Last City: Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series

In his debut collection, Brian Sneeden presents a poetry that is equal parts spell and song, invoking scenes from the Greek islands, the loam-clotted fields of the antebellum South, and the city which emerges, like Cavafy’s city of memory, from the filaments of loss. These poems reach forwards and backwards in time, staging reweavings of such familiar myths as Persephone and Demeter, alongside contemporary myths of selfhood—while at all times conjuring and dispelling the alcoves, the porticoes, and the nearly shadowed rooms of the metaphysical city the self creates, and carries, from life to life.