Surface Fugue

Sneeden's poems and essays have appeared in a broad range of magazines and literary publications including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Common, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and The Surfer's Journal. His work has also been featured multiple times on Poetry Daily and in The Second Set, a jazz poetry anthology edited by Yusef Komunyakaa and Sascha Feinstein. The title poem of his first book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt, 2007), received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine/Poetry Foundation and was also runner up for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. In manuscript form, the book had been a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize (Academy of American Poets), Yale Younger Poets Prize, Brittingham/Pollak Prize, Kathryn Morton Prize, Wick Prize, and New Issues Prize. His latest collection of poems, Surface Fugue, was released by EastOver Press in 2021. In previous manifestations, Surface Fugue was a semi-finalist for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Cider Press Review Book Award. With degrees from UMass Amherst, the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Sneeden is also a recipient of an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph's Club and fellowships from MacDowell, Columbia University, and The American School in London. He has taught high school English for almost forty years, most recently at Phillips Exeter Academy (1995 - 2022), where he was the B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities. Born in Los Angeles in 1960, Sneeden has spent most of his life in coastal New England, where he lives with his wife, Gwen, surfs year-round, and sails.

Whether set adrift in a marsh or canal, traversing battlefields or beaches, or wading the disorienting streams of adolescence and male identity, readers of Surface Fugue will engage with questioning poignancy and imagination the layers of history stifled by modernity. Plunging us through the ambiguous surfaces of time into the proximities of water-borne violence, predation and occupation, Sneeden maintains perspective and scale with timely anchorages in the coves of elegy and personal memory. Vivid and experiential, these poems deliver reverie and threat with equal power; as the poet's description of refraction suggests, "...a dipping oar /is able to inhabit both worlds."