The Forest of Sure Things

$16.95

by Megan Snyder-Camp

The Forest of Sure Things is a layered sequence of poems set in a remote, historic village at the tip of a peninsula on the Northwest Coast, near where Lewis and Clark encountered the Pacific. A pair of newlywed drifters has arrived and settled there, starting the town’s first new family in a hundred years. When their second child is stillborn, the bereft family unravels and un-roots themselves. Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems reveal — like the shoreline exposed by a neap tide — an emotional landscape pressed upon and buckling under the complications of grief and the difficulties of language.

With hypnotic, incantatory phrasing and imagery and an innovative approach to chronology, Snyder-Camp tells the story of the grieving couple, then dramatizes the impact of this enigmatic story on her imagination, her artistic practice, and her own new beginnings in married life and parenthood.

Based in part upon a brief, true story she was told, Snyder-Camp’s mysterious yet uncommonly compelling poetic sequence will draw the reader as if along a current pulling through the book. Acknowledging the importance of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Snyder-Camp has spoken of her fascination with where language frays, as we try and use “story” to create what we remember and see where

by Megan Snyder-Camp

The Forest of Sure Things is a layered sequence of poems set in a remote, historic village at the tip of a peninsula on the Northwest Coast, near where Lewis and Clark encountered the Pacific. A pair of newlywed drifters has arrived and settled there, starting the town’s first new family in a hundred years. When their second child is stillborn, the bereft family unravels and un-roots themselves. Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems reveal — like the shoreline exposed by a neap tide — an emotional landscape pressed upon and buckling under the complications of grief and the difficulties of language.

With hypnotic, incantatory phrasing and imagery and an innovative approach to chronology, Snyder-Camp tells the story of the grieving couple, then dramatizes the impact of this enigmatic story on her imagination, her artistic practice, and her own new beginnings in married life and parenthood.

Based in part upon a brief, true story she was told, Snyder-Camp’s mysterious yet uncommonly compelling poetic sequence will draw the reader as if along a current pulling through the book. Acknowledging the importance of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Snyder-Camp has spoken of her fascination with where language frays, as we try and use “story” to create what we remember and see where

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About the Author

Megan Snyder-Camp grew up in Baltimore and received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Washington. She has been awarded scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Espy Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center. She has taught at the University of Washington and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, where she lives with her family.

Advanced Praise

Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems seem to emerge from the deep well of our common experiences. Years of attention were required to call into being this Forest of Sure Things. That we feel her world as our own is the poet’s gift to us, given over with wonder. In this book we find the authenticity and care we too often forget we need from poems, inflected with its own version of grace.—Carol Ann Davis, judge for the Tupelo Press / Crazyhorse Award

Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems, like mosaics, are built of curious and gem-like pieces: stand close and they’re entrancing; take a few steps back and they reveal a sweeping, vaster movement of mind. With a quiet magical realism and audible adoration of language, Snyder-Camp builds an intensely personal yet clearly narrative frame. With a documentarian’s eye (and a wonderfully inventive, graceful sense of form), she gazes at our deepest fears and embraces the insistent beauty of the new.—Lia Purpura

Sometimes a book of poems can hit so hard that it takes time before I’m willing to talk about it. I’ve picked up The Forest of Sure Things by Megan Snyder-Camp and let it carve its way into my thoughts, then let it go, then picked it up, again and again. It’s the kind of book that both wounds and binds.—Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books

The Forest of Sure Things is a debut volume almost without missteps: each rereading unlocks new facets and brings greater pleasures to the surface.—Kate Middleton, Sidney City Poet

The fierce beauty of sea and sky and earth merge with the always incomplete longing to apprehend what it means to be human. This longing is offered with radiant imagery and tender humor. The result is moving and memorable.—Debrah Lechner, Hayden’s Ferry Review blog

The Forest of Sure Things … is a magnificent first work. Those who enjoy the poetry of Sharon Olds or Margaret Gibson will find this collection valuable and intriguing. Megan Snyder-Camp offers a personal glimpse of the darker corners of womanhood and motherhood achieving richness with precise language and considered line breaks.—Christina Marie Speed, Literary Mama

Format:  Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-88-0