Swerve
arrives in Spring 2026 from Pine Row Press
Advance praise for Swerve:
“These poems are remarkable for the way they “swerve” from one association to the next as they move down the page, their many catalogues lit by a vivid and worldly imagery. I admire their tone, – both stoic and vulnerable -- contemporary, ironic, feminine, their wry humor never too far from the surface.”
—Dorianne Laux
“Squashing all notions of poetry as erudite, infallible, and beauteous, the poems in Swerve deliver hilarious, heartbreaking eff-ups on every page. Think actual people, actually farting. Tracey Knapp’s deadpan, earnest delivery and lack of pretension beckons us inside an unfurnished apartment, where we're pushed off the cliff of an unlived memory into a unfamiliar carpet of humanness. That recollection-reconnection, Knapp seems to say, is why we're drawn to art, and where we are actually connected. And that where is awkward af. “Don’t believe that no one else cares if you’re okay. You’re totally wrong,” Knapp writes. And I usually am, but in Tracey Knapp’s hands, I don’t wanna be right.”
—Jennifer L. Knox
“If you are a fan of Mouth, Tracey Knapp’s first book, you will be pleased that the conversational, associative, tragi-comic, mordant, often self-mocking and flippant voice of that collection returns in Swerve. But darker. But at the cusp of not being funny at all. We are in the confessional; we are down in a hole. “There is some / common urge to say whatever you don’t have / anyone to tell except these strangers,” writes Knapp in the first poem, and she tells us: post-Covid malaise, loneliness, dissipation, jury-rigged selfcare. “Can you name your scars and their reasons,” asks Knapp, contemplating her swerve into middle age, her AWOL “oomph.” She comes clean: “After a certain point you are everything / you’ve ever done to yourself,” and those things, decidedly, ain’t that pretty at all. But even if “[t]he small hours of morning open like a sinkhole,” even if “you are too old for cigarettes, too old / for Santa,” something nascent remains, “a bulb about to pop through / the muck,” something “about to grow” that is viable and “goddamn beautiful.”
—John Hoppenthaler
Mouth
"...part Frank O’Hara, part Robert Herrick, and, yes, part chick lit, it’s a book that hurts, and a book that flirts... It’s also part of the least self-important, and therefore the most important, tradition of lyric, the tradition of trying to make the tiny moments, their delights and disappointments, last."
Stephanie Burt, Slate
"Quotidian, weird, intimate, witty, and skittery, Knapp's poems are refractions through a funhouse mirror. ...Read it and weep over your nachos and wine; it will leave you wanting more."
Kim Addonizio
Deliciously irreverent, Knapp’s poems welcome us into a weird urban landscape full of airports, broken hearts, wine and spilled dog chow. ...[She] delves into the shadow and still finds glimpses of light."
San Francisco Chronicle
"These poems are capable of being self-aware but unapologetic and far from self-important; they are honest, and overly, brutally honest at that ...her wit and humor as the self-aware, unapologetic persona meets the blunt edges and observations of a self-destructive, fatalist persona."
The Rumpus
"The keynotes of MOUTH are rueful resiliency and brash celebration in spite of losses... Tracey Knapp's protagonist is a funny, brave woman who refuses to quit appreciating life ( 'I write to say I have not yet splattered' ) and who knows she should never shut up."
Mark Halliday
"Tracey Knapp's MOUTH sings of missed cabs, visible nipples, and awkward martinis. In other words: everything that matters. Pick striped shirts with her. Groan at the sky. Feel the moon dip into the trees. Don't be late. She has wine and cable."
Daniel Nester
