Betsy Snider is an award-winning New Hampshire poet. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies most recently Love Over 60 (Mayapple Press), River of Earth and Sky (Blue Light Press), Poet Showcase (Hobblebush Press) and You Must Remember This (Poetry Society of New Hampshire). She was first published in the ground-breaking anthology, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence (Naiad Press, 1985).

Her first full-length collection, Hope is a Muscle, is the winner of the 2015 Blue Light Book Award.

Just published:

"Taking us from the heat of the land of blue Aegean, olives and ouzo to the austerity of a convent’s blue serge, hymns and rosary beads, Betsy Snider unveils the belief that “hope is a muscle.” Through doubts, family secrets and lost love, these moving poems show there is always a chance for resurrection. Hallelujah!"

— Kyle Potvin, author of Sound Travels on Water.

"Often wrought with precise detail, in straightforward and deeply felt language, her poems are suffused with yearning—for a lover, for heat, for Greece, for the sensuous life—as she suffers the silence of both God and love, and struggles to choose between a loss of freedom and freedom’s risks. Revealing a seemingly indefatigable inner life, Snider’s poems do not shrink from pain or despair, and yet hope keeps returning, a “muscle” that flexes like wings to resurrect us time and again."

— Alice B. Fogel, New Hampshire Poet Laureate, author of Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations, and Be That Empty.

Featured poem:

Hope Is a Muscle

The memory of God
cleaves to the roof of my mouth.
Prayers gather behind my tongue,
deep in the throat.
Canaries in the mine of my soul.

Dreams confound me.
Disembodied lovers sing soundlessly
into the bone of my ear,
wrapped like cotton batting
around the cage of my heart.

I talk to no one about the albatross.
I do not wish my parents alive.
I bear the burden of my brother
alone in silence and waiting.

I am Mary at the foot of the cross.
Waiting for death.
Waiting for release.
Waiting for resurrection.

               ~ Hope is a Muscle

To order:

Hope is a Muscle- $15.95
For a signed copy, contact the author!

Available online from Amazon
Or, order at your favorite bookstore using the book code:
ISBN: 1421837447 |  EAN: 978-1421837444