Captivating

Lit Reactor

Deeply personal and highly readable…The navigation among such disparate topics, often at a rapid pace, is decidedly easy going, which has to be attributed to Wright's accessible and captivating voice… Snake is full of power, packed with sobering reminders about the human-animal relationship and our responsibility in maintaining it.

Chapter16

We give no creature as much cultural meaning as we do the snake, as Erica Wright shows us in this winning tour through history and biology, religion and fear, medicine and fashion. But the real meat of this book is Wright's bright sensibility. What she sees when she writes about snakes includes: environmental and biological apocalypse, the meaning of fear, existential crises trying to sleep through the night in an absolutely dark cave, the complicated sublime, "the grace alongside the fangs…awful and beautiful together.” That's the genius of this book: the self as both instrument and subject. As it turns out, what we talk about when we talk about snakes is ourselves.

Ander Monson, Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA, and author of I Will Take the Answer (2020)