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"John Estes’ poems—precise, quizzical, erudite, playful—remind us of the revelatory work wit can do when matched to a sensuous mind."

~ Michele Glazer
Author of On Tact, & the Made Up World

"These are the poems of the perplexed. More specifically, they are the poems of the perplexed but good-humored, the perplexed but well-disposed—an all but forgotten species of intellectual whose lineage includes Chesterton, Orwell, and Lippmann. They are, moreover, poems that treat domestic life—life in common—with due respect, and with intermittent awe."

~ Scott Cairns, Author of Compass of Affection

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Winner of a 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America, chosen
by C. K. Williams

“John Estes has a formidable sense of the music of poetry, a command of its resources so certain that he can play and display his verbal gifts with, when he wishes, a headlong dexterity. His poems can also be funny, and sad, as aware of mortality and grief as only the best playful poets can be, and intellectually serious.

“Many of the poems in Swerve are in the tradition of what might be called the domestic sublime, which usually consists of meticulously observed recountings of the mores and morals of individuals in intimate situations, particularly family relations, and their emotional and intellectual repercussions.  The aesthetic opportunities of poems in this tradition, from Lowell and Plath to Olds, and reaching back to Coleridge and Wordsworth, pivot on such dramatic observations out into more resonant, philosophical and spiritual awarenesses; there is often a pressing urge for the poetic consciousness to suspend meaning and value between the particular and the general in just the way Estes does so well.” ~ From the Introduction

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Runner up, 2007 Brushfire Chapbook Award, judged by Ilya Kaminsky

"Fathers—biological, spiritual, aesthetic—and sons populate these complex, allusive, sharply crafted, and probing poems. In them Estes asks nothing less than: For what do we live and for what are we willing to die? Their satisfying mix of high and low dictions, the mythic and familiar, the sacred and sexy re-invigorates these age-old questions—and, appropriately, it is Sappho who provides the age-old answer, which is: Desire." --Kathy Fagan

"These are the texts of a lost literacy. These poems make me want to weep." --Joseph Duemer

Published by Finishing Line Press