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Notes From A Swing State: Writing from Wales and America
From the acclaimed poet and writer, Zoë Brigley, comes a timely meditation on America. These creative nonfiction and craft essays cover the possibilities of girls and girlhood, motherhood, violence at home and abroad, violence against women, the consolation in writing, trauma, and redemption. Other topics covered include the writer’s English family, Halloween in America, and guns. The essays often use popular and literary culture as jumping off for example Alun Lewis’s love letters, the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, David Bowie, or John Burnside’s writings about his abusive father.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
200 pages, Paperback
First published July 9, 2019
12 people want to read
About the author
Zoë Brigley
22 books54 followersZoë Brigley is the author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007). All three are UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Poems from the collections have won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, have been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and were Forward Prize commended.
She has also published a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian 2019), which was well received in reviews. Her most recent chapbooks include: Aubade After A French Movie (Broken Sleep, 2020), Into Eros (Verve, 2021), and Lycanthrope (Salò Press, 2024). She collaborated with Kristian Evans for a prose chapbook Otherworlds: Writing on Nature and Magic (Broken Sleep 2021), and with Jenny Mitchell and Roy McFarlane for the forthcoming Family Name (Nine Pens, 2023).
Her writing appears in publications like Australian Book Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland Review, Orion, Poetry Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Waxwing.
She researches literature, film, trauma, and representations of violence. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne). Her research articles appear in The Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Gender and Education, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. For a number of years, she produced a podcast with her students on anti-violence advocacy at SinisterMyth.com .
She became editor for Wales’ leading poetry journal Poetry Wales in 2021, and she is now Poetry Editor for Seren Books jointly with the poet Rhian Edwards. She was also an editor for Magma Poetry, a special issue on ‘Dwelling’ in 2021 with Kristian Evans and Rob Mackenzie. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she also curated Dwelling During the Pandemic: An Ohio Poetry Project.
With Kristian Evans, she was co-editor of the Seren anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren 2021), and together they founded MODRON: Writing on the Ecological Crisis, which she works on with Evans and editors Taz Rahman, Siân Melangell Dafydd, and Glyn Edwards.
Zoë is a disabled writer; she is deaf and identifies as neurodivergent.
She has also published a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian 2019), which was well received in reviews. Her most recent chapbooks include: Aubade After A French Movie (Broken Sleep, 2020), Into Eros (Verve, 2021), and Lycanthrope (Salò Press, 2024). She collaborated with Kristian Evans for a prose chapbook Otherworlds: Writing on Nature and Magic (Broken Sleep 2021), and with Jenny Mitchell and Roy McFarlane for the forthcoming Family Name (Nine Pens, 2023).
Her writing appears in publications like Australian Book Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland Review, Orion, Poetry Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Waxwing.
She researches literature, film, trauma, and representations of violence. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne). Her research articles appear in The Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Gender and Education, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. For a number of years, she produced a podcast with her students on anti-violence advocacy at SinisterMyth.com .
She became editor for Wales’ leading poetry journal Poetry Wales in 2021, and she is now Poetry Editor for Seren Books jointly with the poet Rhian Edwards. She was also an editor for Magma Poetry, a special issue on ‘Dwelling’ in 2021 with Kristian Evans and Rob Mackenzie. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she also curated Dwelling During the Pandemic: An Ohio Poetry Project.
With Kristian Evans, she was co-editor of the Seren anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren 2021), and together they founded MODRON: Writing on the Ecological Crisis, which she works on with Evans and editors Taz Rahman, Siân Melangell Dafydd, and Glyn Edwards.
Zoë is a disabled writer; she is deaf and identifies as neurodivergent.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 21, 2023
Small but beautiful book of non-fiction about America etc. From travel, to art, to memoirs, to politics and the #metoo movement, Zoe Brigley always has something perceptive, intriguing and vital to say.
January 26, 2026
A compelling collection of essays that interweave Brigley’s personal experience with her academic background and her position as a Welsh-born US resident. I think the collection was at its best in its final section looking at Craft and Art where it really felt like each short essay was building on the other. Standouts for me included “Good Bones” on the idea of poetry allowing us to push the boundaries of conformist ideas and “The Little Cage of Ellis Bell”. “Nine stories with guns and one without” was also so stark. I do think some essays could have done with being slightly longer and more fleshed out particularly in the first section or for the text to do more to acknowledge its limits in terms of detail in this collection. Also while I appreciated an acknowledgement of intersectionality and how marginalised communities are disproportionately affected by some of the issues tackled, occasionally it felt like they were mentioned as an aside or in brackets as a tickbox of acknowledgement when I think it would have just made more sense to make clear again the limitations of the essay and its positionality rather than shoehorning in a mention briefly without fully unpacking it. Overall, really readable and beautiful essays that I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews