Abby Walthausen’s A Swale a Sort of Swaddle is a prismatic eco-thematic collection, intimately alert to the scary wonders of new motherhood in a world seething through various convulsions. Her lines move with sharp, high levels of proprioception. Taut and fluid, she crafts a haptic Dickinsonian music which is truly the sign of an original poet and a major new voice in American poetry.
     —Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons
and School for Instructions

The speakers of Abby Walthausen’s A Swale a Sort of Swaddle contemplate motherhood, religion, domesticity, displacement, and the natural world with dark humor and sonic virtuosity. These poems expose the “gruesome” “touch tank” world as at once holy and absurd. It’s a borderland place of wonder and doom where Walthausen’s linguistic brilliance becomes a new form of cherishing.
     —Kim Young author Night Radio and Tigers

Developmental cairns of early family life are granted electric treatment in A Swale a Sort of Swaddle. The valor in Abby Walthausen’s poems, as in the valor of motherhood, is found in her flights of devotion and self-trust that are weird, intimate, and original. Haptic hazard and delight. Reliquary in Manila pockets, melting butters. “One day language, great byproduct of saliva / will be my only fungus, my hope / to carry those essential signals.” Each poem works philosophical and quotidian registers, sings high comedy in the loaded syntax of Walthausen’s singular heartmind.
    —Sara Ellen Fowler, author of Two Signatures