I Ask Her to Tell Me a Story, by Anna Snider

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

In her debut chapbook, I Ask Her to Tell Me a Story, Anna Snider reflects on the death of her grandmother and the grief that followed. Snider writes about grief as a living entity, a liminal space, a love that you can’t let go of. Her poems range from odes to spoken word pieces to snippets of her grandmother’s eulogy. Imbued with empathy and softness, Snider explores the generational trauma inherited from her grandmother as well as her knack for storytelling.

I Ask Her to Tell Me a Story was written before, during, and after their grandmother’s journey with terminal cancer. Mirroring the timelessness of grief, this story is non-chronological (as are some of the poems). Snider writes to understand not only the love that they have for their grandmother, but where that love fell short. In understanding where they come from, perhaps they can find peace.

From a love of stories, to mental illnesses, to an awe of the natural world – this collection combs through that which is passed from a matriarch to the women and femmes in her family. Ultimately, Snider writes to honor her roots and to weed out what is no longer useful. These poems tell stories of her grandmother that Snider aches to keep alive, and those which she will put to rest, once and for all.

Anna Snider (she/they) is from St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2019, Anna won a spot on TruArtSpeaks’ BeHeard19 Cohort. As a team, the cohort competed at Brave New Voices, an international youth poetry slam. In 2020, she received two Gold Medal awards in the 2020 Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards, and won a 2020 American Voices Award, also from Scholastic. Their work is featured in Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Current, and Slippery Elm Literary Journal. Anna’s work centers around queerness, the natural world, and retaining softness while living in a harsh world. When she isn’t writing, Anna can be found baking an obscene amount of cookies, spending time with her partner and pets, or asking you to come and admire the sky.