Ralph Sneeden
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.
Sneeden’s poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southwest Review, The Surfer’s Journal, and many other magazines. His book Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt 2007) was a finalist (in previous forms) for the Walt Whitman Award (Academy of American Poets) and The Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems in it have been featured on Poetry Daily and received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine. The title poem of Surface Fugue was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the book, in earlier forms, was a semi-finalist for the National Poetry Series, and finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award. Sneeden has received fellowships from MacDowell, Columbia University Teachers College and the American School in London. He was born in Los Angeles but has lived for many years in New England, currently in New Hampshire where he teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy.
