Temporal Body, Boundless Spirit: Lora Mathis’s Poems Slither Out of Dreams Towards a Waking Reality of Collective Healing

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. 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.”

Lora Mathis' profile page

Lora Mathis is an artist and poet from California. They grew up in-between Quebec and Southern California, and now live in Oakland. They received their Bachelor’s degree in English & Art Practice at UC Berkeley. The Snakes Came Back is their third book of poems. Their first collection, The Women Widowed to Themselves, was republished by Party Trick Press in 2020. Here I Am In It, a cross-genre work on observation, banality, and grief was released by Burn All Books in 2022. In addition to being a poet, Mathis is a visual artist who crosses mediums including video, photography, sculpture, performance, design, and sound. In live poetry performance, they tend to incorporate video and photography. Many of these performances also include live sound by their friend and collaborator, Matty Terrones. For the past decade, they have been sharing their work on the internet and self-publishing zines. They coined the phrase Radical Softness as a Weapon.

"In The Snakes Came Back, Lora Mathis sets themself free, climbing out of their body, running through fields, careening down highways, longing spilling everywhere. Vulnerable, wise, and playful, these poems are a balm for loneliness — they feel like a hangout with an old friend, kettle whistling in the other room. Mathis may be tired of writing “eye-catching phrases screen printed onto t-shirts,” but her words are as relatable, resonant, and unforgettable as ever."
— Amy Berkowitz, author of Gravitas, Tender Points

"Lora Mathis' newest collection of poetry The Snakes Came Back is sure to be a hit with both new and longtime readers. Building on their plethora of work, Mathis bluntly perceives and analyzes the Self and what it means to be a person with layering memories that live within you. The Snakes Came Back and Mathis isn't afraid of them. There is courage in these poems.”
— Erin Taylor, author of Bimboland

"The Snakes Came Back is full of beautiful, graceful sentences, humor that’ll surprise you, and down-to-earth, unpretentious philosophy. Absolutely glorious. You will read this book many times.”
— Adam Gnade, author of After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different