This book is about, among other things, reaching that age, usually thirty to forty, when you suddenly see right through yourself. With Swift, this moment of unobstructed vision is accompanied by a fresh view of others. He casts away youthful ‘cool’ and tenderly mourns his father. He recalls his courtship of his wife wherein he acted anything like the overwhelmingly irresistible Marlon Brando in A Street car Named Desire. Painfully and wonderfully, he identifies with the nondescript suburban commuter he once insolently heckled in his head. This emergence of deep empathy with others through a clearer view of himself also allows for wonderful poems about the desanctified Japanese Emporer Hirohito or a pretty woman seeing her soldier-boy off on a departing train. These are poems of yearning, elegy, realization, romance, and enchantment.

Todd Swift was born in Montreal on Good Friday, 1966. He grew up in St. Lambert and Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During his college years he was a top-ranked international debater. After graduating, he wrote over sixty hours of TV, mainly with Thor Bishopric, for HBO, Fox, Paramount and Hanna-Barbera, among others. He is one of the founders of the current poetry cabaret scene in Montreal, and was the emcee of Vox Hunt Slam. As a member of the electronic spoken word group Swifty Lazarus, with Tom Walsh, he has released a CD, The Envelope, Please, from Wired On Words, and has appeared on ABC, BBC and CBC radio. From 1998-2001 Swift was Visiting Lecturer at Budapest University (ELTE) in the American Studies Department, and created several courses on film and poetry. His writing has appeared widely, in such periodicals as The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, enRoute, The Dubliner, Gargoyle and Cordite. He is the co-editor of several significant anthologies, including Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry. Swift's Budavox: poems 1990-1999 was chosen by Geist as one of the five best Canadian books of 1999. He is a Contributing Editor for Matrix, and Poetry Editor of the online magazine Nthposition.com. He currently lives in London, England.

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