“Shedding Season” Casts a Spell https://ift.tt/ycBME46
Jane Morton’s debut collection, Shedding Season, is a feat of embodied poetry, which is to say, folklore, emotions, and trauma take on corporeal form. Morton evokes a Southern gothic vibe that will appeal to readers who enjoy this genre. Some of the work demonstrates Morton’s narrative abilities, like the poem “Snake Lore,” in which the birds foreshadow a snake’s ominous presence as their “open throats” spill “noise like sun over the dirt.” We learn the story:
about the girl who let the snake
in her backyard drink
from her, who held the snake
in her lap like an infant, her chest
bent to him.
As the tale twists forward, the snake is found and its head cut off only to discover “the girl in her bed […] in the morning she was dead too,/ her blue neck bent and strangled.” Poems like these reveal Morton to be a modern myth maker whose intertwined narrations stay with a reader long after putting the book down.
The setting and details of these poems ring true for those who have lived in the South, where the cicadas buzz “loud and hot/ in our ears,” or the “milk snake cloaked/ in the skin of a viper, pretend-venomous” is named for stealing milk from the barn.
In “Heat Wakes Me,” the speaker remarks “How dizzy the days feel when it’s this hot and still” and “it’s so hot my eyelids are slick,” capturing the kind of humid heat that stifles in Southern life.
Morton’s writing is both accessible and gripping, like being entranced by a snake charmer. It’s astonishing how much they can accomplish in a poem using deceptively simple language. For example, “Promise” winds back and forth in form as well as meaning:
Keep me from speaking.
I don't want to hurt
any one of you. But what
does it matter
what I want? I'm only
the mouth of the animal.
The heart and the stomach
speak through me. The throat
its own translation.
Part of the power of these poems comes through their embodiment — the recognition of the body having its own emotional journey, voice, and needs. Promises are made verbally, but the mouth is only relaying what the heart and gut feel, through the complication of a throat’s translation and not wanting to harm another. Something as simple as a promise holds all sorts of tension when the speaker admits they knew “it wasn’t true before I said it.” The body, whether in human or non-human form, is central to these poems, which seems appropriate as the body is the site of emotion and intuition.
In poems like “Dayton, TX,” emotions are masked in metaphor of everyday objects: “Today he’s the saw hanging in the garage:/ dusted orange, impotent, mean. A mouthful/ of blades and unsure how to use them.” These fresh images delivered in spare lines are moody and alive, a signature of Morton’s style. They are not a poet afraid to say the hard things, and this willingness to speak about the darker corners of life comes across as intimate.
A young love story is woven throughout this collection. In “Drive” the speaker is on the way out of town in order to steal a moment alone with a romantic partner, as teenagers might do when living at home. There’s tension in the misaligned couplets as hands flex “around the wheel,/ around each other” and the road strips “everything/ down to basics.” Once the couple parks, even the insects make “a new kind of silence/ of their need, legs rubbing/ and rubbing.” The physical intimacy leaves the speaker wanting however, “afterwards, I was so hungry/ I can remember the taste/ of my own sweat on my wrist.” When the couple drives back before sunrise, there’s recognition of not allowing “the scene” to “become/ beautiful.” The loneliness and desire the speaker feels in this poem while with an intimate partner is relatable as humans fumble towards true connection with each other.
At their best, Morton writes about trauma and what we inherit with sincerity. In “Dogwood” the speaker recalls killing ants as a child, astutely noting, “We all do/ what we know/ even when we hate it.” The poem continues:
We know to eat
the fat and chew the bones
for when we've got none.
We know how meanness lives
its own life in the meat and marrow.
Even as these poems deliver truths, you’ve got to let them sink in on a visceral level. “We are not our bodies,/ but we hurt when they do,/ we hunger.” The cycles of life and death occur simultaneously in this work, like the dead opossum “vibrating with flies,” or the deer taken down with a crossbow and strung up “by her hind legs // in the garage, a bucket/ filling up below her” while the shooter says, “There were so many […] it’s a shame// not to eat/ what you’re given.”
By the last section, there’s a distinct transition towards reckoning with a past hurt and moving forward. In “Distance” the speaker confesses, “I never want to talk about the past/ until it ripens. Until time has softened/ every detail to rot.” Consider the power of “Snake Lore” where we find a man not asking for consent:
I was raised to know the devil
when I see him. His red mouth loose
and rage-drunk, shouting, laughing.
He plays like he's not angry, not
at me. Tonight he finds
his way into my bedroom.
His skin is wet as snakeskin
up against me. Sweet venom
like turpentine he breathes. Says
aren't we having fun?
But he's not asking. His eyes flat
yellow pennies, cheap
Poems like this recognize the hurt and feel their way through the brokenness. Morton finds incredible strength and beauty in being cracked open, or in this case, shedding what no longer serves in order to become something new. By the end of the collection, the poems move fully into transformation, from limbless snake to tiktaalik, crawling out of the sea to finally “a chorus of legs on legs” in which the speaker swears “I’d claw my way out// & be new.”
Overall, the collection is one of growth. There’s a tenderness extended to the self, to a speaker who has faced hardship and trauma. The body is recognized as a site of healing and the reader, having experienced the spell casting of these poems, may come out as changed as the speaker. Jane Morton establishes themself as an exciting new voice in poetry to watch for.
POETRY Shedding Season By Jane Morton
Black Lawrence Press
Published August 19, 2025
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