crowell has a stunning ability to capture the complexity of a family member's life within a few lines . . . [her] images are as dense and rich as the kudzu she frequently references.--Megan Masterman "Midbrow"

In this collection, we are in the archive of memory, we are invited into the home, we are offered a seat at the table, and we are family, warts and all, but it's all love. In this stunning debut, brittny ray crowell's Cord Swell brings all the iconography of a life fully lived and, remarkably, fully observed into full view, offering poems like heirlooms passed down to us, bolstering strength through every challenge. Her gift to us is that we witness, in text and in visuals, her interviews with the ancestors, hers and ours, and she lets 'a little bit of sunlight hit us' all. No flood or tide can wash away the foundation she lays here; whether in the home or the backyard or out in the world at large, she keeps us on solid ground.--A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again

Open this book and enter a world of haints and snuff juice, of hot sauce and bones, of the musk of menthols and the teeth of ancestors. This book is an altar, a praise song to women (mostly women) who survive--some as witness, some as memory, some as a recipe for gravy. With these poems Crowell offers us something remarkable--a glimpse into a life so rich with its own tradition as to be almost invisible until now: 'anything God / made most folk had overlooked.' Like the rhizome hidden beneath us that connects every tree, these poems reveal how the familiar contains the mythic.--Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pub date: 2025-10-07

Length: 96 pages