Paradise, Indiana, by Bruce Snider

Selected by Alice Friman as Winner of the 2012 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize "There's a deep and complicated life in this land's interior . . . Underneath beat a thousand fragile hearts, their sensitive, furtive gestures. Bruce Snider's version of paradise accounts for those souls, makes a haven for them amidst the roadkill and the rapeseed, among the monster trucks and holy scriptures . . . Nothing in Snider's America is ever lost: not love, not beauty, not the first furtive kisses of adolescent boys. In this paradise, no one form of pleasure takes dominion over the others." —D. A. Powell "These powerful eloquent poems explore the difference between the place we make and the place that makes us. The landscape of erotic memory, the vista of long-ago regret join with far more plainspoken pieces of territory, such as gas pumps and cornfields and an uncle's truck bed, to make a believable and memorable world. This is a wonderful collection." —Eavan Boland "What Snider reminds us in these achingly beautiful poems is that we can neither love nor hate the place from which we come. These places divide us 'like one of those snowy Indiana towns / with names like Paradise or Liberty.' These places remind us we are divided things, all of us divided to the very core." —C. Dale Young