Cole Swensen's "Try", the 1998 Iowa Prize winner, won the 2000 Poetry Center Book Award from the Poetry Center/American Poetry Archives.

Covering a variety of subjects - from the plague and the first ""danse macabre"" to the development of perspective and recipes for pigments - the poems in this collection are set in 15th-century France. They explore the end of the mediaeval world and its transition into the Renaissance.