Temporal Body, Boundless Spirit: Lora Mathis’s Poems Slither Out of Dreams Towards a Waking Reality of Collective Healing

Lora Mathis’s The Snakes Came Back invokes mythology, dreams, and the natural world as realms of solace and wells of knowledge in the healing of trauma.

In Lora Mathis’s poems, the body is a temporary resting place for the infinite, resilient soul. The Snakes Came Back follows a speaker contending with trauma in the slipstream of earthly time. Mathis’s poems are peopled with friends and lovers—both named and anonymous, current and past—and invested in necessary interdependence as a means of healing the self. But the self is not fractured. The self is composed of memory, navigating impulses of woundedness with awareness and compassion. Mouths and tongues figure prominently throughout this reflective and forthcoming collection, evocative of the insatiable desire of our hungry ghosts. The mouth is, however, as much a space of hunger and desire as it is an erogenous zone of self-expression and agency. Mapping affective geographies of memory, The Snakes Came Back cracks open everyday tasks and familiar landscapes to reveal their haunting depths. Saturated with heat and wind, Mathis’s poems vibrate with the will to face life’s temporality, its impossible contradictions, its beauty and its pain: “There is loss, but there is renewal too.”