SMALL CEREMONIES by Cynthia Snow

The book itself works a kind of sympathetic magic, telling stories of everyday encounters in ways that reveal their essential strangeness.

- Patrick Donnelly, author of The Charge, and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin

Hazel

I don't kneel,
not in dirt, not on pavement,
not on wooden benches, before carved objects,
gilt-framed paintings, dogs, or men.

This silver hair is mine. No lapse in judgment,
no lax personal maintenance, no poor genetic material.

I wash. I weed. I wipe the counters shiny.
I caulk windows, stack wood, shovel snow, throw salt.
I share my bread with those who look me in the eye.

Listen, dearie, pray is another word
for wait, and I am done waiting, done.

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Reviews:

• Live Oak Review
• The Recorder

The “Small Ceremonies” of Cindy Snow's marvelously unafraid poems are the liturgies of Eros and Thanatos, of sex and love and birth and aging and death. The book itself works a kind of sympathetic magic, telling stories of everyday encounters in ways that reveal their essential strangeness, and casting the powerful light of imperfect, sensual, living bodies upon the hidden life of the spirit.

- Patrick Donnelly, author of The Charge, and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin

Cindy Snow is an astute and sensuous poet of the feminine, from the artistic to the domestic, and the liminal spaces between. Whether chronicling the varied vulnerabilities of motherhood and married love, the "tiny struggles" of the young, or a body's slow self-effacient, Snow's gaze is never less than tender and attentive. She writes lyrical snapshots with shifting frames of reference, giving us glimpses into lives both riarkable and ordinary, and riinding us that the difference between thi is not so great as we imagined. Small Cerionies is a marvelous debut!

- Marie Gauthier, author of Hunger All Inside

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Readings

• Cindy Snow reading

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Cindy Snow’s writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Peace Review, Worcester Review, Crannóg, and elsewhere.  Slate Roof Press published her chapbook, Small Ceremonies, in 2016. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and has won the Poet’s Seat Poetry Contest. Cindy’s poems earned honorable mentions in the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize and the Patricia Dobler Award. In Amsterdam, at the 2017 conference The Changing Nature of Art and Science, Cindy read from her manuscript on the 17th Century naturalist and botanical artist, Maria Sibylla Merian, and her poems are included in the Merian Society’s recent publication: The Maria Sibylla Merian Society (uva.nl). Cindy has been a writing fellow at Cill Rialaig, Ireland, a Platte Clove Artist in Residence, and the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Writing Residency. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Currently, she enjoys exploring the intersections of dance, music, and poetry, and participated in CISA’s storytelling event at the Academy of Music in Northampton: Cindy Snow – “Drying Apples with Dad” | Field Notes: Local Food & Farm Stories with CISA - YouTube.  Cindy coordinates peer tutors and teaches at Greenfield Community College. She lives in Shelburne Falls, MA, with her family.

 

 

Readings:

Cindy Snow reading