Join us for Lora Mathis' The Snakes Came Back Berkeley book release
Don't miss the Berkeley celebration of the release of Lora Mathis' second book of poems, The Snakes Came Back.
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.” - Metatron Press
Lora will be performing poetry alongside Matty Terrones, who will create ambient, dreamy atmospheres with music. Stemming from a longtime friendship, the two seek to create an immersive, experimental and playful space with performance. Videos will also be played as part of the performance. The performance will last 30 minutes. It will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.
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Lora Mathis is a poet and visual artist from San Diego, and living in Oakland. Mathis enjoys making things out of the love of making, and tries to see living life as a creative practice. She tends to work in digital mediums, including video, photography, and graphic design, though she is also exploring sculpture and printmaking. She has been sharing her art and writing online for the last twelve years, and has published two collections of poetry including The Women Widowed to Themselves (2015; republished 2020). More info: @lora__mathis and loramathis.com
Matty Terrones is a musician, writer, and forever student from San Diego. They have played in numerous bands over the years, and currently front the band Neutral Shirt. They have also collaborated with writers, including Nick Bernal and Lora Mathis, to create ambient, experimental accompaniment to spoken word and poetry. More info: https://neutralshirt.bandcamp.com