks, “Where was I then?” but she might as well have been asking, “Who was I then?” as the myriad selves search for the woman who is alive in the moment, in love with a man, with words, with the brutal and beautiful world. It is a mesmerizing journey.

–Barbara Hamby, Holoholo (Pitt Poetry Series, 2021)

Who isn’t torn between the Rilkean drive to change our lives and the people, the food, the places that tie us to the past? These poems dwell in the arc of the swing at the edge of the world; they fling us out into distant locales, the unknown, the possible, only to pull us back: the home state, memory, the self, at once nostalgic and fully aware that living resists nostalgia.

–Brian Clements, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon, 2017)

Perched on the edge of “no place to go,” Lea Graham’s travel poems are an itinerary of incidental journeys into hard past and over meals shared with “these unknown familiar people.” In song and focus, these poems are balanced on the cusp—the turn for home, but singing some elsewhere where we want to remain.

–Garin Cycholl, prairie)d, (BlazeVox, 2024)

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The Swing at the Edge of the World

by Lea Graham

Paper

$15.99 List: ~~$17.99~~

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This title will be released on September 19 , 2025

Is travel within or outside of us?

–“Why Don’t We All Stay Home”

In this chapbook of travel poems, the heft and range of perspective is explored. What do we see and experience when in unfamiliar places? How are those sights and experiences determined by the familiar or the angle of the self? How does our knowledge or lack thereof determine how we piece together a place? How does travel then change our familiar places? If we spend time in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, France, does that change our vision of Paris, Arkansas? Paris, Texas? Like the photo of Lantau Peak by the photographer, Yoav Horesh, in which his subject is shooting photos from the second highest place in Hong Kong, perspective shapes the view.

In some of these poems like “When You’re in Romania and Wish You Were Alone,” a single person (the “rock and roll loser”) undermines the speaker-traveler’s hopes for a peaceful, thoughtful experience. In others, like “It’s As If the Whole World Has Forgotten Us,” the Guatemalan woman who speaks the title’s line, opens up a whole world for our narrator—a world of both near-total isolation on the border of Mexico/Guatemala and one of gratitude. In this book, the ethics and limitations of travel are implicitly questioned—and how places leave us craving, leave us dreaming.

Lea Graham is a writer, editor, critic and translator who lives in Hyde Park, New York. She is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), a fine press book and three chapbooks. Recently, she edited the anthology of critical essays: From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2022).