"Imagine finding that message in a bottle you always dreamed about." So writes Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters, about poet and essayist Ralph Sneeden's new book The Legible Element.
Although a memoir at its core, The Legible Element is much more: the book gathers lyrical essays into chapters, using prose and poetry as facets of the same aqueous gem. With a personal immersion in literature, visual art, film, and music, Sneeden establishes a nonfiction hybrid on the border between the academic and the personal. The collection's narratives about surfing, sailing, fishing, scuba diving, and swimming are earthly dispatches from an ongoing voyage fueled by joy, longing, loss, and humor.
The Legible Element is a book about places, its insights and descriptions spurred by the challenge of distinguishing the personalities of different bodies of water through experience while also paying tribute to the coasts that cradle and define them. The collection's regional touchstones are in New England and California, but as Jennifer Acker, author of The Limits of the World and editor of The Common, puts it, "This book will fling you from shore to sea and back again in search of perfect aquatic moments."
Water provides the language of the essays, functioning as both a lens and mirror for the author's exploration of the act and outcomes of writing itself. As he says in the preface, "...it's writing that ultimately needs to rip its own temporary swath, churn the surface of memory into something that seems more permanent." Bill Roorbach, author of Summers with Juliet, Temple Stream, and Lucky Turtle, writes, "These are a poet's sentences, a poet noticing the world even as he lives in it, language creating a world apart. These essays are profound-you'll want to follow this voice wherever it goes."
The Legible Element will have you wallowing, floundering, and then swimming happily for your life off the shore of your own preoccupations before you even realize you're adrift.
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 and received the "best book of the year" award from the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. 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.
