In this intimate first collection, Bruce Snider explores the intricacies of memory, loss, and identity. A farmer finds the body of a dead child, a boy watches his mother get ready for a date, an overweight sister shares a cupcake. Sometimes funny, always big-hearted and inventive, Snider's book is an attempt to reconcile it all - past and present, fear and desire, self and sexuality - making the barest symbols into their own deeply personal language.
In this intimate first collection, Bruce Snider explores the intricacies of memory, loss, and identity. A farmer finds the body of a dead child, a boy...
A father and son shovel snow from a driveway; a boy accidentally sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home to die. At the center of it all, a teenage boy's suicide resonates through the lives of those closest to him. The poems in Bruce Snider's Paradise, Indiana describe a place where mundane events neighbor the most harrowing.
Shaped by the author's experiences growing up in rural Indiana, Snider investigates the landscapes traditionally claimed by male poets such as James Wright, James Dickey, and Richard Hugo, whose visions of place rarely,...
A father and son shovel snow from a driveway; a boy accidentally sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home ...