Vengeful Hymns

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."

Marc J. Sheehan has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Michigan Council for the Arts (now the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs), and the Hopwood Foundation. His poems have appeared in anthologies from Fine Madness, Passages North, and Milkweed Editions, among others. As a writer for the Lansing Capital Times, he published interviews with such leading writers as Richard Ford, Jim Harrison, and Jane Smiley. His first book of poems, Greatest Hits, was published by New Issues Press (1998). He is communications officer for Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.