Snake: Second Wind [Paperback]

Snake: Second Windcontinues the apocalyptic narrative introduced in its prequel,Snake, where all organic forms are destroyed by the planet Earth in a retributive act of self defense. From these destroyed forms the genderless eternal voice of snake is born. InSecond Windthe poems—with choral asides—explore the possibility that life is only an agreed upon illusion, only real within a certain narrow bandwidth in the sense fog is created by a confluence of heat and moisture for an undetermined time until it disappears back to it’s constituents. The poems inSecond Winddescribe and channel the invisible realities infinitely curled around the visible ones—where fictions—invented stories—dreams, the aspirations and histories—the living and the presumed dead—are all present and real forever.

“Gary Lemons in this heroic passage through an intense personal mythology is working what Carl Jung might have labeled areal time archetype, meme of the tribe in an attempt to explore the darker humus of text. It is a fabulous and brilliant extension of something like Theodore Roethke meets Philip K. Dick. Gary wants to extend our sense of the lyric sacred aria and yet it is all a picture book that one could lovingly bring to the children’s hour. This is a wonderful book.”
—Norman Dubie

“To readSnake: Second Windis to ride the very tip of the artist’s wet brush—the voice is that fluid, the energy of creation that close. We are moving and we are moved by these lines that can become anything, high, low, mythic, sacred or profane. And when the brush lifts we find Gary Lemons has painted a faithful and devastating likeness of humankind, as destroyer, survivor, consumer, debaucher, mother, liar, and storyteller.”
—Kathleen Flenniken

“Through the deranged, visionary, abject voice of Snake, Gary Lemons l³’