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. “He needed help,” writes Snider. “I imagined the chemicals in his brain like the chemicals in mine. // I imagined our DNA, mirrors facing one another—an infinite us.”
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.
In considering the parable of the prodigal son, Snider acutely notes, “without the older brother’s / flawed heart, // there is no story.” And finally, in a later poem, he reminds us that “Cain must be judged / because he did what’s forbidden— // he survived.”
Part I
Reading 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 Music
At the Rainbow Cattle Company
To 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 Machines
When Our Father Forgets the Last Verse of George Strait’s “Fool Hearted Memory”
[The drinking game starts because . . .]
Dueling Banjos
Part II
About 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 iPhone
Trio
[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 Dawn
Listening 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 Makes
Acknowledgments
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.
