Jason Schneiderman

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Jason Schneiderman is the author of four books of poems: Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press, 2020); Primary Source (Red Hen Press 2016), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Prize; Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize; and Sublimation Point (Four Way Books 2004), a Stahlecker Selection. He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press 2015). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2011. He is Poetry Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, and Associate Editor of Painted Bride Quarterly. He is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Source

The Surface of the Water

has properties, tension, behaves differently

from the rest of the water. If you fell

 

onto it from a height, you would bounce.

The surface would reject you, say

 

I’m a solid too – we can’t both be here, 

but then the rest of the water would accept you,

 

take you into itself, pull you down

away from the surface, saying I’m sorry,

 

I want you, come in. 

Published:

2010

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2022

Themes:

Mental Health

Nature

Literary Devices:

Bleeding Title

when the title of a poem acts as the first line

Caesura

a break between words within a metrical foot

Couplets

two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Enjambment

a line break interrupting the middle of a phrase which continues on to the next line

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing