During a record-breaking blizzard in Boston, two poets met, one American and one English. This meeting marked the beginning of a life-transforming love affair. The story is told in The World Before Snow, Tim Liardet's tenth collection, a book of passionate extremes, in which he discovers new dimensions in language and form. The poems document some of the ways in which a particular species of love can allow for the rediscovery of identity, as all the fragments of persona previously put forth to the world are stripped away to expose a raw new self.