Things as It Is the World as It Was

Tell the truth. No decoration. Remember death. These are the demands Chase Twichell has made of her poems for over half a century. One of America’s most prominent poets and a longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell seeks to perceive what Shunryu Suzuki called things-as-it-is.

These two books, published here in tandem, confront fundamental questions about the nature of the self: childhood trauma, the fate of a damaged planet, marriage and widowhood. Twichell’s poems – spare, unflinching, and exact – are distillations of reverence and grief. With language at once precise and intimate, she compels us to consider what it means to be conscious in a world where beauty and joy endure amid ecological and political crises.

Chase Twichell has published nine books of poetry, including Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2010. Things as It Is followed from Copper Canyon Press in the US in 2018, and that collection is now published here for her UK readers together with her latest collection, The World It Was (2026).

'Suppose you had Sappho’s passion, the intelligence and perspicacity of Curie, and Dickinson’s sweet wit, all mixed into a brilliantly shifting connectivity of ideas, scenes, creatures, phantoms, moods, and suspicions, and set her in the life we know we live. Then you would have the poems of Chase Twichell, which are so splendid and astonishing.' – Hayden Carruth

'Chase Twichell’s poems are among my favorites ever written. Often brash, always vivid, smart, and lyrical, pointing toward essential things – this is a marvelous and rich body of work.' – Tony Hoagland on Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been

'They are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness…they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity’ – Robert Hass, Washington Post

Chase Twichell was born in 1950 and grew up in Connecticut and the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. The two greatest influences on her life and work have been this early intimacy with wilderness followed by her years as a Zen Buddhist student at Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills.

Her poetry books include Northern Spy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), The Odds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), Perdido (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, USA, 1991; Faber & Faber, UK, 1992, Poetry Book Society Choice), The Ghost of Eden (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1995; Faber & Faber, UK, 1996, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The Snow Watcher (Ontario Review Press, USA, 1998; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1999); Dog Language (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2006, Poetry Book Society Recommendation); and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010). Things as It Is was published by Copper Canyon Press in the US in 2018, and is published with her latest collection The World It Was (2026) by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in Things as It Is | The World It Was in 2026. The Lover of God (by Rabindranath Tagore, co-translated with Tony K. Stewart) was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2003. She also co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach with Robin Behn (HarperCollins, 1992).

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she won the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. She received a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004. She won both the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize from Austin Community College for Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been. 

From 1976 to 1984 she worked at Pennyroyal Press, and from 1986 to 1988 she co-edited the Alabama Poetry Series, published by University of Alabama Press. After teaching for many years (at Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and Princeton University), she resigned in 1999 to start Ausable Press, a non-profit, independent literary press that she operated until it was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009.