Books

The field of reference in Snyder’s work is extraordinarily broad, forcing the reader not only to pay close attention, but ultimately to adhere to the music on the page. He speaks not just to the city — no easy thing in a distended, dystopic metropolis — but, like a ventriloquist, through the city’s chaotic ramblings, “the catastrophe / that matches our mise-en-scene.” Yet he always comes back to as exuberant and finely wrought a page of verse as one’s encountered in some time:

Here city, city, city.
Come on, boy, don’t be
afraid to coalesce into
an ethereal smear pocked
with monuments that burn
all night, crazier than thou.

–Paul Vangelisti, Los Angeles Review of Books

Purchase at
Parlor Press
Bookshop
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Snyder is an astoundingly articulate poet, able to thrust the reader straight into these eerie nighttime experiences to hear loud and clear the sound “of crumpling paper/ and foil.” This is an enveloping debut.

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Timely and timeless, these poems—“Sky Blue,” “Pastoral,” “How Are You Doing?” to name a few—echo the best of veterans like Simic or Strand but pop with an updated disquietude, a low-key magic that conjures from familiar architecture new alcoves, new apses. Generous with style and energy, marked by a negative capability and a clarity of vision, Snyder’s poems don’t just move, they sweep us up with them.

–Peter Moysaenko, Bomb Magazine

Purchase at
Ugly Duckling Presse
Asterism Books
Amazon