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Twigs and Knucklebones
"Had Dr. Dolittle fathered a prodigious daughter, she might well be behind the bizarre and entertaining personae found on the pages of Lindsay's first-book bestiary...Lindsay's dark-edged, sometimes creepy poems are also imbued with a buoying sense of respect for the different, the unexpected and the challenging.... In work reminiscent of Amy Clampitt and of Albert Goldbarth, Lindsay weaves informed and moving lyric claims around scientific facts, lamenting extinct species or following local rivers." —Publishers Weekly
"Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read....(Sarah Kindsay's) voice...is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters." —Poetry Foundation
"With wonder and bemusement, Lindsay writes supple, sparkling poems about life's perpetual coalescence and breaking down....The heart of this mordant yet profoundly compassionate book is a vivid and involving series about the fictional ancient kingdom of Nab. Here Lindsay sifts through the detritus of a civilization, imagines the inner worlds of people long gone, and the layering of tomb upon tomb, city upon city as bone, clay vessels, and the inscribed tablets are all crushed into splinters and shards." —Booklist
“Sarah Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for.”—The New York Times Book Review
Quirky, macabre, vivid, and fascinating, Sarah Lindsay’s poetry in Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that might just be spadefoot toads singing till their throats bleed, an explorer tumbling into an Antarctic crevasse and swinging from his tether like a pendulum.
Many of Lindsay’s poems occur in extremis, and the situations are often severe and the futuristic “Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto” or a bog person discovered in Eske’s Field. These characters often span—in the space of a poem—various times, cultures, and contexts. Lindsay also creates her own fictional kingdom and peoples it with outlandish characters, including jerboas, megalomaniac archaeologists, an adjunct professor, goatherds, farmers, and the god Nummis, who is depicted with a “hawk on his head, fish in one hand, horned ibex at either side.”
We prod and whisk and deduce what we canfrom marks in clay, from the trace of a wall.But the way the king tossed and caught his adoring daughters,the foolish songs he improvised for his wife, and his furry voice—these have been safely forgotten.
Sarah Lindsay is the author of two previous books of poems. Her debut volume was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.
"Twigs & Knucklebones is a rare thing in poetry—a very good read....(Sarah Kindsay's) voice...is omniscient yet intimate, super-literate and flawlessly graceful, like a really good lecturer who knows how to entertain an audience while speaking on complex subject matters." —Poetry Foundation
"With wonder and bemusement, Lindsay writes supple, sparkling poems about life's perpetual coalescence and breaking down....The heart of this mordant yet profoundly compassionate book is a vivid and involving series about the fictional ancient kingdom of Nab. Here Lindsay sifts through the detritus of a civilization, imagines the inner worlds of people long gone, and the layering of tomb upon tomb, city upon city as bone, clay vessels, and the inscribed tablets are all crushed into splinters and shards." —Booklist
“Sarah Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for.”—The New York Times Book Review
Quirky, macabre, vivid, and fascinating, Sarah Lindsay’s poetry in Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that might just be spadefoot toads singing till their throats bleed, an explorer tumbling into an Antarctic crevasse and swinging from his tether like a pendulum.
Many of Lindsay’s poems occur in extremis, and the situations are often severe and the futuristic “Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto” or a bog person discovered in Eske’s Field. These characters often span—in the space of a poem—various times, cultures, and contexts. Lindsay also creates her own fictional kingdom and peoples it with outlandish characters, including jerboas, megalomaniac archaeologists, an adjunct professor, goatherds, farmers, and the god Nummis, who is depicted with a “hawk on his head, fish in one hand, horned ibex at either side.”
We prod and whisk and deduce what we canfrom marks in clay, from the trace of a wall.But the way the king tossed and caught his adoring daughters,the foolish songs he improvised for his wife, and his furry voice—these have been safely forgotten.
Sarah Lindsay is the author of two previous books of poems. Her debut volume was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in North Carolina.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 1, 2008
4 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Lindsay
233 books13 followersBorn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1958, the poet Sarah Lindsay works as a copy editor and proofreader in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is the author of Primate Behavior (Grove Press Poetry Series, 1997) which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Mount Clutter (Grove Press Poetry Series, 2002); and Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). A graduate of St. Olaf College and the UNC-Greensboro MFA program in creative writing, she apprenticed for a few years at Unicorn Press, learning to set type, print and bind books by hand. She plays the cello with friends in a quartet that is sometimes a trio or quintet, and lives with her husband and small dog among toppling piles of books. In 2009, Sarah received the M. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood prize from the Poetry Foundation and a Lannan Literary Fellowship.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 8, 2018
Reread in fall 2018: the Kingdom of Nab still blows me away. What a great collection this is.
Original review from May 2012: I've been a fan of Lindsay's for a while, but I absolutely loved this poetry collection and it appealed to me even more than her older work. As an archaeology geek, the long middle section about the Kingdom of Nab got me both excited and teared up. Lindsay gets right to the heart of so many of the issues I love about archaeology: who were the people who left these things behind? What can we learn about them, and what will we never know? What stories have been lost?
Original review from May 2012: I've been a fan of Lindsay's for a while, but I absolutely loved this poetry collection and it appealed to me even more than her older work. As an archaeology geek, the long middle section about the Kingdom of Nab got me both excited and teared up. Lindsay gets right to the heart of so many of the issues I love about archaeology: who were the people who left these things behind? What can we learn about them, and what will we never know? What stories have been lost?
February 11, 2009
You must must read this! One of my favorite poetry collections of ALL TIME. Let me know if it's your birthday, and I'll buy it for you--no kidding.
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May 15, 2009Lindsay is interesting.... she’s engaged in science and in, well, clutter (her last collection was called “Mount Clutter.”).
This book has two sections of more traditional “poet engages with world” sections that bookend an invented society. The invented society is dug up by archaeologists, is imagined, is rendered. Fun, I suppose. All those traces of Terabithia, Narnia, the glory of making up a world and a past... then making up the discovery of it.
This book has two sections of more traditional “poet engages with world” sections that bookend an invented society. The invented society is dug up by archaeologists, is imagined, is rendered. Fun, I suppose. All those traces of Terabithia, Narnia, the glory of making up a world and a past... then making up the discovery of it.
January 11, 2009
Inventive, unusual poems - many of them are thrilling - that unfold in an odd space between fantasy, reality and science.
October 9, 2023
Lindsay opens doors into her epic fictional kingdoms that fall, gather, rebuild in surreal imagery. Although I found the
King Nab
section to be mundane but yet interesting destinations to the
Early Kingdom
. This collection may hold a historical significance covered under its “twigs & knucklebones.
Favorites:
Song of a Spadefoot Toad
Scapegoat of Eske’s Field
Flukes
An Old Joke
Tell the Bees
Briar Rose
Small Moth
Favorites:
Song of a Spadefoot Toad
Scapegoat of Eske’s Field
Flukes
An Old Joke
Tell the Bees
Briar Rose
Small Moth
February 22, 2023
Part 2 (the Kingdom of Nab) is a bit cerebral for my tastes, but the other parts I like quite a lot. Part 3 (Figs) is particularly moving.
March 6, 2014
An absolutely amazing collection and possibly the first book of poetry I've read from cover to cover, and read over and over again. "Fluke" is just brilliant. I am awed by the author's ability to convey worlds far removed from our own,to use scientific knowledge without bogging down the language. As if that weren't enough, there's a book within a book of poetry as well.
Highly recommended reading.
Highly recommended reading.
February 4, 2015
The only question I kept asking myself while reading this was, "Why am I only just now discovering Sarah Lindsay?!" A fantastic collection about archaeology and nature, encompassing both the sweeping vastness and small details embedded in history. Most impressive is the middle section of the book, a series of poems about a fictional ancient kingdom called Nab. A collection about a very specific intersection of science, art, and nature, but well worth the read for any lover of poetry.
October 31, 2016
The structure felt somewhat strange and the Nab poems, in particular, were out-of-place. As a whole, I liked those poems less than the other two sections of the collection. But I haven't enjoyed reading a collection of poetry this much in years, small gripes aside.
July 4, 2014
This book is a great read!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews