Previous Praise for Margot Schilpp:

"The abiding interest of these poems are memory and the difficulty of making a self. I read this book as an emotional narrative, the details of the poet’s life less important than the spirit in which they are rendered. It’s Schilpp’s lyrical imagination that I’m most drawn to here: I can feel her, in poem after poem, creating a reality that is shaped most of all by beauty. The poems succeed because they show her struggling to redeem her past. It’s a testament to her ability as a poet that I know myself better having read this book. These are beautiful, quietly powerful poems."

Bob Hicok

Previous Praise for Margot Schilpp: 

"Afterswarm is a collection of powerful, sometimes kaleidoscopic meditations on the human condition in a universe akin to Steven Crane’s, one which has 'no sense of obligation' for our existence. The trials of mutability, heartbreak, alienation, and mundanity are met with stoical tenacity (and, occasionally, wry humor) while 'shimmerings' of beauty and love are 'syncopated against loss.' These poems strike deep. And Schilpp’s unembellished eloquence, musician’s ear, and eye for evocative detail energize every page of this extraordinary book."

William Trowbridge, author of Vanishing Point

Previous Praise for Margot Schilpp:

"The poems of Afterswarm are concerned with our most fundamental choices, those defining swerves of intention—to embrace or abandon a career, to marry, to divorce—and especially the life-changing decision to have children after long certainty not to. In midlife’s creation of 'a grammar of willing away,' of evoking and releasing alternate and former selves humming on the vanishing edge of possibility, Schilpp hides 'little blazes in the wings' of the familiar, the everyday now, discovering the music not of finale but of doors opening. Afterswarm is ultimately less about abandonment than a deep gratitude for arrival. 'Relying on history / got us nowhere. So we sang,' she writes. While taking on fully the anxieties of midlife, of parenting and loss, both potential and real, these poems resist the nowhere of despair and sing beautifully, taking 'seriously the solemn job of love.'”

Sandra Meek