Snake Lore

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.