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Plat
Vivid and haunting elegy facing Mormonism, suicide, and gender in the American West.
In Plat, Lindsey Webb surveys the dream space of grief. By delimiting the reader’s view to the geographical, philosophical—even ecological—dimensions of her own personal loss, Webb pushes sentiment out of the grid. Much like Lucretia Martel’s film, The Headless Woman, Plat interrogates capitalism, collective cultural life and religion through the unrealized dreams of Prophets, the unspoken words of the dead, and the violent bang and clatter of an accident that’s always held unseen. Plat is the perfect song for our dystopian world and Lindsey Webb, the singer of our utopian dreams.
–GEOFF RICKLY
Every time I open Lindsey Webb’s Plat it reveals itself to be something uncannily different, so much so that I am beginning to understand it as being exactly an environment composed of the many facets of its personality constantly shifting, i.e. a book-length spinning jenny, the translation of the self-consciousness of moving through a succession of interiors in the absence of the one who is waiting, elegy and augury, just for starters. And because it is poetry, I understand it also as the realization that grief is dimensional (architectural, horticultural), the design and cultivation of the afterlife.
–BRANDON SHIMODA
“At once phenomenological and grounded, vast and detailed, Lindsey Webb’s Plat renews my faith in language. Its contours remind me of Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple, but Plat finds a grammar all its own. An exquisite debut collection.”
–CLAIRE DONATO
“The three poems of Plat—‘Garden,’ ‘Mancala,’ and ‘House’—constitute a tripartite movement through mourning as though to move beyond it, but equally in terror and in thrall one remains snagged on the thorny subjunctives of these premises. Snagged on the as-though. ‘I crawl,’ Webb writes, ‘in the interest of the dead.’ This calamitous book treats grief even as it assays the estate of the Real. The poet’s a burnished language of the uncanny, ‘a veiled approach toward a sentence,’ and a ‘collaps[ing] inward toward the future, away from all frontiers.’ I am deeply affected by Lindsey Webb’s necropastoral.”
–ADITI MACHADO
“Lindsey Webb’s Plat explores brutal loss through the lens of a failed utopia, with each poem crafted like a careful prayer. ‘I’ve not opened your letters. I’ve not kept your laugh fresh,’ the speaker admits, leading us out of an ethereal garden and into a house where death is reluctantly accepted. In Plat, heaven is an ever-changing, manmade structure where pain and suffering persist, with hope nothing more than a whisper. Webb creates lines with careful brush strokes, each more devastating than the last.”
–LAUREN MILICI
“In Webb’s brilliant book, Plat, a story unfolds in plants and in futures that do not exist. The poems ask, is there room for death in the utopia? Is there room for any of us in the plat, in the house, or in the garden? Reading this stunning collection reinforces that loss is both collective and connecting. Together we are in the house and together we are hurting. Windows, walls, all feeling.”
–LA WARMAN
Lindsey Webb’s Plat is a haunted, Western elegy which grapples with the suicide of her childhood friend in the context of their Mormon upbringing. In conversation with Joseph Smith’s prophesied but unrealized heavenly city, the Plat of Zion, Webb explores a vexed, disorienting space. Her prose poems lead the reader through an unearthly garden and into a house which eludes laws of time or space, unearthing the porous border between the living and the dead.
Plat hearkens to Leonora Carrington, Lyn Hejinian, and Willa Cather, with ecstatic and painterly language that broods over gender, death, and memory like a thundercloud. As ecological and built structures feverishly crumble, Webb maps the grief of a yet-unachieved utopias in the wake of personal loss. She considers how dreams for our imagined worlds and selves may survive.
In Plat, Lindsey Webb surveys the dream space of grief. By delimiting the reader’s view to the geographical, philosophical—even ecological—dimensions of her own personal loss, Webb pushes sentiment out of the grid. Much like Lucretia Martel’s film, The Headless Woman, Plat interrogates capitalism, collective cultural life and religion through the unrealized dreams of Prophets, the unspoken words of the dead, and the violent bang and clatter of an accident that’s always held unseen. Plat is the perfect song for our dystopian world and Lindsey Webb, the singer of our utopian dreams.
–GEOFF RICKLY
Every time I open Lindsey Webb’s Plat it reveals itself to be something uncannily different, so much so that I am beginning to understand it as being exactly an environment composed of the many facets of its personality constantly shifting, i.e. a book-length spinning jenny, the translation of the self-consciousness of moving through a succession of interiors in the absence of the one who is waiting, elegy and augury, just for starters. And because it is poetry, I understand it also as the realization that grief is dimensional (architectural, horticultural), the design and cultivation of the afterlife.
–BRANDON SHIMODA
“At once phenomenological and grounded, vast and detailed, Lindsey Webb’s Plat renews my faith in language. Its contours remind me of Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple, but Plat finds a grammar all its own. An exquisite debut collection.”
–CLAIRE DONATO
“The three poems of Plat—‘Garden,’ ‘Mancala,’ and ‘House’—constitute a tripartite movement through mourning as though to move beyond it, but equally in terror and in thrall one remains snagged on the thorny subjunctives of these premises. Snagged on the as-though. ‘I crawl,’ Webb writes, ‘in the interest of the dead.’ This calamitous book treats grief even as it assays the estate of the Real. The poet’s a burnished language of the uncanny, ‘a veiled approach toward a sentence,’ and a ‘collaps[ing] inward toward the future, away from all frontiers.’ I am deeply affected by Lindsey Webb’s necropastoral.”
–ADITI MACHADO
“Lindsey Webb’s Plat explores brutal loss through the lens of a failed utopia, with each poem crafted like a careful prayer. ‘I’ve not opened your letters. I’ve not kept your laugh fresh,’ the speaker admits, leading us out of an ethereal garden and into a house where death is reluctantly accepted. In Plat, heaven is an ever-changing, manmade structure where pain and suffering persist, with hope nothing more than a whisper. Webb creates lines with careful brush strokes, each more devastating than the last.”
–LAUREN MILICI
“In Webb’s brilliant book, Plat, a story unfolds in plants and in futures that do not exist. The poems ask, is there room for death in the utopia? Is there room for any of us in the plat, in the house, or in the garden? Reading this stunning collection reinforces that loss is both collective and connecting. Together we are in the house and together we are hurting. Windows, walls, all feeling.”
–LA WARMAN
Lindsey Webb’s Plat is a haunted, Western elegy which grapples with the suicide of her childhood friend in the context of their Mormon upbringing. In conversation with Joseph Smith’s prophesied but unrealized heavenly city, the Plat of Zion, Webb explores a vexed, disorienting space. Her prose poems lead the reader through an unearthly garden and into a house which eludes laws of time or space, unearthing the porous border between the living and the dead.
Plat hearkens to Leonora Carrington, Lyn Hejinian, and Willa Cather, with ecstatic and painterly language that broods over gender, death, and memory like a thundercloud. As ecological and built structures feverishly crumble, Webb maps the grief of a yet-unachieved utopias in the wake of personal loss. She considers how dreams for our imagined worlds and selves may survive.
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
Published May 28, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 6, 2025
Thank you to Archway Editions for my copy 💗
4.5 stars rounded up for Goodreads. This is an excellent collection! My heart goes out to the author. Grief can be excruciatingly painful 💔
4.5 stars rounded up for Goodreads. This is an excellent collection! My heart goes out to the author. Grief can be excruciatingly painful 💔
March 31, 2025
"Everywhere I plant theories about your death they come up several months later sticky and rotting from the inside with motive"
Rich and cursive, faith and grief resound
Rich and cursive, faith and grief resound
May 8, 2024
This beautiful and beautifully strange book of poetry and prose poetry builds itself like nest architecture out of the loss of a dear friend and the loss of one’s faith. I am in awe of the logic of this book, just as I was with Lindsey’s previous chapbook HOUSE (Ghost Proposal). Familiar images of domestic life and the natural world of the American West are encroached not just by the aforementioned losses but by the mind that finds itself somehow surviving them. Encroached isn’t quite right. Maybe encroached and given structure, too. I’m so excited for this stunning debut collection.
Thank you to Archway Editions for the e-ARC!
Thank you to Archway Editions for the e-ARC!
March 26, 2025
actually 2.5, while i think there were some really beautiful lines within this, this just didn't resonate with me as a reader
August 28, 2026
Unfortunately, I fall in with the reviewers who didn’t understand the meaning of almost any poems in this collection. Plat requires study and attention that I don’t care to devote to it. It is certainly an interesting idea to write a collection of poems in the style of Joseph Smith’s plat concept.
Read
September 10, 2025Though short and thought-provoking, this was not an intuitive read. Based on its description (and my general experience with mormon-adjacent media,) I anticipated lots of lingo and critiques of the religion’s practices and culture. But all references were vague, and the book’s abstract, poetic structure left me unsure of what I read on nearly every page. It was demanding a level of attention and careful study that I haven’t devoted to a text in a long time…… essentially mimicking the experience of reading scripture.
I’d be curious to discuss this book with both mormons and exmormons. I don’t feel like it leaned too far in either direction
I’d be curious to discuss this book with both mormons and exmormons. I don’t feel like it leaned too far in either direction
April 2, 2025
i was about this collection--what time does the garden keep in eden?
"are there areas where pink rots? Little inlets where the natural pigment, exposed to light, has fled like a fugitive? I'm told these suggest some hybrid world"
"are there areas where pink rots? Little inlets where the natural pigment, exposed to light, has fled like a fugitive? I'm told these suggest some hybrid world"
April 16, 2025
I had the chance to talk to Webb about her book and what a lovely experience! I love her opposition to narrative and closed poetry. It felt like deciphering a code and finding where I fit in. Hints at Mormon culture and Salt Lake City felt like a personal touch.
December 30, 2024
Best of 2024
April 25, 2025
Seemed too intentionally opaque, even for poetry.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews