Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death. These are the demands Chase Twichell has made of her poems for over half a century. One of America’s most prominent poets and a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell seeks to perceive what Shunryu Suzuki called things-as-it-is.
These two books, published here in tandem, confront fundamental questions about the nature of the self: childhood trauma, the fate of a damaged planet, marriage and widowhood. Twichell’s poems – spare, unflinching, and exact – are distillations of reverence and grief. With language at once precise and intimate, she compels us to consider what it means to be conscious in a world where beauty and joy endure amid ecological and political crises.
Chase Twichell has published nine books of poetry, including Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2010. Things as It Is followed from Copper Canyon Press in the US in 2018, and that collection is now published here for her UK readers together with her latest collection, The World It Was (2026).
'Suppose you had Sappho’s passion, the intelligence and perspicacity of Curie, and Dickinson’s sweet wit, all mixed into a brilliantly shifting connectivity of ideas, scenes, creatures, phantoms, moods, and suspicions, and set her in the life we know we live. Then you would have the poems of Chase Twichell, which are so splendid and astonishing.' – Hayden Carruth
'Chase Twichell’s poems are among my favorites ever written. Often brash, always vivid, smart, and lyrical, pointing toward essential things – this is a marvelous and rich body of work.' – Tony Hoagland on Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been
'They are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness…they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity’ – Robert Hass, Washington Post
Chase Twichell: Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been
Chase Twichell introduces and reads six poems from her retrospective Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: ‘Touch-me-not’, ‘City Animals’, ‘Horse’, ‘Decade’, ‘Cocktail Music’ and ‘Savin Rock’. She also talks about her close identification with nature, expanding upon this in an interview excerpt at the end. In September 2009 Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Chase Twichell at home in the Adirondacks in her study, previously her office for Ausable Press, the lively poetry imprint she set up and ran from 1999 to 2009. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce and Neil Astley (2017).
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