Books

Hold Me Tight

2020, Red Hen Press

“Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight is a tour de force of risk and vulnerability. The images that populate this book–from wolves to submarines–show how every story we’ve ever been told (every fairy tale heard, every movie watched) becomes an internalized part of our reality. And that reality is made all the more real when we can talk about it. These poems read like a wrought conversation the speaker only wishes he could have: “I needed / that story once; I’m telling it to you now, / because I know I may need it again.” And the discursive mode here always leads us to a place of surprise, a place where Schneiderman can declare, “This is the one thing / I have never told anyone. I still believe in the circle. / I may be the last, but I believe.” What a tenderly beautiful book!” Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

Primary Source

2016, Red Hen Press

Winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award

Primary Source presents Jason Schneiderman’s most exuberant volume of poetry, as he plays with the literary canon and explores his own personal archive. Starting with rewritten lyrics that put Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” squarely in po-biz, Schneiderman takes on everyone from Shakespeare to Ashbery, making stops along the personal and the political, and interrogating ideas of race, sexuality, and love. Playful and profound, Schneiderman’s light touch is guaranteed to send tingles up your spine.

Striking Surface

2010, Ashland Poetry Press

Winner of the Richard Snyder Prize
Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award

“Jason Schneiderman has a fabulous, distillate gift for seeing to the heart of inherited paradigms: the Greeks on violence and the gods; the Christian Middle Ages on violence and conquest; the all-too-transhistorical, multicultural Everywhere on violence toward children. Hence the ravishing paradox of Schneiderman’s poems, which find their freshest purchase in twice-told tales: the myths of Hyacinth and Echo, the myth of the progressive totalitarian state, the skepticism of the Rabbis, the nostalgia of the skeptical philosophers. STRIKING SURFACE (six of them on the hand alone, says the latest Interrogation Manual) is both beautifully conceived and beautifully written: witty, trenchant, tender, acerbic, and always, immutably, wise.” Linda Gregerson.

Sublimation Point

2004, Four Way Books

“Sublimation Point is like a perfect pop song, making the listener glad to be alive. Jason Schneiderman doesn’t strive for complication: he wins us over with rueful plain-speaking. He has Anne Sexton’s directness, Max Jacob’s eye for incongruity. Tragedy enters the picture, and becomes the frame: nowhere do these poems forget their nemesis, mortality.” Wayne Koestenbaum.

Queer: A Reader for Writers

2016, Oxford University Press

Queer: A Reader for Writers is a part of an imprint of Oxford University Press of single-topic readers geared towards college writing classes which also includes the readers: Gender, Identity and Culture. The idea behind these readers is to introduce students to various academic and cultural concepts and to improve their writing skills through discussing them. Each text is followed by a few questions and at the end of each section there are additional questions which ask students to synthesize information and to explore beyond these texts.

Read the full summary on Lambda Literary.