Bruce Snider: Paradise, Indiana

Months since my last post, I know (thanks, Mom, for noticing!). During that time, I had the pleasure of attending the AWP conference in Boston for the first time. If you’ve never been, I highly recommend it—everybody who’s nobody is there. I got the chance to meet a few folks in the poetry world, some for the first time, some for the first time in person. And snow! I’d nearly forgotten the joy of walking down a deserted city street late at night with snow flakes swarming beneath the streetlights. Would’ve been even better if I’d had appropriate footwear.

Also in the recent months, I received a wonderful book called Paradise, Indiana by Bruce Snider, which won the Lena-miles Wever Todd Poetry prize from Pleiades Press. A remarkable work of deep emotion, delightful language, and disturbing obsession. In fact, a more appropriate name would’ve been something along the lines of “Homage to Nick.” This is one of those books that gains heft in its assemblage, as each poem comments on and contributes to the others. In some poems, we learn that Nick was a cousin and lover—perhaps the narrator’s first. We learn he died by suicide, apparently by shutting himself in the garage with the car engine running. And he was young, as the epitaph to another poem suggests (“for Nick, 1971–1988”). We also learn that, though gay, he put up a pretense of heterosexuality, having a girlfriend who shows up in various poems. Did this internal conflict lead him to his death? The narrator doesn’t speculate. He does, however, relive every detail of their time together. At times, the two seem like typical boys from the farmlands, whiling away their time with hunting, fishing, traipsing through the woods, dreaming about cars. But these episodes are always punctuated by the sexual interludes, the secretive kisses and undone zippers. This dichotomy really comes through to wonderful effect in the poem, “The Ambiguity of Stone.” It begins with the memory of the two fishing, but immediately moves to the memory of a kiss: “a dive lure flaring / like a tiny orange flame between rubber / night crawlers as a breath from / my mouth entered his.” Or consider these later lines:

These lines would not seem out of place in a poem by any number of southern or rural writers, but the particular sexual overtones really set them apart. This poem also includes the line, “In the woods / I’d find a bike so honeycombed / with hornet nests I could taste / their wings in my chest.” Where’d that come from?!?! Don’t know, but wow! But the truly obsessive nature of memory comes through in the fact that six separate poems all carry the same title, “Afterlife.” Interestingly, these all (except for the last one) employ the same form, arising as a series of paired couplets. As such, they can be read as a single long series. Perhaps they were designed that way. The poems are haunted by objects that recall the lost Nick: his knife, his socks, his hockey stick, his car. In one, the narrator sums up his obsession (and indeed, the theme of the book): “His memory, an endless window / I can’t get shut.” And I love the way the word “get” in that sentence conjures a visceral image of a repeatedly frustrated attempt; think of how different it would be if it simply read “an endless window / I can’t shut.” But in the final “Afterlife” poem, the one in quatrains, the narrator comes to accept the endlessly coming future and the receding past. He notes a field giving way to cluster of chain stores—Walmart and Pizza Hut. Nothing we hold dear is exempt from the ravages of time. He looks out over the silent field and concludes: “Dirt. Distance. It does not end.” No, it does not end, the pain, but it does diminish, it does recede. And life goes senselessly on.

The final poem, “Gutting the White-Tail,” continues the lush, visceral, palpable physical description that characterizes the entire collection. But perhaps more than any others, it presents a dense juxtaposition of bodies alive and dead, bodies recently or soon to be dead, the sex and gore, the irony of hindsight. Consider, collectively, this graphic—nearly pornographic—narrative: “we roll the carcass onto its back… I spread the hind legs… He slits around the anus, / drawing it up into the body… With a heave, / he splits the breast… We flip the body belly down… We high-five, passing a cigarette as the body cools…” The poem, and thus the book, ends with “We watch the windpipe steaming in the snow,” a line made more poignant by the revelation in an earlier poem that Nick died of asphyxiation. It also suggests, in a way, a body that cannot speak. Also significant, we find Nick cracking a joke in this poem, which renders his later suicide all the more shocking and unexpected, in retrospect.

One odd note: the cover of the book shows a photo of men bent down in prayer, and it looks like it could’ve been taken in Indiana 100 years ago. But the photo credit reveals that it was taken in Mexico (Zacatecas) less than 20 years ago. Well, I guess you can’t judge a cover by its book.