Swensen — a former Iowa Writers' Workshop director who's spent years bridging American and French literary traditions — has built her career on the idea that poetry doesn't have to stay in its lane. Veer lives up to its name, swerving deliberately toward the outer limits of what language can do, testing where meaning holds together and where it starts to dissolve.

For the uninitiated, Swensen occupies a fascinating space in contemporary poetry. She's not writing Instagram captions dressed up as verse, and she's not producing impenetrable academic exercises that exist purely to justify tenure. Veer sits in that productive tension between accessibility and experimentation — poems that reward attention without demanding a PhD to parse.

So why should a liberty-minded reader care about avant-garde poetry? Because at its best, experimental art is fundamentally about freedom — freedom from convention, from institutional expectations, from the lazy assumption that the way things have always been done is the way they should be done. There's something deeply anti-authoritarian about a poet who refuses to let language be pinned down, who insists that the boundaries we draw around meaning are more arbitrary than we'd like to admit.

That said, the experimental poetry world has its own orthodoxies and gatekeepers, and the Bay Area literary scene is no exception. The question with any collection like Veer is whether it's genuinely pushing boundaries or just performing boundary-pushing for a niche audience that already agrees.

From what we can see, Swensen earns it. The work is rigorous, the swerves are intentional, and the collection doesn't mistake obscurity for depth. If you're the type who thinks San Francisco's cultural contributions should extend beyond app launches and sourdough discourse, Veer is worth your time.