Year of the Labyrinth

In this folk-horror pastoral, poet Brian Sneeden threads paths of myth and ritual, fatherhood and climate collapse, ghost stories and grief.

Described by Kiki Petrosino as "a beautiful invasion," Year of the Labyrinth draws upon Sneeden's experiences as a translator and multilingual writer working in language preservation to explore boundaries between speech and ritual, myth and ecology. "In these fiercely imagined poems," Petrosino writes, "our speaker passes between seemingly fixed physical and conceptual worlds--human/animal, past/present, forest/field. This voice finds lyric power in liminal spaces--in 'the pollen line' and 'a change of wind.' With the speaker, we travel through mirrors to places where you might grasp an animal if only 'by the curve of its name, ' and where 'a bird that ha[s]n't yet been invented' may sing. This poet's imagination makes porous the landscapes we thought were familiar." Kelly Link, in her judge's citation for the Barthelme Prize, writes: "How wonderful it is, the marriage of economy and the arcane, as if a story could be a kind of lozenge that, slipped under the tongue, estranges us from our idea of how both life and language work. Every sentence has the effect of an acupuncturist's needle, small pricks that let in strange energy."