Blood Harmony

Bruce Snider’s previous poetry collections include Fruit; Paradise, Indiana; and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He is a coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice. Snider’s poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, and Threepenny Review, among others. His awards include an NEA fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, and the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

• Part IReading That Johnny Cash Suffered from Autonomic Neuropathy when He Recorded “Hurt”Factory[He said he was sorry, said he wouldn’t do it again, again. . . .][When the doctor put her hand to the prescription pad. . .][Brother of the free-throw shot. . . .]When My Boyfriend Says He Hates Country MusicAt the Rainbow Cattle CompanyTo a Dolly Parton Drag Queen[An older boy asks: What are you, fags? . . .][Because my brother was a man among men . . .]Today. To Be. To Do.[In the parable of the prodigal son . . .]Our Father and the MachinesWhen Our Father Forgets the Last Verse of George Strait’s “Fool Hearted Memory”[The drinking game starts because . . .]Dueling BanjosPart IIAbout the Calf-Skin Head on Earl Scruggs’s Banjo[The ghost that is my brother . . .][At the coffee shop my brother . . .][—I kept . . .][Because a man doesn’t wince at a needle, . . .]Trio[The casket is closed. . . .][When a sober brother falls, he falls . . .][In the story of Esau . . .][When I look into our father’s eye, . . .]Listening to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” on My iPhoneTrio[My brother watches Bugs Bunny. . . .][And the skies saw his need, calling it Indiana. . . .][and hadn’t I poured gin straight . . .]Part III“The Silence Is Unusually Loud Tonight,”Overture[Dear Brother, . . .][In the story of Abel and Cain, . . .][if brother is the map I keep reading . . .][Afterwards, I saw him walking . . .]Self-Portrait as Midwest DawnListening to Waylon Jennings’s “Where Corn Don’t Grow,”[In the passenger’s seat, my boyfriend said: why didn’t . . .][I tell my brother about a guy I love. . . .][When I looked at him across the table, . . .][Had the lake been frozen forever, . . .][When I step inside, my brother asks: How’d it go?” . . .]Reading The Book of American Murder Ballads,Tracks[For weeks I practiced surrender, . . .][because I knew surrender was the crack . . .][I believe our father: Did you see his eyes?]Because America Is a Place the Brain MakesAcknowledgments

“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 “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