The Legible Element is a lyrical memoir of a life lived in and out of the water. In his first book of essays, Sneeden combines poetry and prose in a search for the origins of his passion for buoyancy and immersion.

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. 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 Sneeden 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.”

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.

Whether set adrift in a marsh or canal, traversing battlefields or beaches, or wading the disorienting streams of adolescence and male identity, readers of Surface Fugue will engage with questioning poignancy and imagination the layers of history stifled by modernity. Plunging us through the ambiguous surfaces of time into the proximities of water-borne violence, predation, and occupation, Sneeden maintains perspective and scale with timely anchorages in the coves of elegy and personal memory. Vivid and experiential, these poems deliver reverie and threat with equal power; as the poet’s description of refraction suggests, “…a dipping oar / is able to inhabit both worlds.”