Eleanor Swanson

Before the Reef

The chronicle of the Colgrove family, begins when young Rachel picks up the Miami Herald and reads the column in the lower right-hand corner: “Colgrove Murder Trial Begins Today.” Her father, Noel, is ultimately acquitted, but his family’s life is irremediably altered by the trial and its aftermath, as the murder remains unsolved. Rachel must confront her family’s past as she struggles to understand her older brother Gibb’s obsession with this long-ago murder.

Excerpt from Before the Reef

“The sense of his body’s boundaries were gone, and the sea flowed easily through him, surging through his blood, and he thought, If I could stay here, I’d be safe. He imagined the time before the first reefs had formed along the ocean bottom, remembering a childish notion he’d had of a pristine place, a world full of promise, he’d called it, a world of light. A world that never was, or was no longer.”

What people are saying about Before the Reef

“Kudos to Eleanor Swanson. In this suspenseful family tragedy, she renders in affecting detail the existential mesh of human interaction in which our intention to protect others unleashes the anguish we sought to avoid. This is a skillfully and poetically rendered story of love and its reverberating loss, and of loyalty, sheer endurance, and of healing. Swanson is an adroit raconteur of the human heart.”
—Marilyn Krysl, author of Dinner with Osama,
Winner of Notre Dame’s Richard Sullivan Prize.

“Estrangement grows on the pages of this novel until it is like a great rift on the ocean floor, coming into terrifying focus only after we journey into the darkness beneath the surface of our familiar lives. After her father is tried for murder, Rachel lives in denial of her family’s trauma until she becomes a stranger even to herself, a process she must reverse when she understands that her brother’s obsession with a long-ago crime threatens his sanity. Reluctantly, she comes to face what Gibb has faced, including the recognition that their father has always been a cipher to them all. The backdrop for this powerful narrative is the Florida Keys, where the actions of man have left the coral reefs damaged, a rich metaphor for the lives of the Colgroves. Before the Reef is as suspenseful as it is emotionally engaging.”
—Chris Ransick, author of A Return to Emptiness

Trembling in the Bones

One of America’s jarring and bloody conflicts comes to life in this poetry collection that marks the Colorado coal mining wars of the early 1900s. Eleanor Swanson’s verse remembers the people who labored to harvest fuel for the Industrial Revolution, and culminates in the shameful Ludlow Massacre. Thoroughly researched, Trembling in the Bones allows us to step back in time, to imagine the hopes and laments of people who were trampled without remorse, and in the name of progress.

A Thousand Bonds

Although A Thousand Bonds centers on the life and work of Madame Curie, the relevance of this cycle of poems to issues of our time is clear. Ellen Bass finds Swanson’s graceful poems urgently applicable to us because of Curie’s “fierce devotion to science” regardless of “unforeseeable consequences.”