The Cave: Poems Volume 41

Critics describe The Cave, the long-awaited second collection from award-winning poet Ryan Vine, as ＂powerful and completely realized,＂ ＂profound and enduring,＂ and ＂utterly masterful and deeply moving.＂ The Cave contains haunting meditations on fatherhood, fearless contemplations of place and lineage, clear-eyed examinations of generational trauma, and moves--from narrative to lyric to narrative to lyric--toward a more perfect and complete clarity. The poet Dobby Gibson writes: ＂The Cave is an unforgettable contribution to the poetry of paterfamilias written from deep inside ＂love’s austere and lonely offices,＂ as Robert Hayden put it. These poems are indelible as scars--and just as full of ancient wisdom.＂

Ryan Vine is the author of To Keep Him Hidden (Salmon Poetry, 2018), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award; and the chapbooks WARD (TRP, 2021); and Distant Engines (Backwaters Press, 2006), winner of a Weldon Kees Award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. He is Professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.