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Fruit
Bruce Snider
Wisconsin Poetry Series
Ronald Wallace and Sean Bishop, Series Editors
“Original and rhapsodic, rich in tender details, Snider’s beautiful book is driven by acceptance: the rarest of spiritual fruits.”
—Spencer Reece, author of The Road to Emmaus and The Clerk’s Tale
Bruce Snider’s third poetry collection grapples with what it means to be childless in a world obsessed with procreation. Poems move between the scientific and the biblical, effortlessly sliding from the clinical landscape of a sperm bank to Mount Moriah as Abraham prepares Isaac for sacrifice. Exploring issues of sexuality, lineage, and mortality, Snider delves into subjects as varied as the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky; same-sex couple adoption; and Gregor Mendel’s death in 1884. Each poem builds into a broader examination of power and fragility, domesticity and rebellion, violence and devotion: heartrending vignettes of the aches and joys of growing up and testing the limits of nature and nurture. In language both probing and sensitive, Fruit delivers its own conflicted and celebratory answers to pressing questions of life, death, love, and biology.
What in me, I wonder, is me
as the world goes on copying itself—
black seeds sprouting green,
egg sacks on the gray spider.
—excerpt from “One Day, He Said, I’d Carry on the Family Name”
Bruce Snider is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco. He is coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice, the author of Paradise, Indiana, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.
https://brucesnider.com/
Praise
“Snider’s ravishing new collection examines the ways family is made—the histories we come from, our choices in who and what to nurture. Here are elegies for the self, litanies for the dead, a childlessness both mourned and celebrated, a life ripe with every hurt and desire.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins
“Deeply felt and beautifully built, Fruit is a remarkable book that braids yearning and endurance into sweeping and exquisite music.”
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning
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Larger images
March 2020
LC: 2019039056 PS
96 pp. 6 x 9
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