Swerve

Tracey Knapp is the author of two poetry collections, Swerve (Pine Row Press, 2026) and Mouth (42 Miles Press, 2015). She has received prizes and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy, the Tin House Writers' Workshop, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in the New Ohio Review, The Glacier, SWWIM, ONE ART, Cream City Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcart prizes. Originally from New York's Hudson Valley, Tracey lives in the California Bay Area. Find her at traceyknapp.com.

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 recollectionreconnection,
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