Overview

Poems set in a state of heavy surveillance as the speaker navigates uncertainty and shifting realities. Through the poems in Turncoat, Molly Bendall's sixth collection, the speaker and other figures dwell under the ever-present eye of surveillance by unspecified authorities. Mistrust and dread become part of the fabric of their lives, as they never know who may be a turncoat—a person who disguises her allegiances and traffics in betrayal. These poems employ an invented paranoid syntax meant to evade oppressive surveillance. A series of intimate and darkly humorous incidents press the speaker to continually adapt to unseen—or even nonexistent—dangers. Haunted by a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about whether old friendships may have been compromised, or if spaces could disappear overnight, Bendall's poems coax the reader to step across boundaries and snares, alternating between episodes of interrogation and flight.

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9781632431691

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Reviews

“In the exquisite, enigmatic, finely calibrated poems of Turncoat, Bendall plumbs the deep sense of unease running just under the surface of twenty-first-century life. ‘I barely saw,’ her speaker reports, ‘the future behind us.’ Terse yet expansive, disjointed yet seamless, these poems fashion a mode, and a world, entirely Bendall’s. Don’t ask how she wrote these stunning poems — just read them, and have your mind quietly blown.” -- Donna Stonecipher, author of ""The Ruins of Nostalgia"" “The poems in Turncoat inhabit a world where the difference between being watched and being the watcher no longer exists. Paranoia abounds as Bendall creates a syntax all her own: ‘how do I register myself? / am I beating? / is air leaving my mouth?’” -- Eloisa Amezcua, author of Fighting is ""Like a Wife"" “Bendall’s fascinating and challenging new collection, Turncoat, leads us into ‘The Vague Territory of the Present.’ Bendall makes us unnervingly aware of how enmeshed in a surveillance society we already are: ‘Calculating now what’s permissible, and what/we’re barred from even considering.’ But within the straitjacket of repression, Bendall enacts a Houdini-like escape. Her restless erudition and formal skill shape and reshape identity: ‘I’d invent a stitch for my sentence so its pulse would skip.’ It’s in those syncopated gaps that the turncoat resurges as an agent of resistance.” -- Elizabeth Robinson, author of ""Excursive""

Author Information

Molly Bendall is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Watchful and Under the Quick. She teaches English and creative writing at the University of Southern California.  

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