By Marc J. Sheehan

Vengeful Hymns is the winner of the 2008 Richard Snyder Publication Prize

Vengeful Hymns was the runner-up for the 2009-2010 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Competition.

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• Reviewed in Poetry East, Fall 2011
• #21 on the Poetry Foundation's Poetry Bestsellers List for the week of 6/7/2010
• Reviewed in On the Town, 1/28/2010
• Reviewed on Gently Read Literature, 1/1/2010
• "Gnosticism as a Modern Construct" appeared on Verse Daily, 12/6/2009
• Article in Muskegon News, 10/24/2009
• Reviewed in Small Press Bookwatch - Midwest Book Review, October 2009
• Reviewed in The Collagist, 9/15/2009

“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."

- Jim Daniels

“These are poems full of good will, humor, but also exacting detail.  There's plain genius involved in the hard, appreciative vision here--a long distance from musical fountains to Druidic shrines, bench-pressing to the Vernal Equinox.  Marc Sheehan's poetry opens a door, tosses us in the back seat, and gives us a tour of the undaunted, the admirable, and the startling.”

- Laura Kasischke

“With his hard-pressed wit, and a tone that moves from rueful to lacerating to just plain funny, Sheehan creates a likably woebegone character who can say this kind of thing: “And then, despite my best efforts, it was spring.” Loss and failure may gnaw at the speaker’s vitals, but they leave his nimble mind intact. Like a deadpan Midwestern Wordsworth, he notes: “So this, too, will be memory – disaster / recollected in tranquility.” When a poet this canny and grounded and wry comes out of the heartland, there’s good reason for us all to rejoice.”

- Elton Glaser

About the Author

Marc J. Sheehan has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for the Arts (now the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs), and the Hopwood Foundation.  His poems have appeared in anthologies from Fine Madness, Passages North, and Milkweed Editions, among others. As a writer for the Lansing Capital Times, he published interviews with such leading writers as Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, and Jane Smiley. His first book of poems, Greatest Hits, was published by New Issues Press (1998). He is communications officer for Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. http://www.marcsheehan.com/