The Relenting

After Lisa Gill spent two hours with a rattlesnake in her living room, she started writing. The resulting text is an interspecies dialogue where Woman and Snake tackle everything from myth and evolution to intimacy. Whether you consider The Relentingto be poetry or a play, know that Gill simply considered it necessary. Poet Simon J. Ortiz writes that he is "intrigued by Lisa Gill's voice in The Relentingbecause it is 'tension as voice.' Its power is an unrelenting insistence because of its unrelenting presence! The persona of Woman is provoked and compelled to exist sheerly by the seemingly antagonistic Snake. Bravo for the power of poetry as tension as voice!" Lisa Gillis the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She is the author of three poetry collections: Red as a Lotus, Mortar & Pestle, and Dark Enough. A graphic memoir entitled Caput Nili: How I Won the War & Lost My Taste for Orangesis forthcoming, while recent publications include Tuesday; An Art Project, 1913; A Journal of Forms; The Bigger Boat; and a poem in the National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report. She received her MFA with distinction in creative nonfiction from the University of New Mexico. Gill has now moved to Albuquerque, NM, though The Relentingwas written while living rural near Moriarty, New Mexico.