About the Wrangler-in-Chief
I have lived all my 61 years in this
hot Sacramento Valley, where I've done time as a musician, music
teacher, sandwich maker, belly dancer, music therapist and
psychologist. But recently, Sam the Snake Man and I headed
for the hills, and now the Snake lives at 4000’ in Pollock
Pines. (Yes, snow: boots, shovels, blowers, and cracking my
tailbone on the ice.) I've been lucky enough to have had my own work be
published here and there, in journals such as Atlanta Review,
Cimarron Review, Slant, Sow's Ear, Potpourri, Number One, White
Heron, Urban Spaghetti, Main Street Rag, PDQ, Ekphrasis,
Brevities, Plainsong, and Comstock Review. Of my three
chapbooks, the first one, A Night Full of Owls, was published by
White Heron Press; the second, Keeping Time in the Clock Shop,
was published by PWJ Publishing, and the third, Why We Have
Sternums, was published by Rattlesnake Press. In
February of 2008, Sam the Snake Man
Kieth and I released Sex—For Animals, featuring my poetry and
his drawings in celebration of 25 years of marriage this
year—or, as the dedication says, “in gratitude for 30 years of
better and worse…" And in February of 2010,
Tiger’s Eye Press released kk’s Emily and the High Cost of
Living, a chapbook about neurosis and, well, the high cost
of living…
I have also served on the production staff of two local poetry
journals: Poetry Now and Tule Review. I
found my small role in helping to publish these to be hugely
rewarding, so the Snake empire was born as I began to celebrate
my fifth year (2004) in Sacramento poetry—a noisy,
colorful, sometimes-contentious group of communities which I
dearly love, both for the many well-established poets and for
all those up-and-comers who are just getting started.
 So the Snake is intended to be a (mostly) free showcase for all
those folks—a love letter with a little art and criticism and
prosedy thrown in. And hopefully the tone of the Snake reflects
our wild and vibrant Nor-Cal scene, too:
a little naughty,
a little classy,
a little sly...
She Refuses to Kill Rattlesnakes—
lets them glide across her pages
as she writes: tells them long
stories of their ancestors, the dragons:
watches over them as they nap
in the dust of the afternoon beneath
her armoire… She sees herself
in the gold of their cats’-eyes as
they follow the footsteps of
a mouse: runs her hand over sepia
diamonds on their cold-blooded
backs; then, together they prowl
through the sapphire moondrops
that collect under the woodpile:
silently slide through opportunities
of darkness—share a restless search
for the brimstone of dragons and
the vibrations of prey…
—Kathy Kieth
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“The only thing that scares
me more than snakes is poetry…"
Also available: kk’s littlesnake broadside (#13.1), Way
Too Much Sky. Free, but send SASE to P.O. Box 762,
Pollock Pines, CA 95726.
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