![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/staging-basalt\/files\/2012\/05\/Paradise-Indiana.jpeg\" "\\"Paradise-Indiana\\"")
Pleiades Press, 2012\nSoftcover, $16.95<\/p>\n
Pleiades Press, 2012
\nSoftcover, $16.95<\/p>\n
Reviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n
I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider\u2019s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana<\/em> and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women<\/em>, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not only inextricably linked in both place and subject matter; they are also each, in their own ways, an essential addition to any collection of LGBT literature. That said, Snider\u2019s poems are also just plain good. Though his more playful debut sticks to childhood for the most part, exploring what it means to grow up gay (and simply to grow up), his second book\u2014winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize\u2014takes up an adolescence spent in the open landscapes of Indiana (\u201cI could feel\/the sky crush down on me . . .\u201d). Paradise, Indiana<\/em> also fearlessly recounts the speaker\u2019s troubled romance with his cousin, Nick, who later commits suicide. But if the subject matter sounds too heavy, not to worry: Snider is a master of the quiet moment, his memory-driven narratives slowly unfolding until the accumulation becomes a kind of redemption, which is what all poetry should aspire to. In \u201cThe Girlfriend,\u201d Snider captures just how hard it was to watch Nick\u2019s girlfriend publicly grieve when the speaker knew him far more intimately; he closes the poem like this, looking toward nature to articulate his own unspoken grief:<\/p>\n After the rains,<\/em> So much of Paradise<\/em> (and so much of life) is about those \u201cstrange white silences\u201d we can\u2019t get rid of, and it is these silences, which keep the speaker and Nick from being able to name openly the desire that must have consumed them. This gorgeous book is, of course, an extended elegy, yet it begs the question: How does one memorialize a love whose memory many would rather keep suppressed? The poems themselves are the answer as they ponder what those left living in the aftermath of any tragedy must do to make some fractured sense of it all. But poetry\u2014as Snider well knows\u2014is, at best, a flawed copy of the real, and so he makes do, admitting over and over to the limits of elegy and of writing itself, especially when it comes to describing such a life-altering event, or the place one once called home. In \u201cHeat Lightning Over Tunker,\u201d he writes as always with stark honesty:<\/p>\n . . . Here the dead<\/em> Reading this book, I thought of the famous question posed to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova by a woman who recognized her, standing in the long lines outside the prison to leave packages for loved ones rounded up during Stalin\u2019s purges. \u201cCan you describe this?\u201d the woman asks. Akhmatova replies: \u201cI can.\u201d The stakes may not be quite the same, but in our country, at this time, young men still risk their lives by acting on urges that feel all too natural, by coming out to families and friends who may shun them (or worse) for doing so. One has only to have been paying attention to the news the last few years for evidence of the suicides of several gay teens that prompted sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller to start the It Gets Better Project, which shares testimonials to help show young LGBT people see that life might not always be so harrowing. In Savage\u2019s September 2010 column for The Stranger<\/em> in which he declares his intention to start the project, he writes about Billy Lucas, a teenager who hanged himself in Greensburg, Indiana after enduring severe bullying. Savage says, \u201cNine out of 10 gay teenagers experience bullying and harassment at school, and gay teens are four times likelier to attempt suicide. Many LGBT kids who do kill themselves live in rural areas, exurbs, and suburban areas, places with no gay organizations or services for queer kids.\u201d Bruce Snider, in Paradise, Indiana<\/em>, is doing his part. He has at last told his story, describing what must have resisted description for years. How does one ridge back from memory such an unlikely love? The poem \u201cParts\u201d finds the speaker and Nick during one of the many cautiously tender moments they share throughout the book:<\/p>\n In the back of that car, all elbows<\/em> corrupts like happiness. We ducked in the shadow of cottonwoods . . .<\/p>\n Though Snider shows us pockets in this rural landscape where a young gay man might have escaped, it\u2019s as if the oppressive land itself is always waiting to take over and reassert itself again. \u201cClosing the Gay Bar Outside Gas City\u201d gives us what was once a refuge, but has now been abandoned, reclaimed by nature:<\/p>\n Even the magpies, locked in some<\/em> What is remembered desire, if not \u201csome blood sleep\u201d? Another poem, \u201cCruising the Rest Stop on Route 9\u201d makes evident another risky escape for this speaker:<\/p>\n You lean against the sink, its faucet<\/em> You know a man on his knees<\/em> I hope Paradise, Indiana<\/em> gains a wider readership than books of poetry usually do, if only to show those who make their lives in rural and isolated areas that there are writers committed to speaking for the voiceless, telling the necessary stories. It\u2019s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana where, he tells us, \u201cEven the buckeyes I picked\/along the dirt road opened to soft gray meant, so much hidden\/where you\u2019d least expect it . . .\u201d Snider has unearthed much in this volume, and it reads like a late torch-song (without the sentiment) for a speaker\u2019s first love and the land that shaped him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pleiades Press, 2012 Softcover, $16.95 Reviewed by James Crews I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider\u2019s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[14,20,24,29,40,47],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-bruce-snider","tag-dan-savage","tag-gay-poetics","tag-it-gets-better","tag-paradise-indiana","tag-terry-miller"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":505,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions\/505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ntent caterpillars will fill the trees like snow.<\/em>
\nWebbed and resinous, they\u2019ll cover<\/em>
\nentire limbs, multiplying as they feed,<\/em>
\na strange white silence<\/em>
\neven kerosene can\u2019t kill.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nknow better than to ask for much:<\/em>
\nmound of dirt, pine box. On the shore<\/em>
\nthere\u2019s just another old fishing boat,<\/em>
\nbut it\u2019s more than enough to cross.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nand mouths, we knew nothing<\/p>\n
\ndeeper into ripped seats, two boys<\/p>\n
\nblood-sleep, stir in the eaves as if<\/em>
\nto speak of patience and regret. Stains<\/em>
\nfrom tossed eggs mar the sides, dents<\/em>
\nfrom stones pitched through windows<\/em>
\nboarded up where FAG and AIDS<\/em>
\nare sprayed in flaking paint along<\/em>
\nthe front . . .<\/em><\/p>\n
\ndripping, trying to form a word, night<\/em>
\nstalled between hand and zipper.<\/em><\/p>\n
\ncan read the scored tile, torque of<\/em>
\nhis mouth filled with night and the marsh<\/em>
\nfields\u2019 dampness . . .<\/em><\/p>\n