Happy birthday, Big Other contributor Cole Swensen, a poet of extraordinary perceptual fluidity and experimental adventurousness! Across Swensen’s many collections, she has vitally explored visual art, architecture, landscapes, history, and the natural world, and much more besides, bringing playful and rigorous intellectual inquiry into conversation with a singular alertness to the sensuous life of language.

In “Windows” and “Stairs & Windows,” which we published in Big Other in 2023, she transforms familiar architectural features into continua of thought. A train window becomes a threshold between presence and disappearance, while a spiral staircase sets leaves, air, reflections, and bodies into unexpected motion. The three Swensen poems we published in 2025 extend this fascination with perception: a painted window seems to open onto another space; and broken glass becomes a meditation on the forces that hold things together and the moments when those forces fail. Swensen masterfully makes these shifts feel surprising and inevitable, as though the world were always on the verge of becoming something else, somewhere else.

We’re delighted that some of the abovementioned poems published in Big Other were subsequently published in Swensen’s Veer (Alice James Books) and the anthology Breaking into Blossom (Texas Review Press)!

In other words, celebrate Cole Swensen by reading her extraordinary, endlessly exploratory writing!

Three Poems

A window is a device for multiplying light.

A window in a painting creates a window in the wall behind it. Sometimes we think it’s beyond us, this openness, and sometimes it is.

If, on the other hand, a painting of a window happens to be hung over a window, the light coming through that window will get trapped behind the painting and will build up throughout the day until by evening the painting will seem to be—and actually is—now lit from within.

If you hang a painting of a window over a window, we cannot be held responsible for the consequences. Someone lost in a locked room, someone else you can suddenly see through.

Window slamming shut in wind. Window broken in a storm. How does glass break? What are the elements that must separate? As a non-crystalline solid with a random arrangement of atoms, some of them must just cease to grip, must come unhinged. I once worked for a stained-glass artist, and one day using a glass cutter to score a straight line across a pane, he explained that it was “breaking the surface tension,” as if one could score a line across water, as if a sheet of rain could be cut and fitted into a frame to keep out the rain.

Light fallen across a fallen shadow strikes
a clarity that she would have called a window

Or light falls where it falls and then goes fallow
and there in the earth is planted a window

*

Within a field of thought so oddly thorough
that a crow crosses one pane of a window

which changes everything; you see it follow
the window beyond into another window.

*

If a window falls from a great height, a shadow
will launch out of nowhere to protect it

If the shards sweep themselves together again, a passing
bird will be enough to make a flock of the window

And then it’s off once more, startled to flight
by a diving crow, which, despite its darkness, is its own window.