Snapshots of Life

Perhaps best known as the editor of the free online literary jounral, Short Story Library, Casey Quinn has come out with his first full volume of poetry, Snapshots of Life. Throughout this volume, Quinn joyfully charts the borderlands that lie between the mundane and the transcendent while training a sharp eye on the ironies of life. In “my enlightenment,” for example, Quinn communes with the divine while washing his car, and in “i picked at a scab today,” he meditates on the circle of life while, as the title implies, picking at a scab. The verse that appears throughout this collection is neither dense nor especially verbose. Wielding images like blunt objects — the car, the bird, the niece, the scab — Quinn creates poetry that reads like the verbal equivalent of an expressionist painting or a punch to the gut. You read it and get it immediately. Though I wouldn’t quite call this a book of inspirational verse, it does, in fact, tend to inspire even as it draws attention to the less inspirational elements of life. To borrow a metaphor the poet uses in “reality hold ’em,” we can only play the cards we’re dealt, and Quinn never shies away from this fact. A fine collection of poetry from an insightful poet.