In this intimate first collection Bruce Snider explores the intricacies of memory, loss, and identity in poems about everything from algebra to sperm to lipstick. A farmer finds the body of a dead child, a boy watches his mother get ready for a date, a woman with cancer shops for a wig, an overweight sister shares a cupcake with her little brother. In the book’s longest and most complex poem a tarot card reading excavates the relationship between a son and his distant, often violent father. Sometimes funny, always big-hearted and inventive, Snider catalogues the minutiae of daily life with language that is plainspoken yet strongly imagistic, weaving together both public and private moments as he maps one man’s longing for transformation. It’s an attempt to reconcile it all—past and present, fear and desire, self and sexuality—making the barest symbols of maleness and femaleness into their own deeply personal language.

Bruce Snider is originally from rural Indiana and has lived for the past several years in Austin, Texas, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow and earned his MFA in poetry and playwriting at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poetry has appeared in the Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. This is his first book.