Year of the Snake

In her second collection of poems, Year of the Snake, Lee Ann Roripaugh probes themes of mixed-race female identities, evoking the molting processes of snakes and insects, who shed their skins and shells, as an ongoing metaphor for transformation of self. By intertwining contemporary renditions of traditional Japanese myths and fairy tales with poems that explore the landscape of childhood and early adolescence, she blurs the boundaries between myth and memory, between real and imagined selves. This collection explores cultural, psychological, and physical liminalities and exposes the diasporic arc cast by first-generation Asian mothers and their second-generation daughters, revealing a desire for metamorphosis of self through time, geography, culture, and myth.