Indictus

by Natalie Eilbert

Poetry. Women's Studies. INDICTUS re-imagines various creation myths to bear the invisible and unsaid assaults of women. In doing so, it subverts notions of patriarchal power into a genre that can be demolished and set again. INDICTUS is a Latin word, from which other words like "indict" and "indicate" are born. It translates literally as "to write the unsaid." There is an effort in this book to create the supernatural through the utterance of violence, because jurisdiction fails in real time. That sexual assault can so easily become a science fiction when power is rearranged to serve the victim speaks to the abject lack of control within victims to ever be redeemed. Crimes resolve to misdemeanors. In a world without my abusers, how can I soon become myself? Combining the mythological and autobiographical, this book attempts to indict us, so that the wounded might one day be free.

Genres: Poetry

113 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Natalie Eilbert is one of the greatest fucking poets writing in English now. She uses language like it’s clay and also hard metal, I mean she seriously owns English, and she has a depth of understanding, a depth of comprehension, that few writers manage to achieve EVER. This is such an amazingly generous collection. It’s for all women and all men who love women and all people who want to be safe in a world ruled by dangerous men.

[Claudia Cortese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow--THIS BOOK. I can't remember the last time a book had such an impact on me. I underlined so many lines; I read and re-read so many of the poems; I shook and cried while reading it. This is a book about more than one survivor of multiple assaults--these poems, which are more than memoir, more than confession--have an almost mythic quality, in which the traumas of the speaker's life expand outward to include the traumas--both big and small--of countless women and femmes throughout countless years. Her poems/essays/prose pieces (this book is as essayistic as it is lyric and eschews categorization) glint with deep intelligence, which is to say the kind of intelligence that does not negate viscera and emotion, that knows the mind/body binary is patriarchy's failed invention: "Confusion is a way to deny complicity," "The third joke is the old joke of women's great silence," "I was lonely before I learned the care of men--then I craved loneliness," "To learn about permission I had to first drink language."

[Keegan Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people talk of this collection, they often speak to the trauma and survival aspects. And while this is very much the core of the collection, I believe what sometimes gets overlooked is Eilbert's shift in poetic form, her control of the line and genius pacing throughout this collection. The forms she morphs in and out of are masterful and cunning, deliberate and courageous. This collection marks a leap from her first book Swan Feast, wherein these poems are actively creating an intelligence of their own, are more confident and evolve as the book evolves. These poems know what they want to do and how they want to do it. The genre-bending and use of white space and repetition solidify this work as important as much for what it's saying as for how it goes about saying it. Eilbert's brilliance is on show here, page after page. The ferocity with which she uses to attack the institutions and misogynistic systems that committed violence against her body, spirit, and personhood, has molded a new kind of poetry, a work whose vision, and violence and truth are undeniable.

[Matthew Siegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a staggering book of rage and survival. In the hands of this poet, subject matter otherwise nearly impossible to express is handled deftly and with an ear bent toward the music of language, in spite how language is often used against us. I honor this poet's agency, talent, and aesthetic dexterity.

[Joe Nasta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking. This book is vital to today’s moment. Eilbert is a master, and she pours herself out on every single page. Excited to spend more time with this book over the next few months. Everyone read this.

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and unforgettable!

[Tom Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning book, ferocious in its clear-eyed view of the violent world, gorgeous in its language, and skillful in its poetics.

[Alex McElroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and powerful collection of poems that navigates the continued terror of trauma within the scope of everyday life. An intense and lyrical portrait of contemporary womanhood. Eilbert is an profoundly moving writer, and I've been returning to this collection over and over again in the months since I first read it.

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't remember the last time I found a poetry collection so difficult to stomach and wrap my head around. "Indictus" isn't the kind of collection that one wades in and out of. Eilbert's language is heavy and often requires a few rereads, whether of a specific phrase, a few lines, or even the entire poem, to really begin understanding and engaging with the work. Similarly, the subject matter is also a difficult one but I found that Eilbert's style compliments it perfectly. This is the kind of work that requires a few reads and different angles of approach to really begin responding to it, for lack of a better term, making it a difficult but necessary read.

[Barton Smock · Rating 5 out of 5]

While reading Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus, I could feel parts of myself go missing. Could feel the pause between awe and struck. Could eat, without cooking, deletion. With a frank transcendence, this work leaves navigation to its aloofness and opts instead to skin the map of its long-held location. If sound is the gem of heartbreak, then this here speaking is both swag and fossil, dog- whistle and canary. I’m not sure how it happened, that this is beautiful. By which I mean painful. By which I mean it is not fair that one has to race the created to reach one’s own invention. By which I mean it is not beautiful. By which I mean it is not other, but only. By which I mean it is somehow a story of violations and of a multiple oneness. Of how man is eulogized for making something once while anyone not man must, in order to bury, enlist again and again the help of the unburied. I hope, while reading it, you are not surprised. I hope you are startled by Eilbert and how she seems to reach the ends of things, but then reaches the real ends of things, and all without moving past the reader that you were when you started. I think sometimes that atmosphere can be autobiographical. Short answer: by book’s end, I revisited how I have not been kind to language and came to the conclusion that this is because I have been too kind to words. Perhaps forgiveness is accountability’s first stab at an erasure poem. This book owes you nothing. Be indebted.

[Gabrielle Bates · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this book arrived at the bookstore where I work, I opened it up with the intention of acquainting myself quickly and cursory with its contents; soon after, I found myself seated, reading the collection cover to cover. I love how this book builds momentum across long poems, love its tone, the surprising images that recur. I'm most indebted to this book, however, for how it became an intercessor between me and an anger I contained but did not know how to unleash. Eilbert pulled me in immediately and kept me riveted with these dark, strange, intelligent, rageful, unweildly-yet-precise poems.

[Lucas Bailor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just so, so good. A few of my favorite excerpts:
"I whisk grace until it thickens into not-grace."
"I take beauty into a landscape and split it open, / the scent it makes to chew its flora-an act of transference."
"I / watch its closely, genre my way to paradise, / the wick, the burn, the diction carried up."
"There was a failure done / to me first, and so I grant failure the way light grants a prism."

[Mike]

This book kind of fucked me up. It’s a book that takes an act (or, really, several acts) of violence, and embodies it in a way that I can’t fully articulate. The language itself is often violent, or perhaps violated. It is unsettling, and it is amazing.

[Alison Kronstadt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book and almost instantly picked it back up to start reading again. Indictus is deeply specific to Eilbert's experience and nonetheless made a home in me and mine. It makes it easier for me to move through this battering world. I could not be more grateful for this book.

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s like when you are so scared of a book because you know it’ll feel so personal when you go through it but you have to do it. These poems are scary and incredible and necessary.

[Rebecca Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrowing poems that visit and re-visit a woman's trauma of sexual violation. These poems seem all too apropos in the era of DT.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection challenged me to realize just how much rape culture pervades America. Eilbert is a gifted poet-writer-archivist-teller; she writes from (a) perspective(s) so silenced, initially it took me awhile to understand the trauma. I (feminist here upset to admit, but it is important to admit) also found myself wondering if the writing was "too much," which only highlighted to me how I was indoctrined into the discourse of rape culture: one that doubts the truth presented by the person who was assaulted/attacked/abused/violated...& once I acknowledged the patriarchal lens I was reading this work with...my experience as a reader exploded into one of anger, appreciation, awe, and...just being with the words. I am having an incredibly tough time articulating just how important and powerful this collection is to read & its importance in doing the work of shifting thinking in deep ways through honesty while recentering whose memory and truth we believe and align ourselves with now and moving forward.

[Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly powerful, structurally and linguistically fascinating

I’m floored by the way this collection functions as one cohesive work by creating an in-text semiotics that reveals key details across different poems