Poetry. Winner of the 2008 Richard Snyder Publication Prize, VENGEFUL HYMNS is a slow cruise through the past and a sudden turn into the present, where happiness is a chosen commodity like fruit in a roadside orchard. Filled with collapsed porch roofs, irreparable apartments, coin Laundromats, and a heaping dish of ordinary, these poems recognize where we've been and yearn for where we always hoped we'd go. As Jim Daniels says of Sheehan's poems, they would break your heart if they weren't so warm and funny, wistful and accepting.