Snake Lore

Overview

Jane Morton’s debut chapbook Snake Lore explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together—a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns—the beauty and the harm that they potentiate—converge and haunt.

Author Biography

Jane Morton’s poetry collection Shedding Season will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2025. Her chapbook Snake Lore won Black Lawrence’s Black River Chapbook Award. Her poems and short stories have also been published in journals including Gulf Coast, West Branch, Boulevard, Passages North, Ninth Letter, Joyland, and Cream City Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, where she was Online Editor for Black Warrior Review. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama.