About Port Desire... “A being between two worlds / conjures terror and bliss,” Elizabeth Swann writes about the archaeopteryx, part reptile, part bird. This unwieldy condition between safety and flight, loss and discovery, life and death, infuses the imagination of this stunning new poet. Whether it’s the wily Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame or a six-thousand-year-old Peruvian mummy now “on display under glass,” or the child, moccasins torn from her feet, pulled “shrieking, / into a cotton dress,” Swann tacks between these two worlds, allowing us to feel anew the agony and ecstasy of being alive. This is a remarkable collection. I love it.

– Dannye Romine Powell, author of A Necklace of Bees

In Elizabeth Swann’s aptly titled Port Desire, she examines the forces that draw us equally to the safety of harbor and to the hazards of the open ocean, open road, open heart. She tests and braids these contending pulls in the lives of artists and scientists, criminals and saints; she contemplates the flight of swallows and studies the bones of the archaeopteryx. In addition to a wide-ranging intelligence, there is wisdom in these poems. Swann knows that often our strongest desire is for a simple bit of luck, a wishbone’s break, or the “four fast-wilting leaves” of a four-leaf clover. And throughout the collection we are carried by the music of her lines. These are rich and rewarding poems, summoning us to acknowledge our own courage and the value to our lives of both port and desire. Elizabeth Swann is a poet who deserves a wide audience.

– Marjorie Stelmach, author of Bent Upon Light

What I love most in these tight, finely crafted poems by Elizabeth Swann is how beautifully they embody our human need for something more. It may take the form of a four-leaf clover, or the larger half of the wishbone, or beating the boys at their own game in “Learning the Ropes at Sixteen.” Or Darwin’s hunt for the flightless Lesser Rhea in the splendid title poem. “How easy/it would have been to quit,” the poet writes. But this poet is no quitter. She hangs on through all the vicissitudes of life and keeps wanting more, and in the process gives us this moving, compassionate book of poems.

– Anthony S. Abbott, author of If Words Could Save Us