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Fruit

Fruit

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.

“Original and rhapsodic, rich in tender details, Snider’s beautiful book is driven by acceptance: the rarest of spiritual fruits.”—Spencer Reece, author of The Road to Emmaus and The Clerk’s Tale

“Snider’s ravishing new collection examines the ways family is made—the histories we come from, our choices in who and what to nurture. Here are elegies for the self, litanies for the dead, a childlessness both mourned and celebrated, a life ripe with every hurt and desire.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade and Our Lady of the Ruins

“Deeply felt and beautifully built, Fruit is a remarkable book that braids yearning and endurance into sweeping and exquisite music.”—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lightning