Catalog: Snyder Series

Vault

Vault

By Bruce Bond

2022 Richard Snyder Prize Winner, selected by Mark Irwin. "Gravid , lucid in its stillness and haunting music, Vault is a symphonic poem whose six movements explore personal loss, capitalism, memory, and the passage of time." --Mark Irwin


Afternoon in Cartago

Afternoon in Cartago

By Margaret Mackinnon

2021 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize Winner, selected by Maggie Anderson. "In Afternoon in Cartago, Margaret Mackinnon reminds us why we turn to art in our hours of darkness." -- Kathleen Graber


Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years

Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years

By Peter Grandbois

"Tinctured with the wisdom of Rumi and the passion of Neruda, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years is a book to savor—night, day, and always." —Phil Brady


Midwest Gothic

Midwest Gothic

By Laura Donnelly

Winner of the 2019 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, Selected by Maggie Smith. "These difficult times have tested my faith in many things, including language, and Midwest Gothic arrived just in time to remind me what poems can do. " —Maggie Smith


Save Our Ship

Save Our Ship

By Barbara Ungar

Winner of the 2018 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, selected by Mark Jarman. "They make us think again about our lives and the brave, complicated humor that may somehow redeem us." -- Mark Jarman, Richard Snyder Judge


Idea of the Garden, The

Idea of the Garden, The

By Michael Moos

Winner of the 2017 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Elizabeth Spires. "In The Idea of the Garden, Michael Moos brings a distinctly contemporary sensibility to subjects of timeless importance. What more could we ask from a poet?" – Jim Moore


Burning My Birth Certificate

Burning My Birth Certificate

By Pamela Sutton

Winner of the 2016 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize, selected by Andrew Hudgins. "All those disparate aspects of herself grieve for American wrongs and the wrongs of history, as well as the more intimate depredations life itself inflicts on those we love and on our own bodies.  Burning My Birth Certificate is a passionate investigation of the responsibilities of anguish and the consolations of the inconsolable." –Andrew Hudgins, 2016 Richard Snyder judge


Life As It

Life As It

By Daneen Wardrop

"Life as It proves Daneen Wardrop's mastery of voice. In these pieces, the past, present and future coalesce in bright bursts, and, through juxtaposition and accumulation, the connections become ever more compelling, and beautiful, and edgy, and interesting as they unspool. This is poetry of both narrative and musical accomplishments, and a book one won’t forget." - Laura Kasische


Genome Rhapsodies, The

Genome Rhapsodies, The

By Anna George Meek

The Genome Rhapsodies opens with Gregor Mendel’s question: “What is inherited, and how?” Like strands of DNA, the syntax in these brilliant and moving poems intertwines with the infinitely recombinant moments and utterances that comprise our lives, revealing that what we inherit, first and finally, is language itself... - Angie Estes, 2014 Snyder contest judge


Tancho

Tancho

By J. David Cummings

Tancho [by J. David Cummings] is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. Its account of terrible beauty is itself beautiful, speaking of "hope and despair, the promise of each to other."


Luminous Other

Luminous Other

By Robin Davidson

These beautiful, wise and moving poems live in the shadow of history and art. They inscribe a contingent world where, as the sign above the "Main Street Fire Sale" reads, "New losses arrive daily." In the face of such inescapable loss, the speaker of another poem is prompted to ask the question that haunts all human life: "How can I sing when I know / I will die?" And the answer comes back as another question, the only answer there can be: "When I know I will die, how can I keep silent?" Luckily for us, Davidson can t keep silent; she sings. - Susan Wood


The Rigid Body

The Rigid Body

By Gabriel Spera

Gabriel Spera tiptoes a fine line, maintaining a balance between formalism and free verse, traditional tropes and verbal originality. When Spera casts his long, clause-riddled sentences into a formal structure, the result is often spectacular. The sentences tumble down through the stanzas like downhill skiers, swerving almost breathtakingly to clip the gate of each rhyme...


Traction

Traction

By Mary Makofske

Traction is a collection of poetry that repays attention. The poems are intelligent and well-crafted. Makofske ranges widely from moving meditations on prehistory to an homage to Walt Whitman, love poems, family poems, poems about nature, mortality, and growing up in the fifties. These poems are not just for the eye but sound in the ear.


Striking Surface

Striking Surface

By Jason Schneiderman

Jason Schneiderman is a sly, dextrous, and in many ways existential poet. Intellect and feeling meet head-on in his work; their collision elicits arresting moments of clarity, of understanding. These poems seem to believe without believing, betraying the depths (always scary) beneath their surface veneer. Sometimes Schneiderman stands naked, as in the breathtaking elegies to his mother. I feel this book has taught me something new about mortality and human need.


Vengeful Hymns

Vengeful Hymns

By Marc J. Sheehan

Marc Sheehan’s poems are reflective, wry, and humble. They are also quietly stubborn and assertive. The humor in these poems hurts a little with their recognition of our own foibles and pure flat-out goofiness. Sheehan celebrates the good, ordinary, imperfect life full of improvisations, going through life on hunches and goodwill. His poems would break your heart if they weren’t so warm and funny, wistful and accepting.


Shimming the Glass House

Shimming the Glass House

By Helen Pruitt Wallace

Bronze Medal Winner in the 2008 Poetry Category of the Florida Book Awards Like Robert Frost's, these poems have a lover's quarrel with the world. Their words and music throw light over dark places, and find meanings and leanings in the smallest details. Helen Wallace's first book is a remarkably wise and moving collection.


Permanent Address

Permanent Address

By Lorna Knowles Blake

Lorna Knowles Blake is a poet who writes with elegance, wit and formal invention. Her subjects are love, marriage, family, and the kinds of commitment needed to sustain them. Reading her work, one sees again and again the contingencies of domestic life transformed by those rituals that give them place and permanence. Permanent Address is a wise and joyful collection by a poet of impressive accomplishment.


Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath

Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath

By Benjamin S. Grossberg

Grossberg writes poems so well-fashioned they appear to have been wholly conceived. (“Artifice is our general burden,” quoth Amerigo Vespucci.) But radical too: in their erotic reveries, and with knowing sadness, the poems here take up classical matters anew and afresh. What a fine book, distinguished in these times for its historical reach and lyrical substance.


Remorseless Loyalty

Remorseless Loyalty

By Christine Gelineau

One of poetry's tasks is to encounter pain. Not to resolve it, not even to console it. But to encounter it with a language that will let it be known, and in this knowing some transformation, however small, may happen. The poems in Remorseless Loyalty bristle with such hard-won transformations.


Calling in the Bones

Calling in the Bones

By Carol Barrett

Carol Barrett's narratives document the suffering and fecundity of an ensemble cast: a mapmaker, a sleep technician, a man who would eat soap are only a few of the actors celebrated by this poet for their small acts of bravery in an all-too-human world.


Moment's Equation, The

Moment's Equation, The

By Vern Rutsala

This wonderful book of poetry, which was a 2005 National Book Award finalist, is filled with scintillating visions of life, home, work, and family expressed in accessible language through which the poet magnifies daily events into art. "The Moment's Equation" takes us through decades of America. There are evocative settings, memorable events; there are many roads to regard, many lives to consider. Each poem journeys to a destination. With a remarkable deftness and an unerring sense of direction, Vern Rutsala gets us there.


Separate Escapes

Separate Escapes

By Corrinne Clegg Hales

Corrinne Clegg Hales' poems are biography of the most luminous kind. As we read them, we're in the presence of events and their inexhaustible implications, described in terms somehow both wickedly accurate and surpassingly generous. Separate Escapes works through lives as flawed and ravaged as they come, transforming knowledge to forgiveness. It is, quite simply, a beautiful book.


Instructions for Walking on Water

Instructions for Walking on Water

By Jan Lee Ande

Jan Ande's well-crafted poems are like a fresh mountain stream that springs from ancient sources. They are animated by a deep reverence for the world, by a sense of mystic awe, by a feeling of transcendental plenitude. They put us in the presence of great mysteries.


Weal

Weal

By Philip Brady

Brady offers a sojourner's panoramas and outstanding depth of field. The poems present themselves as majestic, audible, dangerous rivers with live banks... Weal, a word of contradictory geographies, ranging from common good to whiplash scar, rings here around a hundred years of world migrations. This is an unpredictable, demanding, strong book, each poem an exploration.


Demons in the Diner

Demons in the Diner

By David Ray

David Ray's poetry has always been radiant even though personal tragedy has suffused it.


Little Apocalypse

Little Apocalypse

By Wendy Battin

Wendy Battin's poems are the waking dreams of a physicist: elegant, pure, accurate as light. But hers is a human physics, in which the emotional dimension is as present as the intellectual. The language of Little Apocalypse is meditative and playful, while never abandoning the rigor of reason. Wendy Battin is a brilliant poet.


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