Bruce Snider

Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections, Fruit, (University of Wisconsin Press, Spring 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, UTNE, and ZYZZYVA, among others. His awards include a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, as well residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco. Source

Credo

I believe in his foot hitting the accelerator.

I believe in the traffic light, its green fuse over every street.

I believe in bows hemmed in by rain and milk.

The secret places we go: old Yoder Road, lots behind the gutted saw mill.

Heaven, Nick jokes, is the back of his car.

I believe ephemerals.

Turnips push, radishes root down.

I believe the cracked mounts nurse the oil leak, steady shiver in the light.

I believe in creek, corn and sycamore, vastness broken where thorns unwind.

I believe in the lake, turtles tucked in burrows, their drowsing three-chambered hearts.

I believe our hands in the icy water. I’m a kid, and then I’m not.

I believe in the crumbling elm, which owes nothing to memory.

Let the loons lift. Let the past recede into rapeseed.

Faith is the shrinking distance between his mouth and mine.

I believe the fate of the shoreline.

I believe cattails shattering into seed.

Nothing can stop the waves.

Let the fish strain against fish lines.

Let the bloody pliers tear out the hooks.

Published:

2000

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

Themes:

Childhood & Coming of Age

Faith & Hope

LGBTQ+ Experience

Nature