John Koethe reads from his latest collection of poetry "The Swimmer"

“Few poets write more accurately and painfully [than John Koethe].... This is a poetry of magnificent undertow.” —Jorie Graham

John Koethe, in his tenth volume of poetry, investigates the capricious nature of everyday life, “the late night jazz, great sex and all / The human shit defining what we are.” His poems--always dynamic and in process, never static and complete--luxuriate in the questions that punctuate the most humdrum of routines. In The Swimmer, the “terrible feeling of being just about to fall” energizes everything: life’s trivialities, surprises, and disappointments, even “the indifference and infirmities of age.” Together, these remarkable new poems rescue the detritus of life from oblivion and render a robust portrait of an individual: complicated, quotidian, and resounding with truth.

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John Koethe has published nine books of poetry and has received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the 1973 Frank O’Hara Award for Poetry. He has also published books on Ludwig Wittgenstein and philosophical skepticism, and is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.