Snake IV

Original Grace is the fourth book in the Snake Quartet and the eighth collection of poetry published by Gary Lemons. Gary worked many jobs, mostly involving hard labor outdoors, to underwrite his life as a poet, but the one dearest to his heart is planting over five hundred thousand trees in the logged-off high elevation forests of the Pacific Northwest. He attended the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he studied with John Berryman, Donald Justice, Marvin Bell, and Norman Dubie. He now teaches yoga at Tenderpaws Yoga Studio owned jointly with his wife, Nöle Giulini. Gary currently resides in Port Townsend, Washington.

“'We are here only right now— / Trembling in each other’s arms.' Part cautionary tale, part eulogy, Original Grace, the extraordinary conclusion to Gary Lemons’ post-apocalyptic Snake Quartet, careens along a devastating trajectory, land-mined with portent and longing. And yet, these astonishing poems are not without hope. 'Maybe it’s not courage / But duty that requires plants to / Stare at the sun until / They’re blind enough to bloom.' These are poems of witness by an evolved saint/sinner, the awakened inheritor of Berryman’s brilliance, navigating a dystopian future." —Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of The Dead Kid Poems, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly."In Original Grace, the amazing conclusion to the Snake Quartet, Gary Lemons has found a deep syntactical pulse in the language that mixes witnessing with hallucination—arching across this series of books, I have to observe that the imagination working here is not only compassionate but weeps for us all. And yet the passage through imagination lifts us in just the way Blake intended when he took a large rake to the King's messenger. I love these insurrections of mind. Taken as one book or as a whole the Snake Quartet is a relevant and signal accomplishment.  Praise no blame!" —Norman Dubie, author of Quotations of Bone