Snake Lore
by Jane Morton
Black Lawrence Press, 33 pp, $9.95 (print)
The famed courtliness of the American South, so venerated in movies like Gone With The Wind and used to great effect in the TV crime drama Justified, can serve as a mask, hiding disdain or bigotry behind fine manners and an eloquent tongue. Author Danielle Easley defended the regional tradition of politeness and respect in a 2019 blog post, but acknowledged, “[o]ne of the biggest challenges with navigating life to avoid disrespect and embarrassment may mean those raised in the South simply avoid conflict altogether.” Many Southern writers and poets, however, have used their work to explore this unspoken tension, the situations where fine language butts heads with naked violence and, as Tennyson wrote, “nature, red in tooth and claw.” Jane Morton’s new chapbook continues this tradition.
(Black Lawrence Press, 2024)
Snake Lore, published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2024, is a startlingly beautiful and haunting collection where the speaker of one of three titular poems watches for “signs / in every drop of blood”. Violence is a matter of fact and functions as the organizing principle of the world. It leaves trails of viscera behind as proof of life, itself, as in “Dayton, TX,” where the final image is of a dog, “shot straight through” but not dead, licking the afterbirth of the speaker’s family cow. Is this a miracle or an aberration?
Heat, blood, and love–powerful forces that can’t be separated from one another–are frequent motifs in Snake Lore. Like many of the poems, “Thistle” is written in couplets. The speaker writes to a lover comparing their painful desire and the damage love can cause to the cuts from a thistle plant:
Everyone I love has got bloody
palms, bloody teeth–
I do too. Fingers
pressing wounds
that hurt me but not
me worst of all.
The chapbook’s imagery seethes, bringing to mind humid, sweat-laden summers; how rural land and unbridled lust carry unknown dangers, keeping an inexorable hold on readers. Animal similes and metaphors abound across the chapbook’s 33 pages, including a roach crawling on a too still hand in “Dogwood” and “legs thin / as chicken legs / and clawed” in “Heat Wakes Me.” The poetry collapses the binary between the natural and what is considered human, as if Morton is rewriting our definition of Southern literature, so specifically centered on human sin and fallibility. The only poems in the chapbook with identical titles are the three titular “Snake Lore” poems. The first zooms in on a girl who “held the snake / in her lap like an infant,” and the price both pay for this violation of a boundary. The speaker in the second poem, however, testifies,
I’ll open up
past the edges, unhinge
from my body like a snake’s jaws
stretch over warmth, bone and blood both.
The third title poem completes a triptych featuring the snake-as-devil and interloper theme by echoing the toxic romances of “Refrain” and “Dayton, TX.”
When they aren’t written in couplets, Morton’s poems feature stark, careful enjambments and line breaks. The subject matter is not epic, but small and mystical, and the poems lack the density or massive sprawl of an urban writer. Narration is from a speaker who lacks noise or even much stimulus in life except perhaps the hums of insects and “the birds’ bloody murder cries.” City residents can be all too easily insulated from actual life–when a neighbor dies, or the block changes, it’s less of a transformation than an unwelcome surprise. Light pollution erases the stars and animals are often pests rather than uneasy cohabitants of the same space.
To live in nature means that one accepts sudden, shocking death and the changes that come with it. A body without breath feeds the living. The actual circle of life lacks the filtered sentiment of a Disney movie, but the speaker in “There Are So Many Flies in the Kitchen” still longs to “touch / the shiny black, incessant” fur of a dead opossum “vibrating / with flies.” They confess that regardless of what they’d make contact with, whether living insects or a dead animal’s coat, “I still / want it.”
As an autistic person, I’m not sure I’d have functioned very well in the American South. A friend from Kentucky once told me “Bless your heart” is the Southern equivalent of “Go fuck yourself.” However, I appreciate the tradition of Southern writers like Tennessee Williams, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner in the tradition of portraying the South’s unspoken tensions; a tradition that Morton has joined with Snake Lore. Despite so many verses centered around death and decay, this chapbook crackles with life and longing, the energy palpable on every page, making it one of my favorite chapbooks of 2024. Morton’s debut full-length poetry collection, Shedding Season, is slated for publication by Black Lawrence Press in 2025.
Author Bio
C.M. Crockford is a writer and editor originally from New Hampshire. He’s the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Adore and Mark The Place, and his debut full-length, Birdsongs, was published in March 2024 by Alien Buddha Press. Crockford lives in Philadelphia with his cat Wally.
Find out more at cmcrockford.net.
Snake Lore by Jane Morton product page
Jane Morton Author page
Contents
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/2 from Black Lawrence Press, LSU Press, Persea, Omnidawn, Bloodaxe Books and Central Avenue Publishing.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for June 2024 from Driftwood Press, Sheila-Na-Gig Inc., Diode Editions, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Finishing Line Press, Bottlecap Press and an Editor’s Pick from Tupelo Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/9 from Finishing Line Press, New Directions, Phoneme Media, University of Calgary Press and Curbstone Books.
July ‘24: A Fledgling Journal No More
We’ve completed our first volume, there’s a new featured chapbook poem, and we’re starting to look for a Poetry Editor to expand what we publish. Check out the editor’s note for July 2024.
Chapbook Poem: Whenua by Nicola Andrews
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for July 2024, “Whenua” from Māori Maid Difficult by Nicola Andrews, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/16 from Finishing Line Press, Soft Skull, Penguin Books, Regal House Publishing and University Of Minnesota Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/23 from Host Publications, W. W. Norton & Company, Carcanet Press Ltd., LSU Press, Finishing Line Press, The Song Cave and Wake Forest University Press.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 7/30 from Delete Press, Quale Press, Duke University Press, Seagull Books, Sarabande Books, Michigan State University Press and Alternating Current Press.
Southern Literary Tradition: On ‘Snake Lore’ by Jane Morton
In this essay, C.M. Crockford reviews “Snake Lore” by poet Jane Morton, a chapbook published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2024.
Check out new poetry books published the week of 8/6 from NYRB Poets, Belle Point Press, Finishing Line Press, Black Lawrence Press, Wayne State University Press, Milkweed Editions, Penguin Books, Bloodaxe Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Alice James Books, Mercer University Press and two Editor’s Picks from Coffee House Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Chapbook Poem: It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye by Amanda Rabaduex
Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for August 2024, “It’s okay to say the hurricane has an eye” from Resin in the Milky Way by Amanda Rabadeux, along with a few words from the poet.
Check out new poetry chapbooks for July 2024 from Seven Kitchens Press, Small Harbor Publishing, Belle Point Press, Orison Books, Variant Lit, Querencia Press, The Poetry Box, Bottlecap Press and Finishing Line Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/13 from Querencia Press, Alice James Books, Finishing Line Press, University of New Mexico Press, Harbour Publishing, Knopf, Amistad, TriQuarterly and Red Hen Press.
Check out new poetry books coming the week of 8/20 from Querencia Press, Finishing Line Press, McClelland & Stewart, Zephyr Press, Tin House Books, W. W. Norton & Company, Red Hen Press, Graywolf Press, Wesleyan University Press and an Editor’s Pick from Copper Canyon Press.
Check out new poetry books for the week of 8/27 from Carcanet Press Ltd., Beltway Editions, Finishing Line Press,, LSU Press, Milkweed Editions, Tupelo Press, Guernica Editions, University of Nebraska Press and Texas Review Press.
Resistance and Resignation in Will Russo’s Glass Manifesto
“Glass Manifesto is a meditative collection of poems that call to resist the powers that move the world at times, or resign and offer oneself up to them at others.” Review by PCR contributor, Drishya.
Meet our contributor, Drishya, a writer and artist based in Kolkata, India, publishing under a single name to protest India’s caste system. Read about his writing life and other work.