Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser

"When Luisa Igloria cites Epictetus--'as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place'--she introduces the crowded and contradictory world her poems portray: a realm of transience, yes, where the vulnerable come to harm and everything disappears, but also a scene of tremendous, unpredictable bounty, the gloriously hued density this poet loves to detail. 'I was raised / to believe not only the beautiful can live on / Parnassus, ' she tells us, and she makes it true, by including in the cyclonic swirl of her poems practically everything: a gorgeous, troubling over-brimming universe."

--Mark Doty, judge for the 2014 Swenson Award The May Swenson Poetry Award, an annual competition named for May Swenson, honors her as one of America's most provocative and vital writers. During her long career, Swenson was loved and praised by writers from virtually every school of American poetry. She left a legacy of fifty years of writing when she died in 1989. She is buried in Logan, Utah, her hometown.