Shann Ray

Balefire: Poems Shann Ray

Balefire is Shann Ray's debut book of poems, and contains a range of lyric and narrative poems that challenge the complexities of gender, race, and loss.  He returns to the rugged masculinity encountered in his earlier American Book Award winning collection of short stories, American Masculine.  Paul Constant of Seattle's alt weekly, The Stranger, said Ray's work is about "violence, Montana, and sweet, sweet love."  Balefire considers the threshold over which a man must pass to regain himself, and the desolation he experiences in stumbling toward an experience of the feminine no longer defined by apathy, violence, or greed. Balefire affirms love and beauty, refined by the fires of the contemporary American West.