Snake III: The Hunger Sutras

(Paperback)

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Snake--the Hunger Sutras is the third book in the Snake Quartet. By now snake has carried the lost voices--from the smallest single celled whisper to the bellow of more complex creatures as she wanders the empty Earth. Thousands--maybe millions of years--listening--while also searching for the clues in the ruins that when puzzled into insight become the beginning movement in the opera of life returning. The clues are fossils embedded in the archeological remains of stone and air--fire and rain. All that is left. Except for snake.

Reviews

"Reading Gary Lemons's The Hunger Sutras, you will enter a dizzyingly visionary head-space, and you will feel your skull crack, ear imp, spirit throb. Expect to be transported at vertiginous speed to an apocalyptic post-modern world where 'naked angels / [Lie] in the sand like industrial debris' (re-see: the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel the Elder), this wondrous topsy-turvy, twisted, gnarled-up world (O Revelation) where 'melodious ashes fill the air, ' this 'compost pile' realm of the tail-flailing snake, Lemon's own re-invention of the Damaballah of Haitian vodun but with a Buddhist twist. Be convulsed, be transmogrified by snake's prophecies, by snake's obfuscations, by snake's teasing secrets--O, indeed, allow yourself to be enraptured by snake's riddling words, by snake's shape-shifting thoughts, this animal shaman 'befriender of the dead, ' this trickster that dwells in the here and the there--omniscient as an 'atom in an eye, ' this roving seer that seeks after truths (the many, never the few) and like some avenging angel 'detonates all the lies she's ever / Been told.'"--Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of Fetish and Heresies

"Gary Lemons' third book, the Hunger Sutras, advances his brilliant quartet and is something very surprising--like James Merrill meets Robert Bly. This book, though, is in no way derivative--it is, and this is my point, utterly original and, if this is possible, it's also a warm-hearted puzzlement. This work serves as an illumination in a time of great darkness. Wonderful!"--Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone

• Part I of Interview Series with Behind the Vision
• Part II of Interview Series with Behind the Vision

Author Bio

Gary Lemons studied for two years with Donald Justice, Norman Dubie, and Marvin Bell in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at Iowa City from 19711973. He has published five books of poetry, including Bristol Bay, Da de los Muertos, Snake, Snake: Second Wind (the last two of which comprise the first two books of the Snake Quartet), and The Weight of Light. For decades he fished Alaska, built grain elevators, worked high steel and re-forested the clear cuts of the Pacific Northwest. Currently he and his wife, the artist Nle Giulini, teach yoga from their studio, Tenderpaws, in Port Townsend, Washington.