Metatron Press is overjoyed to announce the release of Lora Mathis’s The Snakes Came Back, a book of poetry that invokes mythology, dreams, and the natural world as realms of solace and wells of knowledge in the healing of trauma. 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.”

128 pages
Perfect-bound
Cover art: Mary Herbert
Fall 2023

Lora Mathis (she/they) is a poet and artist from Southern California. Mathis primarily works in digital mediums, including video, photography, and graphic design. She has been sharing her art and poetry online for the last twelve years, and has utilized digital tools as a part of her practice. She has participated in group and solo shows across the US, Canada, and Europe. Mathis has also performed poetry at universities, festivals, and tours on their own and with their sound collaborator Matty Terrones. Recently, Lora’s practice has been expanding into more physical mediums such as printmaking and sculpture. Mathis came up artistically in the DIY punk scene in San Diego. They have played in several punk bands, and view performing, community organizing, low cost all ages shows, and independent publishing as a part of their practice. They have published two collections of poetry including, The Women Widowed to Themselves (2015; republished 2020). Here I Am In It was published by Burn All Books in 2022. Mathis currently lives in Oakland and is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where she completed her BA in Art Practice and English.