"Jerika Marchan’s SWOLE is both chronicle and canticle of Katrina: choral and various, silty and loamy, light-throated and dark-hued. Her multivocal rendering recalls Kamau Brathwaite’s Tempest-driven ‘video style’; like Brathwaite, she spins a shipwrecked archive of a historical catastrophe threaded with so many other submerged (yet rising) voices. A textured and haunting debut." —Joyelle McSweeney

"SWOLE full y’all—of what flotsam language is when time comes to name the wrongs befalling (some of) us. A songbook of catastrophes—these, big as bodies, small as cities—Marchan’s reeling debut is the real thing. She washed her lines in Katrina’s filthy water till they smeared into gendercrit mondegreens, broad dialects, Yung Crank’s crunk-ass barz, and syntax that’s at once saturated and eroded. Reckoning the wreckage, she writes: 'after the rain has left my room coldish / … I light / candles makes me feel / oceanic or just salty'—vast and pissed, deep and caustic, SWOLE near bursts with poetry." —Douglas Kearney