Welcome to Gary Lemon's Website
Early reviews and prasie for Gary’s latest novel, Snake:
Legacy, levity, language, and lineage lean lonesomeness into a slender host, so off Snake goes on his lonely way, polishing grass, amusing children, circling the planet, tail in mouth, ringing hymns, lightin one soul off the burnin end of another, until one illuminated manuscript wets a whistle keen into dreamtime antihero. Snake hisses humans into hard realities, overstepped. Swallows God, smugglin god inside the tubularity, curls into a bugle, blows one note into the emptiness, sings. This is one rambling serpent, lighting darkness with a candle of stars. Lemons brought us a bit of magic from earth’s longest revered beast. Reminding us to dream everything into being, dust it off and return to the bellies of immortals to make our cleansing. Entering Snake is admitting a bit of creature exists in all of us. Snake takes it home.
In this new collection, Gary Lemons—the poet of the creaking fishing boat, the mountains over Kodiak, the “throats of grasses”—speaks, through the nar- rative consciousness of Snake, in nothing less than the fractured memories and voices of species slowly going extinct. A mournful dirge for what has been lost, a dreaming song for what could yet remain, Snake is an avian, reptilian, piscine—and, yes, mammalian—howl in an era of fracking, tar-sand extraction, and calamitous climate change. These poems are wise, beautiful, and necessary.
In Gary Lemons’ Snake, his amazing new book of verse, we encounter the future, present age of the Draco-Mother-Naked-of-Last, complete with the revenge of Milton’s Satan on the collective purity of planet Earth. Not since the white-face ventriloquism of Berryman’s Dream Songs have I seen such challenges made to the questions of what is voice, what is dream—brilliant book!”
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