Cord Swell
brittny ray crowell
W.W. Norton
Oct. 7. 2025 (Pre-order)
Cord Swell, the debut poetry collection by Atlanta-based poet brittny ray crowell, shines best when it speaks clearly about family. crowell has a stunning ability to capture the complexity of a family member’s life within a few lines.
My favorite poem in the collection is “Scar Elegy,” a page-long poem that concludes:
Now that the earth is over you (a safety)
i take the long way home across your face
map the architecture of your blood
and pray against dying early
by the hands of a man who makes a craft of loving
women like dogs a man who tames
with heavy petting and violence
who mistakes sweetness for something soft to carve
The poem’s use of spaces—gaps where words are missing—is effective. There’s more to the story of this cruel man with a scar on his face than she’s telling us. In the gaps, we feel the unspeakability of his transgressions. We also understand that the speaker isn’t hiding the whole story: She sees no reason to dwell in its pain. The man is dead, his lessons have been imparted, and he can be forgotten. The language is typical for crowell, whose images are as dense and rich as the kudzu she frequently references.
crowell grew up in Texarkana, Texas. In an interview with Bold Journey, she described her family: “I’ve been fortunate to come from a host of loving, giving people … They were always making something to give away: jars of muscadine or strawberry and fig jelly, freezer bags full of chopped vegetables from their gardens, or bushels of the prettiest, greenest collard leaves.” Her warmth toward her family, even in their darker moments, is clear throughout the collection. Cord Swell is full of affection and yearning for her country roots. The poems brim with persimmon and pitty-pat, football cleats and crepe myrtle.
The collection is named after, as crowell puts it, “a Black East Texas colloquialism based on the belief that newborns should not be allowed to cry due to the risk of umbilical hernia. Being allowed to cry or get upset means you're old enough to cry without risk of injury. Thus, ‘your navel cord’s well.’” It’s an interesting choice. The collection’s name implies that she’s now old enough to cry about life’s difficulties, but she rarely does. Though there are occasional flares of rage. In “Notes On Your Absence,” she writes: “i saged the house when you left / turns out memories aren’t immune to ash.”
crowell chooses not to capitalize her name, nor does she capitalize “I” in any poem. This decision may have been inspired by bell hooks, the seminal Black feminist theorist who always stylized her pen name in lowercase to minimize attention to herself and keep the focus on her work. I believe crowell is purposefully placing herself within this tradition. She seeks to understand, not to dwell.
Unfortunately, the collection’s organization dims the brilliance of individual poems. Although it’s organized into four distinct chapters, there’s little connective tissue that holds the chapters together. crowell bounces between styles and topics without the clear throughline you’d expect from a dedicated section. Each chapter contains an interview-style poem called
“Interview with an Ancestor [Number].” As such, I suspect each section is supposed to focus on a specific ancestor. However, there’s a broad shift from one poem to another in voice and point of view, to the extent that readers can’t be sure that each poem is speaking about the same person. “Scar Elegy,” for example, is clearly about a man who’s dead, told from the POV of a speaker who’s glad to be rid of this man. But the previous poem, “Victuals,” is a love story. The collection’s title poem comes after “Scar Elegy” and it’s about clear-cut grief.
crowell experiments with different formats. Some of these experiments are successful, while others feel underbaked. For example, the checklist poem “Blood Petition: A Prayer of Reckoning” was one of my favorites in the collection. However, there’s a series of poems called “To The Tune Of” that are in conversation with well-known songs, like “Give Me Your Love (Love Song)” by Curtis Mayfield. These poems rely too much on the source material and are hard to enjoy—or understand—without looking the song up and reviewing its lyrics.
Ultimately, this is a strong debut collection. I look forward to seeing what crowell writes in the future. I’d recommend Cord Swell to anyone with an interest in poetry about complicated family histories.
