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.

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.

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