Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower

"Lindsay's delight in imaginary and unknown worlds, her compulsion to write exactly what she doesn't know, removes her poems completely from the tired confessional anecdotalism of so much narrative poetry."—Poetry "Sarah Lindsay's niche in contemporary poetry might be likened to that of Joseph Cornell's in modern art. Anything might turn up in a Cornell box: a stuffed bird, images snipped from old engravings, dice, corks, a broken watch--anything. Like Cornell, Lindsay also creates tiny, complete worlds that operate according to their own particular laws."—Parnassus In her fourth collection of poetry, National Book Award finalist and Lannan Fellowship winner Sarah Lindsay presents a lyric menagerie of bizarrely imagined personae and historic figures revealing their long-held secrets, alongside surprising scientific subjects and discoveries layered into quirky, dark-edged, sometimes macabre, always intimate and graceful poems. Imbued with a buoying sense of respect for the different, the unexpected, and the challenging, Lindsay's poems are alive with wonder. And when asked the obvious question about the title, you can say, "A 'bone-eating snotflower' is the inelegant slang for the worm-like creature, Osedax mucofloris, that feeds on the carcasses of minke whales in the North Sea." From "Without Warning": Elizabeth Bishop leaned on a table, it cracked,both fell to the floor. A gesturegone sadly awry. This was close to factand quickly became symbolic, bound to occurin Florida, where she was surroundedby rotting abundance and greedy insects. One moment a laughing smile, a graceful handalighting on solid furniture, a casual shift of weight, the next, undignified splayed legs. The shell of the tableproved to be stuffed with termite eggs . . . Sarah Lindsay graduated from St. Olaf College and holds a MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her first book of poetry, Primate Behavior, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She currently works as a copy editor for Pace Communications, and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.