Once Upon a Time

Daniel Schwartz's debut collection of poems Once Upon a Time "astounds with its acrid and self-steeling figurative power." In this phantasmagoric journey, Schwartz offers readers a kind of "genetic account of creation" -- a creation that is simultaneously an excavation of the speaker's own mind, never quite ending or arriving, looping always ecstatically back on itself. Called by one reader a "contemporary theophany," Schwartz's collection transfigures the emotional landscape of childhood -- our immemorial family drama -- into incandescent abstraction, an imagistic anti-thinking whose dark intensities are strange and joyous.