Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Actualities: Transparent to the Stone (2021), Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018); Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr; If (Talisman House, 2012); The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Gnostic Blessing (Goats & Compasses, 1992). Poet Forrest Gander wrote, “Leonard Schwartz's poems introduce philosophical meditation to emotional sensibility in a way that has become unusual in contemporary poetry. In his work, one feels the risk, even the vertigo, of the mind orienting itself to otherness, to world, and to language.”
Schwartz is also the author of the multi-genre books of poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016) and A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays Towards a Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 1998). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane's Cine-Poems and Others (NYRB Poets, 2016), and hosted the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound.
