Snake IV: Original Grace

(Paperback)

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Original Grace is the last book in the Snake Quartet. In it, the journey from destruction leads through the darkened rooms of an enormous house where occasionally outside the windows creatures past, present, and future appearasking for help or solace or trying to break the glass to get in. But the house is made of poetry and is unassailable unlike those who live in it.
is not just the end of what was but the beginning of what comes next. The sun has gone down. The long wait for a new sunrise is nearly over.

Reviews

'We are here only right now / Trembling in each others arms.' Part cautionary tale, part eulogy,Original Grace, the extraordinary conclusion to Gary Lemons post-apocalyptic Snake Quartet, careens along a devastating trajectory, land-mined with portent and longing. And yet, these astonishing poems are not without hope. 'Maybe its not courage / But duty that requires plants to / Stare at the sun until / Theyre blind enough to bloom.' These are poems of witness by an evolved saint/sinner, the awakened inheritor of Berrymans brilliance, navigating a dystopian future."Alexis Rhone Fancher, author ofThe Dead Kid Poems, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly.

"InOriginal Grace, the amazing conclusion to theSnakeQuartet, Gary Lemons has found a deep syntactical pulse in the language that mixes witnessing with hallucinationarching across this series of books, I have to observe that the imagination working here is not only compassionate but weeps for us all. And yet the passage through imagination lifts us in just the way Blake intended when he took a large rake to the King's messenger. I love these insurrections of mind. Taken as one book or as a whole the Snake Quartet is a relevant and signal accomplishment. Praise no blame!"Norman Dubie, author ofQuotations of Bone

Author Bio

Original Grace is the fourth book in the Snake Quartet and the eighth collection of poetry published by Gary Lemons. Gary worked many jobs, mostly involving hard labor outdoors, to underwrite his life as a poet, but the one dearest to his heart is planting over five hundred thousand trees in the logged-off high elevation forests of the Pacific Northwest. He attended the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he studied with John Berryman, Donald Justice, Marvin Bell, and Norman Dubie. He now teaches yoga at Tenderpaws Yoga Studio owned jointly with his wife, Nle Giulini. Gary currently resides in Port Townsend, Washington.