By Claire Bateman

Let’s begin with genre. While Patrick Swaney’s Hand Over Hand Over the Edge of the World (YesYes Books, 2025) is described in its promotional materials as prose poems, the title piece won Nanofiction’s 2012 Nano Prize, and Swaney himself refers to it as a story. This slippage is generative: on the flash-fiction/prose-poem continuum, there’s space for experimentation in the messy middle, and that piece exemplifies this fluidity:

At the college they’re reenacting famous plane crashes. It’s a fundraiser. We all go.
In the auditorium we’re waiting for the first plane. The woman sitting next to me
tells me a story I don’t ask to hear. She tells me about a girl who lived in a town on a
plateau and a man who came across the plains, all squint and callus, pulling a rope
that stretched behind him to the horizon. At the center of town, the man placed the
end of the rope at the waiting girl’s feet and clapped the dust off his hands beneath
a sun that could have been any sun, high and flat. The girl didn’t know what to do
with the rope. She asked the man, but the man didn’t answer. He just retraced his
steps and disappeared in the distance as if he was climbing over the edge of the
world. The woman stops talking like it’s the end of the story. What did the girl do?
I ask. What? the woman says. The girl, I say, with the rope? Oh, I don’t know, the
woman says, she could have done anything. What does this story have to do with
me? I say. I think they’re starting, the woman says, and resituates herself in her
seat. The auditorium darkens and a spotlight follows paper streamers of flame and
smoke from a failed engine across the stage.

The book is populated with such characters (“man,” “woman,” “girl,” etc., and sometimes “I” or “you”), usually unnamed though occasionally referred to by their roles, such as “Mr. and Mrs. Dentist.” Swaney also typically favors nested micronarratives and generic archetypal settings, places like “the college,” “the city,” or “the house,” over named or grounded geographies. He has stated that his method is to go deep into the momentary “to represent the immediacy of the temporary” and “capture a world completely but also hint at an unseen, unspoken world around the edges”; these self-contained absurdist fables and lyrical narratives have a timeless, dreamlike quality. Working in a tradition rooted in the lineage of Russell Edson, Swaney focuses on the surreal or on particular luminous scenes. (He mentions Edson as an influence along with Denis Johnson, Mary Robison, Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis, and James Tate.)

In both the surreal pieces and the understated miniatures such as “Commute,” in which the narrator recounts a quiet conversation with a player’s mother during a Little League game, emotion is presented in muted tones or is only implied, yet the collection isn’t flat or affectless; there’s a quiet bewilderment and/or longing reminiscent of slow cinema, present even during charged or dramatic events (for instance, a fire at the blanket factory that consumes the workers’ homes in “Thermometer”). Individuals are located behind panes of glass or enclosed in bubbles of air or light. A rich, evocative emptiness prevails.

One challenge in a collection where so many pieces are reliant on defamiliarization is sustaining reader engagement. In “Uncovered,” Swaney escalates strangeness only to undercut it with a Zen-like turn:

“Look how loose your skin is,” the woman says, and grabs hold at his elbow. She
pulls and the skin stretches, so that even though there is less of him there’s more.
“I don’t see the problem,” the man says. He thinks of his hunger like a bright spot
on his tongue. A bright spot sliding down his throat. She collects his skin in folds.
“Look at this,” she says, with an armload of pasta-like elbow skin. A bright spot in
his stomach. She is enveloped in elbow skin, but still she pulls. “How much more?”
she asks. A bright spot expanding until there’s nothing left. “Patience,” the man
says.

This approach balances novelty with restraint, avoiding the numbing effect of constant surprise while maintaining quiet tension.

Ultimately, this collection’s resonance emerges from the human hungers that illuminate both lyric meditations and surreal incongruities. Swaney’s work demonstrates that flash and prose poetry can coexist in a cohesive, contemplative vision, offering readers emotional subtlety, existential reflection, and a sustained sense of wonder.

---

Claire Bateman is the author of the hybrid collection The Pillow Museum (Fiction Collective 2 / University of Alabama Press) and nine poetry collections, most recently, Wonders of the Invisible World (42 Miles Press) and Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships by the NEA and the Tennessee Arts Commission Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and two New Millennium Poetry Prizes.