"Snyder is an astoundingly articulate poet, able to thrust the reader straight into these eerie nighttime experiences to hear loud and clear the sound 'of crumpling paper / and foil.' This is an enveloping debut." —PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (starred review)

"In understated verse, he captures the city in wide-angle views ... and finely wrought close-ups." —BOOKFORUM

Escape from Combray presents an intimate cycle of poems exploring the growing sense of urban ennui and dislocation affecting a generation of Americans. Snyder's poems evokes a psychogeographic landscape where quotidian symbols of the working class juxtapose with the timeless profundity of Proust, Virgil, and Dante.

_________

These poems often occur at dusk on the way home from work, the mind loosed from constraints and merging with the ambience of city streets. They record the sad but sustaining ironies of urban life—shops lighting up for the night, dirty snow, pockets of neglect and obsolescence—as well as brief glimpses of unexpected happiness. Throughout, one finds a light touch, whimsical self-regard, and lyrical wistfulness. Escape from Combray dips into the stream of days and the vernaculars of our time in order to draw up something memorable.

—Devin Johnston

I find myself reading Rick Snyder’s Escape from Combray on a gray summer morning in Maine. Its cityscapes, scenes, and sounds echo along the pines, intertwine with rural chirrups. These beautiful poems show how experience is shaped when the senses expand the flatness of the present in unfolding rhythmic phrases. Snyder’s pen moves skillfully from the casualness of a chance encounter into Augustine’s house of memory. It is what poetry does best, though one rarely sees it done so well.

—Jennifer Moxley

Quiet, moving, brutally nostalgic. Details—a soup-can’s expiration date (associated with the expiry of a relationship), a broken cuckoo-clock (in a dead aunt’s apartment)— are unsentimental emblems of the disjunct between then and now. The markers of loss persist in accumulating. “How can you stand it, living among the relics of the future?” No problem, at least while we're in the company of these fresh, startlingly elegant poems.

—Cathy Wagner

Stan Brakhage writes “The American inherently struggles to be gentle and at the same time not to be taken advantage of.” Nowhere is this notion more evident than in Rick Snyder’s remarkable poems, whose sweet-bitter speakers reveal the numerous states (both territories and conditions) with which—and in which—to fall in love and take issue. I’m very glad this book is in the world.

—Graham Foust

Rick Snyder’s chapbooks include Blueprint (811 Books, 1999), Double Ear (811 Books, 1999), Forecast Memorial (Duration, 2002), Flown Season (Portable Press, 2004), and Guestbook (Dusie, 2007). His poems have appeared in print and online journals such as 6x6, Aufgabe, Barrow Street, Dusie, Hanging Loose, jubilat, LIT, LVNG, Lungfull!, Milk, Open City, The Poker, Radical Society, Readme, Skanky Possum, and TheEastVillage. His poem “How Are You Doing?” was recently featured in the syndicated column American Life in Poetry. In 2003, Situations published his translations of Catullus’ poems 1-30 as This Charming New Chapbook. His review-essay of English-language versions of Paul Celan appeared in Radical Society and was included in a collection of critical writings on translation published online by Duration in 2005. His essay on Flarf and Dada was published in Jacket in 2006. He formerly edited the poetry journal Cello Entry and programmed and curated book fairs, poetics lectures, and a translation-based reading series at the Dactyl Foundation in New York.

_______