Shann Ray's work has been featured in Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney's, High Desert Journal, Poetry International, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, and Salon. He spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeast Montana, played college basketball for Pepperdine University, and professional basketball in Germany's Bundesliga. He has served as a scholar of leadership, genocide, and forgiveness studies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Ray is the author of Atomic Theory 7, Sweetclover, American Copper, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, American Masculine, Balefire, and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity. He lives with his wife and daughters in Spokane, Washington, and teaches at Gonzaga University

Other poems by Shann Ray in Verse Daily:
August 8, 2014:   "The Gesture" "On the surface..."

Books by Shann Ray:

Other poems on the web by Shann Ray:
"atomic theory 5—poems to my wife and God"

Shann Ray's Website.

Shann Ray According to Wikipedia.

About Sweetclover:

"Ecstatic and haunted, tender and wild, Sweetclover opens with the violent, needful calls of elk and closes with the 'jaw and body rise' of the long-known love. And what a journey between. Herein we cross mountains and ford rivers, we reckon our deepest beliefs, come evening we hungrily hold 'the hipbones of the beloved.' Shann Ray is one of the most vital, necessary writers at work today, and whether novel or poem his project, I am beginning to understand, is nothing less than finding for himself and those he loves, as well as all the rest of us, ways of being whole in the body and whole in the world. And for that, I thank him."
—Joe Wilkins

"Not torch song but full-throated anthem for the conflagration love tenders, Sweetclover offers an intimate libretto chronicling the kingdom of marriage in which a wife's body reigns supreme. Ghostpipe, banner, burning house, river, hollowed bell, sugarbowl, fluted vase, mountain lily, weather vane—here's the body 'God made,' disrobed, 'gilded like a struck match,' winged. Shann Ray is a poet of ecstasy, god-parented by Derrida and Dickinson, propelled to plumb terrain both spiritual and geographic for clarity around what it means to be embodied and consumed. Love letter writ large to the divine grandeur of Ray's Montana home and his fellow sojourner, Sweetclover renders poems as consummate prayer."
—Katrina Roberts

"Shann Ray's Sweetclover is a book steeped in desire, a book of body and spirit. It strikes me, savoring these fine, wise poems, that love and religion share a vocabulary: ecstasy, rapture, devotion, faithfulness. In Sweetclover, married love is nothing less than holy."
—Maggie Smith

"This is a book of the very earth, of the bodies of men and women, and the spirit housed in the physical landscapes of each. As a whole, it is a love song to long marriage that calls back to Blake's 'heaven in a wildflower,' shimmering with the compressed energy of the finite. Earnest and boldly written, the poems follow the gravity of desire and find a steady gazing in the oxbows of thought."
—Matt Neinow