The Swallows Come Out (Paperback)

The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems, 1995-2025, with a foreword by Stephanie Burt, brings together three decades of Angie Estes's extraordinary linguistic alchemy. Opening with selections from her newest collection, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, and including selections from her acclaimed previous books, these poems illuminate connections between art, memory, and desire.

Estes weaves together classical mythology and contemporary longing, European art and American landscapes, creating a tapestry where Dante converses with Miles Davis, swallows become stars, and the past ignites our lives. Her signature style — playful yet profound, erudite yet accessible — transforms everyday moments into revelations through stunning juxtapositions.

Whether exploring the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, the vineyards of Burgundy, or a mother's handwriting, Estes finds the sacred in the quotidian. This essential volume confirms her position as one of our most distinctive voices, a poet who makes language itself a form of devotion, a way of entering the world.

Angie Estes is the author of seven previous books of poems, most recently Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Edition Press, 2025). Her book, Enchantée, won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, and Tryst was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A collection of essays devoted to Estes's work appears in the University of Michigan Press "Under Discussion" series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry (2019).

The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. In 2023, she was a Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the James Merrill House.

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her books of poetry and criticism include Taylor's Version: The Musical and Poetic Genius of Taylor Swift (2025), Super Gay Poems(2025) and We Are Mermaids (2022). Her next book of poems will appear from Graywolf