The Snowbound House
Shane Seely turns the earth over and over to find the rind of the world. Two boys discover a bullet, a couple fight through a mouth of toothpaste, a father gives his son a rifle. These are poems of filial complexity, meditations on death's cruelty and kindness, poems of amplitude and depth which ask us to live fully in the length of morning. --Dorianne Laux Judge, 2008 Philip Levine Prize for PoetryThe Snowbound House is a book of earth and death, a book of often-overlooked human gestures. These poems are rooted in the natural world and are full of acute and profound details. Shane Seely has written a deeply resonant book, both lyrically and emotionally. The Snowbound House is searing and tender; it is a beautiful book. --Malena MörlingShane Seely, in The Snowbound House, reminds us that to live is to be confronted daily with life's end, is to be death-haunted. These lapsed pastorals remind us that memory is, in its retrospective gaze, elegiac, burdened by grief. The Snowbound House is a remarkable first book startling in the precision of its knowing, in the adamant clarity of its verse. --Eric Pankey