To Eve · Sarah Dickenson Snyder
In To Eve, Sarah Dickenson Snyder dismantles the mythology of blame and rewrites the story of the first woman as one of agency, hunger, and sacred curiosity. This book-length poem moves from Eden to our modern-day life of parking garages, newborn clothing, placing the phone after a father’s diagnosis, and always in Snyder’s engaging voice: I don’t understand Reiki. Why not touch? / And yet I do believe in the energy / of between – look how magnets pull. In these times, we need these retellings, this reframing and reclaiming of maternal power, female desire, and strength. Let’s just love everyone, imagine / each is a god – this gorgeous book reminds us of our humanness and what it’s like to care and caretake, to live the larger life despite that no one I know has returned / from death to say, “You’ll be fine.” Both intimate and expansive, To Eve insists that knowledge is not a fall, but a beginning.
— Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Accidental Devotions
ISBN 978-1-949279-64-1
84 pages
$20.00
read an excerpt
in rib, snake, & apple,
but sometimes you need to
say frost to statue the world
so you can find what is lost.
Or even sand to feel your feet
sink, enter what is below.
Don’t be afraid of darkness.
It is there that we are solved,
our hinge to gods. Everywhere
we can’t see, there.
The way pollen enters
even closed windows,
the way fingertips
sweep skin and find
the dust of all
the other worlds.
You’d prefer to touch the softness
of a cow’s hide, sink into
those large, dark eyes.
Your first blood was your own.
The Maker placed in you what you never
emerged from: fallopian tubes & a womb.
In the cool heaven of evening,
did the Maker speak to you.
All those tiny pieces of light
& one moon flung in blackness
before the forbidding.
Now borders uncrossable
& fertile lands you must find.
No more words from the Maker.
No more, Follow.
What about a wax-sealed letter? A voice
decipherable. Your world edged
with thunder & turbulence in the firmament.
Your skin weathered, still hungry.
You moved through the muddied riverbeds,
plucked mushrooms, unearthed wild onions.
You ate what grew from the soil,
picked up a stone, a smooth heaviness
to hold. When you rested, you found a stick,
drew spirals in the clay or sand,
messages to no one. This was
the beginning. You read the trees.
To rob an apple tree means there
will be no forgotten apples, that there is
someone who cares about an
apple, doesn’t want the good to rot, doesn’t want the amazon
to wither, to lose its largeness in
this orbiting world of us.
Eve is the first recycler, she
may have taken what is
a god’s, but it was a nourishment, an unwasting, the
same way we open every dark secret
so that life is livable – how what we
name becomes sayable. We cannot do
the burying, can not
let skeletons remain & have
ponderous weight, a borrowed decay to
spread & sink. We all need airing, to learn
the generous currents of wind, the
way emptied clothes dance on a line, the strength
of something invisible that
dries & satisfies, how one swallowed bite opens
our eyes to hunger, gives us
desire. There is a beyond
a vastness within ourselves,
how we herald each birth,
believe each history is
a small, important story. It will be our
tiny account like a container of baby teeth, a birthright
crocheted or just-woven, how we
arrive to smell the hedge of jasmine & smile,
only that. & perhaps the truth of wildness – our
world making itself flecked, shadowed, & mysterious.
How we bite into an apple again & again & smile.
about the author
After decades in the classroom, Sarah Dickenson Snyder carves in stone, sculls on the Connecticut River, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has five poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2023). Several poems have been nominated for Best of Net and Pushcart Prizes. Work is in Rattle, Verse Daily, and RHINO.
Copyright © 2026 Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Book design by d’Entremont
Cover image from Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio by Alberto Seba, published in Amsterdam, 1734; used with permission.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
ISBN 978-1-949279-64-1
84 pages; 7.375″ x 9″
