In Snapshots, Ron Lauderbach demonstrates a wonderfully deft hand for poetic storytelling, offering up a series of vignettes filled with richly drawn characters-people in his life from past to present. We read of working-class people, "urban farmers" like his grandfather, and "lay angels" who save bits of their hard-earned money to make life better for those less fortunate than them. These poems and narratives infused with heart and humor, juxtaposed with those containing the harder realities of everyday life, such as a grandfather who is "not a man of means" who deeply loved his animals but could no longer provide for them when they had outlived their usefulness. In addition to his narrative skills, this poet demonstrates equal facility fashioning descriptive details that bring readers immediately into scenes and stories. This collection is one to be read through more than once, and to savor. -Debbie Hall, What Light I HaveRon Lauderbach's Snapshots paints a picture of another era and conveys all of the charm you might expect in nostalgic storytelling, but running underneath the familiar vignettes and characters, there is a pervasive violence, a sense of irony and dread. These poems are as delightful as they are chilling.-Blas Falconer, Professor of poetry in the San Diego State University MFA program, The Founding Wheel, Forgive the Body This FailureRon Lauderbach's poems in Snapshots do not fool around, they are distinctly Southern California, they set out with devotional intent to preserve a growing up in a landscape-emotional and physical-that has been paved over, built on, crowded out. These poems of ordinary particularities of ordinary existence using ordinary language are far from ordinary. They show us a man's roots, the influences that comprise the tangible and intangible things of an abundant life.-Ron Salisbury, Inaugural Poet Laureate of San Diego, winner of Main Street Rags 2015 PoetryPrize.
