The Relenting began on September 29, 2009, when poet Lisa Gill found a rattlesnake coiled on the brick floor of her living room in her cabin outside Moriarty, New Mexico. Inevitably, the two hours she spent with the snake transformed into an archetypal journey in her memory, a journey which she documented. In The Relenting, a lyric epic, she 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.
