The Naughts by Lindsay Bell

“Lindsay Bell’s The Naughts is poetry sung “at ten thousand feet”—high-altitude language that leaves the reader dizzy and breathless. These “frontier ballads,” dirges, and rock climbers’ epithalamia sing and play as they make a musical theory out of daily life, as when we hear the approach of “the ice cream truck’s hemiola.” Mountainwise rather than streetwise, Bell zooms from a 360-degree vista to a living room window, taking in everything from death and marriage to freedom fries and breakfast cereal. Sometimes I think I’m hearing Plath in the American West, or Christopher Smart in the first decade of the 21st century, those aughts that cried “nevermore” and sometimes seemed emptied of everything but terror. If “in the desert sand gets everywhere, / such that every grain is a signatory,” then each word in this collection, too, seems to have signed an oath to tell the truth in all its slantness through the startling vividness of inner and outer landscapes.”

–Becca Klaver

“Lindsay Bell‘s poems are painted with a beautifully-bent brush. Her languages act as conduits to the cloud tops as well as the heart cores. Whether inhabiting interior or exterior landscapes, Bell’s words ring mellifluous.”

–Daniela Olszewska