Fruit

by Bruce Snider

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299326746
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series , #1
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

Bruce Snider is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco. He is 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.

Read an Excerpt

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”

Table of Contents

Contents
The Blue Whale Has the Largest Heart of Any Living Creature 3
I.
Homo 7
Litany for My Father’s Sperm 8
Childless 10
Fruit 11
Creation Myth 13
My Uncle’s Barn Cat as the Shadow of Death 14
Childless 15
On Swallowing the Fourth Plague of Egypt 16
Because Eden, from the Hebrew, Meant Pleasure 17
Childless 19
Ellipsis, Dash, Bullet Point 20
Cleaning My Father’s Rifle 22
They Will Not Eat the Bird of Paradise 25
Why My Father Smells Like the Night 27
Childless 28
After Reading the Wikipedia Entry on Homosexual Behavior in Moths 29
Inside the Creation Museum 30
The Average Human 32
Childless 34
Chemistry 35
On Billy Lucas, Who Hanged Himself in His Grandmother’s Barn 37
II.
Devotions 41
III.
Twin Peaks Bar, San Francisco 47
Childless 49
Toy Box 50
Shelter 51
Elegy for the Girl I Was 55
Childless 56
Litany for My Father’s Guns 57
Still Life with Cows 59
It’s the Dog 61
Childless 63
At the Sperm Bank 64
Prayer for the Bear My Father Shot 65
Elegy for the Bully 66
Heaven and Earth 67
Mendel on His Death Bed 70
Childless 72
Creation Myth 73
Territory 74
One Day, He Said, I’d Carry on the Family Name 76
Frutti di Mare 77
Acknowledgments 81

Editorial Reviews

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

“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

From the Publisher