Ryan Vine's poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Verse Daily and on National Public Radio. His chapbook, Distant Engines (Backwaters Press, 2006), won a Weldon Kees Award and spent time on the Poetry Foundation's contemporary bestseller list. He has received the Greensboro Review's Robert Watson Poetry Prize, McKnight/ARAC Career Development Grants, and an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Ryan is associate professor, the Rose Warner Professor and Chair of the English Department at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN. To Keep Him Hidden was a finalist for the May Swenson Prize, the New Issues Prize, the Crab Orchard Series, the MVP Prize from New Rivers Press, and—selected by Robert Pinsky—the Dorset Prize. The book includes work chosen for the Robert Watson Poetry Prize and the Weldon Kees Award.

Other poems by Ryan Vine in Verse Daily:
December 8, 2014:   "Rule 30" "friend I hear there's a hole..."

Books by Ryan Vine:

Other poems on the web by Ryan Vine:
Three poems
Two poems
Three poems
Three poems

Ryan Vine's Website.

Ryan Vine on Twitter.

About To Keep Him Hidden:

"Reading To Keep Him Hidden is like watching a man tear himself free from a thick wrap of tangled vines. Working-class machismo plus alcohol plus Catholicism have woven a spirit-killing trap that our protagonist has to escape, by way of courage and imagination. The poems convey the stress of outgrowing one's origins without betraying them. It's a drama that Ryan Vine explores without sentimentalizing and without self-vaunting: not an easy feat. Vine hits notes of bleak elegy like those in the best dark songs by Bruce Springsteen."
—Mark Halliday

"Ryan Vine has given us a book of hard-won poems. These are painful and dark encounters, sometimes unrelenting in their probing of human descent. And yet, even in this deep darkness some kind of hope emerges. Perhaps that is the work of true art. Certainly it is the exalted work of the human spirit. But I think this book, wisely and beautifully, combines the endeavors of the spirit with the endeavors of art. The result is arresting. Here, pain is replaced with compassion, and grief is restored by love. And faith is involved, even if it comes with uncertainty. But that is the nature of poetry, and this is a book full of it."
—Maurice Manning

"The poems in To Keep Him Hidden struggle with a boyhood awash in desperation, friends who didn't survive, the disillusionment of an entire generation (not to mention the self), and still learn how to live—not in vain, but freely and generously with compassion for the past and hope for the future. These are simply wonderful, memorable poems which will break your heart then mend it."
—Mary Ruefle

"To Keep Him Hidden delves into masculine disappointment amid the bleak beauties of the blue-collar upper Midwest in economic decline. Ryan Vine's world of absent fathers and aimless sons sounds bleak, too, but it is not. It's a whole and vibrant world brought to life and lit brightly by the poet's piercing intelligence, compassionate wit, and buoyant insinuating voice."
—Andrew Hudgins