ABOUT THE POEMS

Shann Ray’s poetry—narrative and concise in lyric intensity, evokes human understanding in the necessary light of both justice and mercy. With poems in Subterrain, Borderlands, Poetry International, the Portland Review and other venues, Ray's poetry forms a crossroads between love and mystery, body and spirit, the physical and the transcendent.

To find the following poems click on Read the Poems on the right side of the page: “Up Going-to-the-Sun Road…” explores the complexity of domestic life and the origins of love; the Best New Poets selected “A Quiet Poem About Marital Sex” speaks of joy in the traditional communion; and a man, lonely, at odds with the world and bound to a powerful physical self, approaches ultimate tenderness in “The Violence Elegies.”