The Swallows Come Out: Selected Poems, 1995-2025 brings together three decades of Angie Estes's extraordinary linguistic alchemy. Opening with selections from her newest collection, Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City, and including selections from her acclaimed previous books, these poems illuminate connections between art, memory, and desire.

Estes weaves together classical mythology and contemporary longing, European art and American landscapes, creating a tapestry where Dante converses with Miles Davis, swallows become stars, and the past ignites our lives. Her signature style — playful yet profound, erudite yet accessible — transforms everyday moments into revelations through stunning juxtapositions.

Whether exploring the mosaics of Hagia Sophia, the vineyards of Burgundy, or a mother's handwriting, Estes finds the sacred in the quotidian. This essential volume confirms her position as one of our most distinctive voices, a poet who makes language itself a form of devotion, a way of entering the world.

Angie Estes is the author of seven previous books of poems, most recently Last Day on Earth in the Eternal City (Unbound Edition Press, 2025). Her book, Enchantée, won the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry, and Tryst was selected as one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her second book, Voice-Over, won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (GibbsSmith, 1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. A collection of essays devoted to Estes's work appears in the University of Michigan Press "Under Discussion" series: The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry (2019).

The recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has also received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. In 2023, she was a Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the James Merrill House.

Stephanie Burt is Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard. Her books of poetry and criticism include Taylor's Version: The Musical and Poetic Genius of Taylor Swift (2025), Super Gay Poems(2025) and We Are Mermaids (2022). Her next book of poems will appear from Graywolf

"Reading a poem by Angie Estes is like listening in on the intricate turnings and realizations of a brilliant mind, a mind that follows one path only to discover another more surprising one, a mind that observes with an acuteness and intelligence I can only envy … But there is gravity here, as well, beneath the slipperiness of language — a sense of the profound presence of our cultural pasts, the seductiveness of image and language, the power of romantic longing, connection, and loss." — Kevin Prufer, previous praise

"Neruda, Glück, Tranströmer, Bishop . . . and, yes, Angie Estes, a poet who to my mind is their equal. At once propulsive and recursive, wildly erudite and supremely sensual, these are revelatory poems. Which is to say poems that delight again and again in profound and playful paradox, their mysteries both timeless and precisely occasional, as if announced in the voice of an oracle or a 10th century mystic via a battered drive-in movie speaker. Which is to say, Estes at the peak of her powers — and what powers to behold." — Daniel Lawless, previous praise

"Whenever I see a poem by Angie Estes I prepare myself for serious de-light. Her timing and her ever-uninhibited instinct for poetic shape are the triumphs of a first-rate musical intelligence. Angie Estes is Fred Astaire and Ginger too: backwards in high heels, forward on rollerskates, never have classy and sexy been better matched." — Linda Gregerson, previous praise

"This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh sur-prise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read." — Langdon Hammer, previous praise

"...whose poems stand out as pleasingly intricate, invitingly melodious, tantalizingly smart but never confounding, founded on sinuous curves and diminutive things? Angie Estes's poems do. She not only achieves self-conscious beauty but writes about it, about why we need it, and about how it can emerge in our adult lives, our griefs, our sexual joys, our thwarted loves, and our imagined or literal travels...[An Estes poem is] an enduring construction — like Venice on wooden posts: it's beautiful, fragile, made to last, artificial all the way down, and better for it, a kind of building no one can accomplish alone." — Stephanie Burt, from the foreword