Hope Is A Muscle [Paperback]

Betsy Snider is a retired attorney who lives on a lake in rural New Hampshire with her cat Sophie and the ghosts of her many dogs. When she is not swimming or hiking, she writes poetry and has volunteered as a CASA Guardian ad Litem for abused and neglected children. She was first published in the ground-breaking anthology, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence (Naiad Press, 1985). Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, most recently in River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century (Blue Light Press, 2015); You Must Remember This (Poetry Society of New Hampshire, 2015); Poet's Showcase (Hobblebush Press, 2015); and Love Over 60: an anthology of women poets (Mayapple Press, 2010). She is also a winner of the 2015 Blue Light Book Award for her new book of poems, Hope is a Muscle. ENDORSEMENTS: In this unusual collection of poems, Betsy Snider takes us back to her youthful years as a nun, when she tried to escape from a troubled childhood and then struggled to surrender instead to the safety of the convent's strict rules. Throughout the long course of the writer's life, her spirit is strong, and the poems later lead us forward to a new life in rural New Hampshire. Often wrought with precise detail, in straightforward and deeply felt language, her poems are suffused with yearning-for a lover, for heat, for Greece, for the sensuous life-as she suffers the silence of both God and love, and struggles to choose between a loss of freedom and freedom's risks. Always, she desires anything but this / dread ... where / ... I fall beneath the boots / of doubt. Revealing a seemingly indefatigable inner life, Snider's poems do not shrink from pain or despair, and yet hope keeps returning, a muscle that flexes like wings to resurrect us time and again. -Alice B. Fogel, New Hampshire Poet Laureate, Author of Interval: Poems Based on Bach's 'Goldberg Variations, and Be That Empty. In Hope is a Muscle, Betsy Snider draws the reader into her worls+