Snake

Snake is a brilliant, ambitious book of 63 dramatic monologues in five sections, almost 150 pages, on apocalypse and rebirth enacted by a cast of four, from an upcoming small press in Southern California. Lemons’ Chorus provides the commentary.

“Every truth got its dark side / Some folks call the lie.”

Earth kicks off the story by destroying the troublesome human species and all other life in retribution for man’s transgressions—except for snake, the central character, the tragic-comic figure of eternity and dream. (A fourth character, god, makes a deus ex machina appearance toward the end.) Meanwhile, snake has a job to do to “save the fire” that has engulfed the world. Throughout, he struggles with memories and unanswered questions fighting “in the closet of the brain / Like old suits struggling with moths.” There is more than a glancing reference to global warming here, but with his gift for metaphor and dramatic voice, echoing the great John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” and with his light touch, Lemons keeps the text crackling with energy and verve. As he is wondering why “we got to being / Down the whirlwind on ourselves,” snake is simultaneously “salivating about the good taste/ Of a bone still got some of the critter on it” (“Snake’s Karma”).
- Reviewed by Zara Raab
(read review online by clicking here) 

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
(read review online by clicking here)