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EMPTY THE RIVER, poetry by David Swerdlow
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 114 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-29-1
Of all the literary works to emerge in response to the pandemic years, few are as harrowing as David Swerdlow’s Empty the River. Bosch-like in its surreal intensity and excruciating details, this collection of poems presents the hellscape of societal collapse in “a city on the river … besieged by illness,” narrated by survivors who might envy the dead. A father’s cry is swallowed by a blank page. City leaders “scratch / by memory our names / in the walls in case we do not / remember them at the times / of our deaths.” “I worked for the city,” says the man who plowed under and tallied the dead, those around him “keeping our distance in case / he carries something from the past.” Empty the River joins the ranks of great apocalyptic literature from Camus’ The Plague to Rebecca Gayle Howell’s American Purgatory as works that force us to confront the nightmares of our past and present in order to make possible the dream of a better future.
Praise for David Swerdlow & Empty the River
David Swerdlow has written a stunning parable. Read Empty the River, and you will find it at first compelling and gorgeous, then wise, then haunting—then, finally, essential to feeling alive in these bereaved and bewildering times. You’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
—Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of As Is
David Swerdlow’s Empty the River joins Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic as an essential poetic allegory of our times. The collection depicts a city by the river that is plagued by mass illness where each body “suddens / with death.” We learn about the sickness through its townspeople: the city council, an old woman who cuts off all her hair and writes her dead husband explicit love letters, an androgenous librarian who flies to the corpses of past lovers, a sick a boy who waits to die because “My sister tells me / I’m made of silence and she will / go first,” their mother who carries “one death in each eye,” and their civil servant father who, after driving the plow that pushes the dead into a mass grave, “sat alone / in a wide room for hours, still feeling the scrape / of the plow against the road.” This collection eerily foreshadows a time that is already collapsing, a time when civil servants “worked for the public / good (so it was called).” Combining the political scope of magical realism and the emotional precision of poetry, Empty the River shows the resiliency of everyday people who spit in the face of death by taking “it in / the way furious black horses took in / the winters of our childhood.”
—Allison Pitinii Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk & Business: a novella
About the Author
David Swerdlow is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and a novel. His work has appeared in many distinguished publications, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Laurel Review, and Poetry Northwest. The recipient of several awards, Swerdlow has served as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages. Since 1990, he has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 114 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-29-1
Of all the literary works to emerge in response to the pandemic years, few are as harrowing as David Swerdlow’s Empty the River. Bosch-like in its surreal intensity and excruciating details, this collection of poems presents the hellscape of societal collapse in “a city on the river … besieged by illness,” narrated by survivors who might envy the dead. A father’s cry is swallowed by a blank page. City leaders “scratch / by memory our names / in the walls in case we do not / remember them at the times / of our deaths.” “I worked for the city,” says the man who plowed under and tallied the dead, those around him “keeping our distance in case / he carries something from the past.” Empty the River joins the ranks of great apocalyptic literature from Camus’ The Plague to Rebecca Gayle Howell’s American Purgatory as works that force us to confront the nightmares of our past and present in order to make possible the dream of a better future.
Praise for David Swerdlow & Empty the River
David Swerdlow has written a stunning parable. Read Empty the River, and you will find it at first compelling and gorgeous, then wise, then haunting—then, finally, essential to feeling alive in these bereaved and bewildering times. You’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
—Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of As Is
David Swerdlow’s Empty the River joins Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic as an essential poetic allegory of our times. The collection depicts a city by the river that is plagued by mass illness where each body “suddens / with death.” We learn about the sickness through its townspeople: the city council, an old woman who cuts off all her hair and writes her dead husband explicit love letters, an androgenous librarian who flies to the corpses of past lovers, a sick a boy who waits to die because “My sister tells me / I’m made of silence and she will / go first,” their mother who carries “one death in each eye,” and their civil servant father who, after driving the plow that pushes the dead into a mass grave, “sat alone / in a wide room for hours, still feeling the scrape / of the plow against the road.” This collection eerily foreshadows a time that is already collapsing, a time when civil servants “worked for the public / good (so it was called).” Combining the political scope of magical realism and the emotional precision of poetry, Empty the River shows the resiliency of everyday people who spit in the face of death by taking “it in / the way furious black horses took in / the winters of our childhood.”
—Allison Pitinii Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk & Business: a novella
About the Author
David Swerdlow is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and a novel. His work has appeared in many distinguished publications, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Laurel Review, and Poetry Northwest. The recipient of several awards, Swerdlow has served as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages. Since 1990, he has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.