Cartographies

poems by Eleanor Swanson

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Since the first clay tablets and the Lascaux cave paintings of stars, maps have shaped human views of the world. The poems in Cartographies depict Galileo’s three maps of Tuscany and the annual migratory routes of birds, as well as Marie Tharp's revolutionary maps of the ocean floor. Historically, maps have created spiritual and physical spaces that humans have become part of.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-971191-03-4 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2026935371

Released February 24, 2026  |  Copyright 2026

108 pages; 7 full-color images

Author Biography

Eleanor Swanson’s work is widely published. Awards include an NEA Fellowship and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship. Her first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and her second collection of poetry, Trembling in the Bones—About the Colorado Coal strike of 1913 and the 1914 Ludlow Massacre—was reissued in 2013 (3: A Taos Press). Her third poetry collection is Memory’s Rooms (Conundrum Press). She is also a fiction writer. She has published a novel and two collections of short stories. Her second short story collection, Exiles and Expatriates, won the 2014 Press Americana Prize. Other awards include first place in the National Writers Union Annual Competition, finalist for the Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Editors’ Prize, and Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda’s Prize. She has a fourth collection of poetry, Non Finito, recently published by Fernwood Press.

Endorsements

“Leave it to a poet in an exacting age of GPS and pixelized satellite images to fasten onto the handiwork of the cartographer drawing in india ink and color wash the curved and shadowed places of the earth. Eleanor Swanson, in her beautiful and astounding book, takes her place among these mapmakers, moving us effortlessly through the outer and inner terrains of cave painters and writers, painters and the politic, taking on voice and dream, fact and mythology in the coding and decoding of each heart she encounters. Swanson travels across vast and exotic places as if she spun a globe by a finger’s touch, exploring the flattened contours of a life with empathy and epiphany: a beaten elephant in the streets of Nepal nodding momentarily in dream beneath her gentling hand, the sleepers in dark corners ‘cry [ing] out in unintelligible syllables.’ Swanson, too, is the cartographer of her own life, and we follow the sweet breadcrumbs she scatters for us along the isolines she draws: its loves, its losses, its birdsong, its strawberry moon. Swanson tells us that the map may be / saying to the reader / ‘You are here, / you are really here.’ And we believe her.”
—Kathryn Winograd, author of Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children

“‘I map the universe,’ imaginately proclaims Eleanor Swanson in her stunningly beautiful collection, Cartographies. The tightly woven book maps the human heart, memory, language, dreams, and so much more with elegance and precision. Swanson captures the stars, the nakedness of what it means to be a traveler lost and sometimes found.”
—Sheryl Luna, author of Pity the Drowned Horses, inaugural winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize

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