From Publishers Weekly
The interplay between involuntary acts and cognition ("Suddenly thinking somewhere in the breath--along// the breath, is an understood place") centers Snow's second collection. The governing influence of its three sections of long-lined lyrics is Jorie Graham, who is all over lines such as the above, as well as the dashes, parentheses and brackets that break up the text throughout. In fact, the book as a whole attempts the meditational metaphysics that Graham has made famous, finding abstract ideas swirling around "every slip left out to dry," or a recurrent "boundary [coastline]." The main emphasis is on thinking through the intertwinement of the internal and external as held together by the body and self of the female speaker. It's an approach that works best in "Bowl," where images of "Something there./ Something white there under the water" lead to a "tug" that encloses scientific laws, rock gardens, television and the poet ("I am That") within its textual parentheses, but which more often collapses under the weight of abstraction and stylistic tics. When the poet breaks through with an I that's just trying to make sense of things--" somehow I am fourteen and panicking"--the poems are refreshed. But repetitions tend to dull rather than emphasize the insights, making it difficult to identify which of them is being reinforced. Readers looking for philosophical verse that engages the postfeminist, public-private predicament would be better served by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's Empathy or Four Year-Old Girl. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Snow, who lives in San Francisco, won the Book Award from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 1990 for Artist and Model, her first collection of poetry. She also received a NEA Fellowship. Here (in the first volume of the New California Poetry series) she sets herself the task of the ages in trying to describe what it means to stand within a small fragment of time, attempting to make sense of the whirlwind of impressions, past and present, that descend upon one in a moment of quiet. She layers her images, shifts the figure and ground, interposes scenes from memory with the reality at hand, and subtly merges or shifts the relationship between the observer and the observed. In some respects these are ``thought experiments,'' and, as in all laboratory situations, not all results are successful. Sometimes the thoughts obtrude. Her insistence upon aesthetic exactness is wearing at times, as when her favorite parenthetical expression, ``(somehow),'' is continually repeated. Yet she posits an interesting ekphrasis (describing a work of art in verse) of two photographs of a thematically-linked painting and sculpture. Her poems are often visually spare and striking, as in her description of a Henry Moore sculpture of ``a woman's body, reclining, curved: eloquent as bone, shell, stones worn beyond contradiction.'' Snow is most successful when her space is circumscribed, when she limits herself to defining a single moment, with all its attendant sensations, thoughts, and memories. She is least poetic and most didactic when performing her syntactic legerdemain. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In For, the first volume in the New California Poetry series, Snow continues her vast poetic project of defining the relationship between art, life, and the acts of perception that define and limit those terms. If there is "subject matter" -- an elusive term when one talks about Snow's writing -- it is the play between memory and moment.

Snow makes innovative use of autobiographical material in finely wrought poetry of integrity, power, and subtlety. The kinship For has with Eastern thought and poetic forms is apparent in the depth charge of its spare style. Although Snow's poems have an affinity with those of Tu Fu, her antecedents among American writers include Elizabeth Bishop and George Oppen.

In For, by her clean observations and simple, forceful representations, Snow synthesizes the ancient and the classical. She forges new and remarkable poetry by combining traditions that once seemed incompatible -- the materials of life and a purely aesthetic, experimental style.

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