ABOUT THE POEMS

Shann Ray’s poetry—narrative and concise in lyric intensity, by turns ironic, violent, imbued with light—forms a crossroads between love and mystery, body and spirit, the physical and the transcendent.  “Up Going-to-the-Sun Road…” explores the complexity of domestic life and the origins of love; in the Best New Poets selected “A Quiet Poem About Marital Sex” the traditional communion makes an exalted ascent into joy; and a man, lonely, at odds with the world and bound to a powerful physical self, speaks of sensual tenderness in “The Violence Elegies.”

Shann Ray’s poetry walks the boundary of the domestic and the wild, the liminal moment that crystallizes unforeseen emotion and reveals beneath our daily lives the temporality and sacredness of the human endeavor.