About the author: Eleanor Swanson’s most recent poetry collection is Trembling in the Bones (Ghost Road Press, 2006). Her collection A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium (National Federation of State Poetry Societies Press) received the 2003 Stevens Prize and was a finalist in poetry for the 2004 Colorado Book Award. Other awards include both an NEA and state of Colorado literature fellowships. Additionally, in 2002 she was finalist for the Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Editor’s Prize and for Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Award. She was recently twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Swanson is a professor in the English Department at Regis University in Denver where she teaches fiction and poetry workshops, as well as American literature.

Reviews: April 2008, Class Action (classism.org) reviews Eleanor Swanson’s Trembling in the Bones 

Blurbs: “One of America’s jarring and bloody conflicts comes to life in this poetry collection that marks the Colorado coal mining wars of the early 1900s. Eleanor Swanson’s verse remembers the people who labored to harvest fuel for the Industrial Revolution, and culminates in the shameful Ludlow Massacre. Thoroughly researched, Trembling in the Bones allows us to step back in time, to imagine the hopes and laments of people who were trampled without remorse, and in the name of progress. Eleanor Swanson is an accomplished poet whose stirring, informed lines give important new insight and understanding to a story I labored to untangle as a young historian many years ago—the early struggles for recognition and justice of Colorado’s coal miners. This thoughtful, carefully selected collection of her poems merits wide reading.” —George McGovern, Ph.D., Northwestern University, author of The Great Coalfield War, U.S. Senator, U.S. Ambassador, and 1972 Presidential nominee

“Through the voices of coal miners and their families, of Mother Jones and the militia men, Eleanor Swanson recreates a history that resonates far beyond the borders of these pages. Hers is a vivid, intricately detailed rendering of ‘this new garden.’” —Linda Bierds, author of First Hand

“Reclaiming for poetry the art of reinterpreting historical lives, Trembling in the Bones makes the case that memory, like invention, is always at our imaginative doorstep, that it informs our present, and directs us to our future. Swanson’s narratives capture, transform, and liberate the “smoke and blood” of the ever-present past.” —David Biespiel, author of Wild Civility

“One of the effects of great art is to shock and move us to rage. We can see it in Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, where Spanish freedom fighters are lined up against a wall in the dark of night and shot by French soldiers. Closer to our own age, we see this ability to shock, move us to tears, and make us raise our fists in protest and solidarity in the poems of Eleanor Swanson’s luminous narrative about one of the most shameful incidents in American labor history. [It] is a dazzling collection…Swanson’s language is both spare and evocative, bluntly descriptive and deeply moving, as she lays out the horror that unfolds when some have all and others just want their fair share.” —Robert Cooperman, author of A Killing Fever and winner of the Colorado Book Award for In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains

Trembling in the Bones
Eleanor Swanson
ISBN 0977803465 $13.95

Mother Jones Visits Colorado in Disguise 1903

Not long before a strike was called, I disguised
myself as a peddler, and went down to the southern
coalfields of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

I put on a calico dress, faded and gauzy,
such as a homely old woman would wear
as she eked out a living in the squalid coal camps.

I hid my face with a big sunbonnet, and made
my way into the windswept canyons of the Black
Hills, and to the coal towns of Tabasco and Berwin.

Mouths to the narrow canyons are guarded,
but I was allowed to pass, so meager was my attire.
I peered from beneath the brim of my bonnet

at the shoddy company cabins
perched among sandstone rocks
and thick stands of juniper.

I offered the simple sundries most
were too poor to buy, the diggers paid
only in scrip—pins, needles, elastic

and such, for making or mending clothes.
At each camp, some family would ask me
to take a meal with them and stay

the night, more often than not, bedded
down on a quilt among the children,
who wanted to touch my long white hair.

When I let it down, they stroked it,
and begged for a packet of pins
or buttons, holding out small hands.
As always, although nearly forty
years have passed since I lost them,
I could not help but think

of my own four babies, dead
of yellow fever, one by one, my
husband passing of the same sickness.

A boy reached out to me with cut palms
and fingers, a breaker boy of ten
or so who sifted rocks from coal

all day in near darkness.
I pitied him his lost childhood
and gave him a packet of my best

brass buttons, shiny as little suns.
Poor lad. I told him he must
go to school and learn to read.

He laughed. “Next I’ll be a trapper
and then take up the pick,” he said,
a thin child with coal-dark hair.

Enough, I thought, a word I’ve
thought and said ten thousand times.
Their souls slowly drift away.

Men, women and children,
all living as if they have already
been taken by the earth and its long silences.