Lora Mathis Book Release: 'The Snakes Came Back'

Join us on Friday, September 29 to celebrate the release of "The Snakes Came Back" by Lora Mathis. There will also be a live poetry performance by Lora Mathis and Matty Terrones in Jacobs Hall and a Book Pop-Up Shop in Berglund Lobby. Refreshments will be available for purchase from The Kitchen.

"The Snakes Came Back" is Lora Mathis' third collection of poems, published by Metatron Press in Montréal, Quebec.

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. "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.”

About the Author|
Lora Mathis (she/they) is a poet and artist who grew up between Southern California and Montréal. She is interested in creating immersive worlds through poetry, video, and performance. She has been sharing her art and poetry online for the last twelve years, and has utilized digital tools, such as video, graphic design, and photography, as a part of her practice. In the last two years, her practice has expanded into printmaking and sculpture. They have published two collections of poetry including, "The Women Widowed to Themselves" (2015; republished 2020). The experimental essay "Here I Am In It" was published by Burn All Books in 2022. Mathis performs poetry on their own, and with their sound collaborator and longtime friend, Matty Terrones. With Terrones, they put out the poetry and music album Sediment via Hello America Lit. Mathis is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley and currently lives in Oakland.

Related links:
MCASD website | Instagram | Facebook
Lora Mathis website | Instagram