Snake III

"Reading Gary Lemons's The Hunger Sutras, you will enter a dizzyingly visionary head-space, and you will feel your skull crack, ear imp, spirit throb. Expect to be transported at vertiginous speed to an apocalyptic post-modern world where 'naked angels / [Lie] in the sand like industrial debris' (re-see: the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel the Elder), this wondrous topsy-turvy, twisted, gnarled-up world (O Revelation) where 'melodious ashes fill the air, ' this 'compost pile' realm of the tail-flailing snake, Lemon's own re-invention of the Damaballah of Haitian vodun but with a Buddhist twist. Be convulsed, be transmogrified by snake's prophecies, by snake's obfuscations, by snake's teasing secrets--O, indeed, allow yourself to be enraptured by snake's riddling words, by snake's shape-shifting thoughts, this animal shaman 'befriender of the dead, ' this trickster that dwells in the here and the there--omniscient as an 'atom in an eye, ' this roving seer that seeks after truths (the many, never the few) and like some avenging angel 'detonates all the lies she's ever / Been told.'"--Orlando Ricardo Menes, author of Fetish and Heresies

"Gary Lemons' third book, the Hunger Sutras, advances his brilliant quartet and is something very surprising--like James Merrill meets Robert Bly. This book, though, is in no way derivative--it is, and this is my point, utterly original and, if this is possible, it's also a warm-hearted puzzlement. This work serves as an illumination in a time of great darkness. Wonderful!"--Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone