Balefire: Poems - Softcover

Ray, Shann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0991146514 ISBN 13: 9780991146512

Publisher: Lost Horse Press, 2014

Synopsis

Balefire is Shann Ray's debut book of poems, and contains a range of lyric and narrative poems that challenge the complexities of gender, race, and loss.  He returns to the rugged masculinity encountered in his earlier American Book Award winning collection of short stories, American Masculine.  Paul Constant of Seattle's alt weekly, The Stranger, said Ray's work is about "violence, Montana, and sweet, sweet love."  Balefire considers the threshold over which a man must pass to regain himself, and the desolation he experiences in stumbling toward an experience of the feminine no longer defined by apathy, violence, or greed. Balefire affirms love and beauty, refined by the fires of the contemporary American West.               

About this title

About the Author

Shann Ray has served as a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Division, and a visiting scholar in the Netherlands, the Philippines, Canada, South Africa, and Colombia. His collection of stories, American Masculine, named by Esquire for their Three Books Every Man Should Read series and selected by Kirkus Reviews as a Best Book, won the American Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Bakeless Prize. Sherman Alexie said Ray's work is "tough and beautiful" and Dave Eggers called it "lyrical, prophetic, and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful." Shann's creative nonfiction book of leadership and political theory, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, sheds light on the nature of categorical human transgressions and engages the question of ultimate forgiveness in the context of ultimate violence. His poems and prose have been awarded prizes from Narrative, Subterrain, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Ruminate. His work has appeared in some of the nation's leading literary venues including Poetry, McSweeney's, Narrative, and Northwest Review. Shann grew up in Montana and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. He lives with his wife and three daughters, in Spokane, Washington where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lost Horse Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0991146514
• ISBN 13: 9780991146512
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84