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Metatron Press

The Snakes Came Back

$20.00 CAD
$20.00 CAD
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In its palm, time is a gap
that is closing,
But the spirit throws its head to the wind
without hurry.
It has looked out at time’s expanse.
It already knows it’s infinite.

In Lora Mathis’s poems, the body is a temporary resting place for the infinite, resilient soul. The Snakes Came Back follows a speaker contending with trauma in the slipstream of earthly time. Mathis’s poems are peopled with friends and lovers—both named and anonymous, current and past—and invested in necessary interdependence as a means of healing the self. But the self is not fractured. The self is composed of memory, navigating impulses of woundedness with awareness and compassion. Mouths and tongues figure prominently throughout this reflective and forthcoming collection, evocative of the insatiable desire of our hungry ghosts. The mouth is, however, as much a space of hunger and desire as it is an erogenous zone of self-expression and agency. Mapping affective geographies of memory, The Snakes Came Back cracks open everyday tasks and familiar landscapes to reveal their haunting depths. Saturated with heat and wind, Mathis’s poems vibrate with the will to face life’s temporality, its impossible contradictions, its beauty and its pain: “There is loss, but there is renewal too.”

  • Poetry
  • Author: Lora Mathis
  • 128 pages
  • Perfect-bound
  • Cover art: Mary Herbert
  • ISBN 9781988355368
  • Fall 2023
Lora Mathis (she/they) is a poet and artist from Southern California. Mathis primarily works in digital mediums, including video, photography, and graphic design. She has been sharing her art and poetry online for the last twelve years, and has utilized digital tools as a part of her practice. She has participated in group and solo shows across the US, Canada, and Europe. Mathis has also performed poetry at universities, festivals, and tours on their own and with their sound collaborator Matty Terrones. Recently, Lora’s practice has been expanding into more physical mediums such as printmaking and sculpture. Mathis came up artistically in the DIY punk scene in San Diego. They have played in several punk bands, and view performing, community organizing, low cost all ages shows, and independent publishing as a part of their practice. They have published two collections of poetry including, The Women Widowed to Themselves (2015; republished 2020). Here I Am In It was published by Burn All Books in 2022. Mathis currently lives in Oakland and is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she completed her BA in Art Practice and English.