Gary Lemons' Snake is a brave and beautiful book--a trippy, visionary ride to the end of the world, where all is in flames except for Snake, who remains as a repository of all Earth's memories and shared consciousness.
Lemons' poetry is disarmingly simple, like a folk or blues lyric: "Time keeps on passin--til it's not / recognizable as time but feels more like / Dreamin in a tide pool beside a warmin / Sea where blood sacks couple in the waves." But there are hidden depths and meanderings, musicality where you'd least expect it. For a reptile, Snake is a surprisingly compassionate bearer of memory. He longs to be loved and remembered as were others who went before him: "Snake knows the dead be happier cause they got / One another for company and if he could / Only die, which he can't, he never be alone again."
While Snake is a long, rambling, apocalyptic dream that plays out in the head of a slithering everyman, it is also a tear-filled lament for wildlife and traditions we are on the verge of losing now--and a meditation on the push and pull of shared and specific consciousness as Snake fights to maintain his identity while almost literally carrying the weight of the world.
Snake is a wonderful fable, a trickster tale, a vision of a world set to fire by a vengeful mother earth, and some fine, chiseled poetry, direct and wisdom-filled. --Donald Powell, freelance writer