The Snakes Came Back has been out for one year.
Thank you to everyone who's read this book, bought or borrowed a copy, performed alongside me, and listened to me read poems from it. Thank you so much to @metatronpress for publishing this, and to @ashley.obscura for editing it. Thank you so much to @maryanneherb for allowing us to use your illustration on the cover.
After October 7th, I didn't feel like promoting this book, or talking about much. Now its anniversary is a very sad reminder that it has almost been a year, and still brutality is waging on. My heart goes out to people in P@lestine and Leb@non , and I wish them dignity, freedom, and an end to destruction.
It's weird to commemorate a book in the same breath. But life has been weird, strange, and uncertain, and I am grateful to poetry for the guidance it gives me. Not in solving pain, but in living with it.
Copies are available via @metatronpress , @asterism_books , @utpress@ampersandinc and @antennebooks
Much love 🐍🐍🐍🐍
P.S. if you've read the book, do you mind reviewing it on Goodreads? Thank you
Collaboration with @self.img 🌀💫🐚🌾🪨🫧🧺🪸
Some prints online @ loramathis.bigcartel.com
Karla’s work is so satisfying to my brain. Everything is organized, beautiful, and has a whimsy to it. It reminds me of being online ten years ago, before the rot set into my cognitive processes. And I think we’ve followed each other for that long. Never meeting but liking what we each were making, and then, with this print, finding a way to make something together. Sometimes I want to delete my accounts and be a newborn online lurker, but then I’m reminded of connections like these, that make me put the phone down and think, Damn, I’m lucky
One of three poems by Lora Mathis in Issue Five of the Recenter Press Poetry Journal
Lora Mathis is a poet, writer, and visual artist. She has written three books of poems, including The Snakes Came Back (@metatronpress , 2023). She makes sculptures, paintings, photos, and likes to collaborate with friends. With the musician Matty Terrones, they released the live performance album Sediment (@helloamericalit , 2022). You can find more of their work at loramathis.com, and on Instagram @lora__mathis .
I Love You, You’re My Friend 📝
Writing on friendship being the thing that punctuates time.
🦚 Lora.substack.com 🦚
Poem from @terraoliveira_ ’s new book, Itinerant Songs.
Kiss your friends faces shirt in selfie from @sunshineshop.la
🔉 Collaboration with my friend @babybluehands that was published by @suds_zine . It’s on cassette and online.
🔉 Matty and I performed at @burn_all_books in January. Thanks Nick for mentioning our performance and having interesting questions about writing a book in a day. (On @adamgnade ’s newsletter, where he interviews his friends.)
🔉 I love collecting images and putting them into my grab bag, where I pull them out to follow threads later on. Nothing disappears, it just oscillates.
🔉 I don’t want to be on here all the time. I don’t only want to promote. I resent the way my attention is sold. I love using the internet as a tool for curiosity and cataloguing images. I love communicating via it. I love finding new ways to engage. I love my digital notepads. I resent the way pieces of my behavior are bought and sold. I haven’t been here very much lately but I’m here now. I keep looking for a way, but am less interested in a singular path. Whatever works for as long as it works.
🧤❣️
@lora__mathis reads her poem “The Meaning of Fire” accompanied by visuals from her piece “Ladder To Heaven”
.𖥔 ݁ ‧₊˚ °˖ ✧ ˖ ࣪⭑ ✧˖ °. 𖥔 ݁ ˖
This piece is on view for one more day as part of the group exhibition Full Body Chills at Anglim/Trimble, which closes Saturday, December 21.
“The Meaning of Fire” is an excerpt from Lora’s book The Snakes Came Back (@metatronpress , 2023).
#AnglimTrimble #LoraMathis
Wrote on my intimate friend, fear, who lives in my head and whispers in my ear. Sometimes I have a little dialogue with it, and sometimes I can hear it so clearly that I give it a little kiss and say it's ok, but mainly I feel this anxiety and back pain and I wonder, hmmmm what's going on? Then I write and I understand again. 🧶 lora.substack.com
Full moon in Aries ❤️🔥 Let me do my work and do it well. Let me be nobody’s fool 🌋🌋🌋🌋
still from Fire of Love, Poem from ten years ago, Mando at the beach, June Jordan, still from Yosuke Yamashita performance, Saul Williams, poem from my book The Snakes Came Back, excerpt of my newsletter, process of making a painting, excerpt from another newsletter, old comic I made, adrienne rich, poem from last year, from Octavia E. Butler’s journals
