• Bruce Snider
  (author)
• University of Wisconsin Press
  ,
  2025
• Purchase Online

Winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry

“There is a mythic precision in Blood Harmony, a collection of the limits of recovery and language (‘There was always need in the needle’); heartbreaking elegy; and always Indiana, a place of ice and kerosene but also ‘unmown grass, sweetness, rain.’ No American poet is as empathetic as Bruce Snider.”— Randall Mann

An unflinching tale of selfishness and sacrifice, guilt and resentment, hope and despair, Bruce Snider’s fourth collection tells the story of two brothers torn apart by opioid addiction. These sublime poems paint a singular portrait of rural working-class America populated by shuttered tool factories and country gay bars, hidden fishing holes and Dolly Parton drag queens. Drawing on music and myth, science and history, Snider interrogates the bonds of family, exploring themes of masculinity, devotion, sexuality, and the biology of addiction. Yet for all its competing tensions, Blood Harmony leaves us with an enduring portrait of brotherhood defined as much by tenderness as by pain.

“In Blood Harmony, ‘the truck stop / is the ghost of a truck stop’ and songs of George Strait strike lightning. Snider’s devastating love poems for a ‘brother of Indiana tattooed on his calf’ show the body alive in itself, in this battle of desire and blood’s machinery.”— Jan Beatty