Bøger af Gary Lemons

It is the last day of October 1969, Día de los Muertos. Under the harsh Oaxacan sun the dead are staking terrain-moving in and around and through the apparently alive.

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. By this time, Snake has undergone the transformations from sole survivor into the mythic voice of the collective with all their throats open and in full song. She has undergone the movement from original gender into all genders. The rough linguistic artifacts left from the first bookthe dialects and fogginess she experienced living both in and out of a dreamslowly become more coherent as she learns to filter the collective voices back into her personal speech. Original Grace 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.

In Snake, Snake is the last thing left alive. HeÆs all that remains of our voices. The bodies of all living animals and plants have escaped down the Dreaming Way, leaving behind a residual ego trapped inside Snake: the sole survivor the Earth must destroy to complete the cleanse and start over. All that is gone—all that has been reduced by fire and ice and the other dynamic retributive forces of Earth—lives on in Snake. Snake is the extracted limbic brain removed from the collective consciousness and hunted across an emptied landscape. Snake is the bad-ass reptile holding back the end of time by sticking himself into the spokes of Samsara. Snake is a single narrative sequence, a frontline account of pursuit, avoidance, and even friendship, forged in the heat of struggle.

Bristol Bay is the easternmost part of the Bering Sea and the site of the largest Salmon run in the world. It is also home to some of the highest tides and roughest water on the planet. In winter, ice storms freeze the riggings of fishing boats and the added weight of the ice, if not chipped off and thrown overboard, is sufficient to sink all but the largest of boats. The working conditions are brutal and the Bay itself as unforgiving as it is lovely. If it were a town, its name would be Deadwood or Tombstone, a place where life is measured in sunrises, not years.The title poem, Bristol Bay, is autobiographical. Much of what is described in the poem is true and not hyperbole or metaphor. The author worked two seasons on the 420 foot floating processor, the All Alaskan, now a partially submerged wreck outside of Kodiak, Alaska, and the poem speaks to that almost apocalyptic experience.The poems in this book are thematically aligned with the title poem in that they share a willingness to explore the potentially fatal, often unknown body of the individual. Homelessness, war, the blue collar work ethic, the love of all things opposed by the hatred of one thing mothers and fathers all of these become touchstones through which greater awareness may be experienced as a spiritual participation in building and sustaining human communities."

Blurring the line between meditation and poetry, Gary Lemons¿s The Weight of Light reminds us to connect our self to the earth in a fast-paced, materialistic world and invites us to reexamine both in ways at once vulnerable and powerful.

Snake: Second Wind continues the apocalyptic narrative introduced in its prequel, Snake, where all organic forms are destroyed by the planet Earth in a retributive act of self defense. From these destroyed forms the genderless eternal voice of snake is born. In Second Wind the poems—with choral asides—explore the possibility that life is only an agreed upon illusion, only real within a certain narrow bandwidth in the sense fog is created by a confluence of heat and moisture for an undetermined time until it disappears back to it's constituents. The poems in Second Wind describe and channel the invisible realities infinitely curled around the visible ones—where fictions—invented stories—dreams, the aspirations and histories—the living and the presumed dead—are all present and real forever.