Publisher's Synopsis
A debut chapbook from a promising talent, Jane Morton.
Jane Morton's debut chapbook SNAKE LORE explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together--a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns--the beauty and the harm that they potentiate--converge and haunt.
"SNAKE LORE shimmers with the incantatory powers of myth, prayer, and making. In this haunting chapbook, Morton's voice is vibrant and agile, rich with the Southern storytelling idiom, the language of guts and teeth and dirt 'rich to taste.' These are intimate, tender verses that celebrate nature's rot and ruin, the dark and dank places where scaly things are born, and the ways in which we learn to survive there. SNAKE LORE takes us through an alchemical process, transmuting the decay of the post-industrial South into hard, glinting images of transcendence that glitter on the page as Morton forges and reforges an origin story within these brilliant poems."--Essy Stone, Author of What It Done to Us
"We begin with a 'flock of open throats' and right away I hear the cicadas, the peeper frogs, the flies and their 'filthy white noise.' Jane Morton's SNAKE LORE is made entirely of humidity and high dew points, poems slick with spit and cottonmouth venom. This book brings me back to my roots, watching snakes writhe in the wet grass. I trust these poems, and I trust the familiarity they bring rushing back. As humans we are built to sense rain; we are drawn to it above all else. These poems are all rain and the most arid soil. Let them draw you in."--Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Author of Water I Won't Touch
"Between sleeping and waking, between desire and violence, between bodies re/membering--this collection generates its own intoxicating humidity. Sows, dogs, flies, birds, snakes, the taste of dirt in the mouth: dreams. Jane Morton's SNAKE LORE is both visceral and ethereal. The lyrical intensity in these poems is a ghost-tongue edging the mystery of our messy, complicated human hearts. I love these poems. I read them over and over. Jane Morton is an incredible talent."--Selah Saterstrom, Author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher
Poetry.
