The Relenting found its beginning when poet Lisa Gill encountered a rattlesnake coiled on the brick floor of her living room in her cabin outside Moriarty, New Mexico. Her encounter with the snake transformed into an archetypal journey in her memory. In The Relenting, a lyric epic, Gill enters into direct dialogue with the snake–and this time the snake speaks back. Theirs is a feisty and sensuous confrontation in which a woman finds herself speaking to predator, cohort, mentor and lover. Each party in the potentially venomous duo find an unprecedented reception with the other and lives are changed.

In this staged reading, poets Lisa Gill and Matthew Conley take on the parts of woman and rattler. Lisa Gill is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship and the author of two books of poetry: Red as a Lotus: Letters to a Dead Trappist and Mortar & Pestle. Matthew Conley has an MFA in Creative Writing from U of A and is a Tucson Pima Arts Council teaching artist.