Please note that, while RSVP is not required, it is very helpful to us in gauging expected attendance. If you are planning on attending, please RSVP. Those who have not RSVP'd will not be denied entry. Seating is first come, first serve.

Join us on Monday, November 24 at 7pm when we celebrate the release of Bruce Snider's latest poetry collection, Blood Harmony, with Randall Mann at 9th Ave!

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Or Watch on YouTube Live/Link Available Soon

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“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

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.

Bruce Snider’s previous 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 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.

Randall Mann is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Deal: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He works in biotech, teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and lives in San Francisco.

The event is located on the ground level, and there are no stairs between the entrance and event space.