Author Description

Poetry. "Russel Swensen's MAGIC KINGDOM is a glass globe, shattered like the one Charles Foster Kane let fall, a sphere of obsession in which the past is a fugue of vanished music and desolate mornings, glamorous and desparate gestures in a city gone liquid and dream-quick with cocaine and sexual promise. This poet knows from the beginning that intoxication ends, and beloved companions scatter and perish; such dicey kingdoms don't come again. But it is his work, his lament and his privilege to place the unfinished past at the center of his bristling, troubled art." Mark Doty"