For Cache Valley native, Utah State University graduate, and award-winning poet May Swenson, the act of writing and poetry itself was a home. Swenson finds refuge in poetry, as well as the freedom of expression and exploration one associates with a strong sense of stability and support. In the written word, she creates a comfortable space for herself to peer past the appearances of things. Swenson considers poems beyond her control, as phenomenon that happen to her and have individual psyches of their own. 'The frontiers are internal now,' she writes in 'An Unknown Island,' and into these spaces Swenson travels with a pen in hand and makes a home for herself out of the written word. In 'At Truro,' readers see that Swenson considers the act of writing as something primally innate, something that gets lost 'on the shore of intellect.' Poetry becomes a point of access to her animalistic unconscious self; the page is where she feels at home enough to do so. 'The Centaur' is an earlier poem of Swenson's demonstrating that poetry is the place where she has the last word, as the speaker in the poem literally does after flowing between male and horse identifiers, resulting in being chastised by her mother. Poems such as 'It Rains' show that everything to Swenson was an occasion for a poem, and no event was too small to escape her artistic notice. It was through making art via poetry of her world and experiences that Swenson made her paper home in the world.
