The World Before Snow

In 2013, Tim Liardet met an American poet during a blizzard in Boston and the two began an immediate, life-transforming love affair. The World Before Snow was the result. In a book of passionate extremes, the self-portrait— itself reinvented—documents the ways in which a very particular species of love can allow for the rediscovery of identity, as all fragments of persona put forth to the world are stripped down to expose the raw self.

Tim Liardet is an award-winning poet and the author of several collections, including The Blood Chair, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize; Competing with the Piano Tuner, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; The Storm House; and To the God of Rain, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He has reviewed poetry for the Guardian, PN Review, and Poetry Review, and has been poet-in-residence at the Guardian.