Snake Lore - Paperback

by Jane Morton (Author)

A debut chapbook from a promising talent, Jane Morton.

Jane Morton's debut chapbook SNAKE LORE explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together--a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns--the beauty and the harm that they potentiate--converge and haunt.

Author Biography

Jane Morton is a poet based in Birmingham, Alabama. They received their MFA from the University of Alabama, where they were Online Editor for Black Warrior Review. Their debut chapbook Snake Lore won the Black River Chapbook Contest from Black Lawrence Press, and their poems have been published in journals including Gulf Coast, West Branch, Ninth Letter, Boulevard, Passages North, and Poetry Northwest. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and they have received a Fulbright Fellowship and a Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship for the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. They currently teach English and creative writing at the University of Alabama.