Cate Whetzel’s “Lady Xok and the Vision Serpent”

Photo: Isaac Bordas

from the Yaxchilan Lintel 25 (housed at The British Museum), showing Lady Xoc (or Xok) performing a blood sacrifice, calling up a vision serpent as a way to communicate with the ancestors.

Cate Whetzel grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied at Kenyon College and Oxford University. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, and her poems have appeared in The National Poetry Review, storySouth, Epiphany, Phoebe, and New Plains Review. She lives in Chicago with her husband, poet Ben Debus.

On this extended web edition of The Poets Weave, Cate reads her poems “Lady Xok and the Vision Serpent,” “Ode,” and “The Pregnant Male Sea Dragon in Isolation.”