Not a Snake

Overview

In this new collaboration between artist Simon Carr and poet Leonard Schwartz, risk, beauty, mortality and relation seek out some equation by way of the delirium that accompanies the presence of a certain creature. Following on their earlier book, Salamander: A Bestiary, also from Chax Press, Carr and Schwartz posit that all things are nonselfidentical and that here, color is all. “It isn’t a snake,/Its soil and soul in a chthonian coil… That is no snake, it’s the sun coming out/From behind several barricades.” About Carr and Schwartz’s collaborations, Hyperallergic has written that “the two are syncopated in their respect for the otherness of our animal familiars.”

Author Biography

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities III: Comic Earth (01/01/2021, 01/01/2022, 01/01/2023 Goats & Compasses). His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the MidEast Crises (University of Arkansas Press), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include If (Talisman House), A Message Back and Other Furors (Chax Press), and The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse). He also edited and cotranslated Benjamin Fondane’s CinePoems and Other (01/01/2016), for New York Review Books.