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No Planets Strike
No Planets Strike , the debut collection by Josh Bell, reads as a playfully serious record of modernity. Subversive in their treatment of the contemporary voice, broad in their subject matter, and often delightfully funny, the poems in this collection have a brilliant ear language.
- GenresPoetry
71 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 7, 2022
I really struggled to rate this book because Bell is clearly a master wordsmith and a master of many poetic forms. Many of his phrases, stanzas, and poems are beautifully written. Often his images are very complex and thought-provoking. I struggled to connect with this book or any of the poems because of the scientific jargon—I had to keep looking things up in the dictionary to read this collection. The main reason I cannot give this book a high review is because it did not provide what I look for when I read a poetry collection. Maybe others might connect to this collection more deeply, but I felt it difficult to do so. I connected with some lines and some moments but overall I felt very lost and unattached reading these poems.
October 1, 2025
In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins suggests students “waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore” or “walk inside a poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” In the end, he laments,
…all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
In no planets strike, Josh Bell is acutely aware of the layers and layers of poetic sediment he rests upon—and upon the tendencies of readers to wield pens and high-lighters like scalpels. After paraphrasing Whitman for three lines in ”Zombie Sunday (The Dear Reader Version),” he writes:
I saw you reaching for your high-lighter
like a samurai. Like a samurai
I’ve got something for you
to explicate. What further strings
must I pull to force you
to blast me from the local ether?
Allow me to reach for my hose and commence the beating: You see T.S. Eliot in here, don’t you? Maybe it’s just college brainwashed me, but I see Eliot in the term “ether” as used in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
Bell’s narrator wants to be extricated from the poetic tradition—poets have been talking to God and going out for evening strolls forever—and Bell struggles with finding his own voice while simultaneously breathing the same air as all the poetic giants of yore. Bell may find it amusing or alarming I sensed Eliot in these lines—“Can’t a poet use the term “ether” without invoking Eliot?”
In “Zombie Sunday,” Bell creates an image used widely in this poem collection:
…or hear that sharp
vulnerable intake of breath before singing,
the breath which gathers up the shapeless air
and drags it down the throat and back,
different now, beautiful, a clean sound
like a clear piece of tile which perfectly fits
the space the lungs pulled it from,
then fades back into nothing, and the same air
can be breathed over and over
and sung again, different voices or the same,
your dirty wedding song or hateful lullaby…
We’re talking “inspiration” here, aren’t we? The “intake” of “breath.” Like the components of the poetic tradition, air is recycled over and over and the songs continue. In “Meditation on Insomnia,” Bell notes the following:
…If I had a straw
I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,
take shape. As tired as I am, who knows
when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica
of empty space on my tongue.
When the poet finishes shaping inspiration into song, the result is an artifact for others to find, to hear. Is it only “empty space?”
Bell’s poetry is rich and layered. Bell dresses his verse in quirky outfits and imbues them with odd accents, but he is aware of how he fits within the poetic tradition. In “Sleeping with J.A.,” Bell’s narrator notes he keeps a copy of John Ashbery under his pillow and compares the poetry of Ashbery to himself: “They are a semi with soft brakes and a Honda in front of it, who is me.” The poem then turns towards the relationship between the narrator and the poet, a relationship which, in our distracting world, is typical between the reader and poetry:
You have hamstrung
my unusually strong will to better myself,
which is why I love your book! It is and not
your fault. Better people than me tell me about
how you’re a genius. I eat lunch gladly
with them, and hear serious things. I believe.
And yet at night with the ridiculous clock
I slide your book beneath my pillows
and turn toward the television, supreme
in my knowledge that what I don’t know
won’t hurt me…
Enough—I’ll put my hose away, because I haven’t revealed anything in this review indicating whether this collection of poems is worthy of your time. I believe the poems are worth your time, but you need to be aware Josh Bell is obviously well-read. The difficulty of the allusions and references, unraveling his complex knitting of disparate ideas, can weary a reader. I could only read a couple of poems in a sitting because I had to read each poem three or four times. He’s funny, but he’s deep. And if you wish to experience the depth, you’ll have to chip and dirty your fingernails on the surface of each poem.
Consider the poem “First, Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-Ninth Lines Courtesy of Thomas Campion.” Thomas Campion was a lyrical poet at the end of the 1500s, writing poems for the lute and experimenting with verse forms not based on accented syllables. Anyhow, the joke is the four lines noted so pedantically in the title are the same banal line: “There is a garden in her face.” And, Bell admits, this is a damn funny line. So if there’s a garden in her face and we shake her, fruit may tumble out of her mouth. He brings up migrant workers, sharecropping, a mobile garden which can come inside and get water when it is thirsty. And all these zingers are funny—and I hear rim-shots after some lines. Then he notes she has “witchy photosynthesis,” and I’m thinking about the movement of air again, the recurring imagery permeating so many poems in this collection. Photosynthesis? With the energy supplied by the sun, components of the air and water (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are transformed, carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen (and vice-versa, my biologically inclined friends). Plants are the product of the movement of air, like the wax model of the air inside the narrator’s mouth in a previous poem. What does this have to do with Thomas Campion? Is Bell just showing how silly Campion’s line was? Doubtful. Bell is recycling poetic imagery—breathing and recycling the same air and transforming it.
The surface of much of Bell’s verse is witty and, at times, irreverent, but I don’t think many readers would find the surface satisfying enough to sustain them through the entire work. Bell examines religion, life, art in his own idiosyncratic way. Often, the seeming throw-away gags are more important in the deep structure than is obvious on a cursory reading. Trust me—the surface must be penetrated (to borrow one of Bell’s images, like bacteria through a cell-membrane) in order to appreciate what Bell is truly wrestling with in these verses. I’m sorry, Mr. Collins—and Mr. Bell—but while I would love to just water ski over these verses, I wouldn’t have anything meaningful to take home to think about. No. These poems are insouciant and require a good spanking with a hose.
…all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
In no planets strike, Josh Bell is acutely aware of the layers and layers of poetic sediment he rests upon—and upon the tendencies of readers to wield pens and high-lighters like scalpels. After paraphrasing Whitman for three lines in ”Zombie Sunday (The Dear Reader Version),” he writes:
I saw you reaching for your high-lighter
like a samurai. Like a samurai
I’ve got something for you
to explicate. What further strings
must I pull to force you
to blast me from the local ether?
Allow me to reach for my hose and commence the beating: You see T.S. Eliot in here, don’t you? Maybe it’s just college brainwashed me, but I see Eliot in the term “ether” as used in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table…
Bell’s narrator wants to be extricated from the poetic tradition—poets have been talking to God and going out for evening strolls forever—and Bell struggles with finding his own voice while simultaneously breathing the same air as all the poetic giants of yore. Bell may find it amusing or alarming I sensed Eliot in these lines—“Can’t a poet use the term “ether” without invoking Eliot?”
In “Zombie Sunday,” Bell creates an image used widely in this poem collection:
…or hear that sharp
vulnerable intake of breath before singing,
the breath which gathers up the shapeless air
and drags it down the throat and back,
different now, beautiful, a clean sound
like a clear piece of tile which perfectly fits
the space the lungs pulled it from,
then fades back into nothing, and the same air
can be breathed over and over
and sung again, different voices or the same,
your dirty wedding song or hateful lullaby…
We’re talking “inspiration” here, aren’t we? The “intake” of “breath.” Like the components of the poetic tradition, air is recycled over and over and the songs continue. In “Meditation on Insomnia,” Bell notes the following:
…If I had a straw
I’d suck wax into my mouth, let it pool,
take shape. As tired as I am, who knows
when they’d find me, sleeping with a replica
of empty space on my tongue.
When the poet finishes shaping inspiration into song, the result is an artifact for others to find, to hear. Is it only “empty space?”
Bell’s poetry is rich and layered. Bell dresses his verse in quirky outfits and imbues them with odd accents, but he is aware of how he fits within the poetic tradition. In “Sleeping with J.A.,” Bell’s narrator notes he keeps a copy of John Ashbery under his pillow and compares the poetry of Ashbery to himself: “They are a semi with soft brakes and a Honda in front of it, who is me.” The poem then turns towards the relationship between the narrator and the poet, a relationship which, in our distracting world, is typical between the reader and poetry:
You have hamstrung
my unusually strong will to better myself,
which is why I love your book! It is and not
your fault. Better people than me tell me about
how you’re a genius. I eat lunch gladly
with them, and hear serious things. I believe.
And yet at night with the ridiculous clock
I slide your book beneath my pillows
and turn toward the television, supreme
in my knowledge that what I don’t know
won’t hurt me…
Enough—I’ll put my hose away, because I haven’t revealed anything in this review indicating whether this collection of poems is worthy of your time. I believe the poems are worth your time, but you need to be aware Josh Bell is obviously well-read. The difficulty of the allusions and references, unraveling his complex knitting of disparate ideas, can weary a reader. I could only read a couple of poems in a sitting because I had to read each poem three or four times. He’s funny, but he’s deep. And if you wish to experience the depth, you’ll have to chip and dirty your fingernails on the surface of each poem.
Consider the poem “First, Second, Twenty-Fifth, and Thirty-Ninth Lines Courtesy of Thomas Campion.” Thomas Campion was a lyrical poet at the end of the 1500s, writing poems for the lute and experimenting with verse forms not based on accented syllables. Anyhow, the joke is the four lines noted so pedantically in the title are the same banal line: “There is a garden in her face.” And, Bell admits, this is a damn funny line. So if there’s a garden in her face and we shake her, fruit may tumble out of her mouth. He brings up migrant workers, sharecropping, a mobile garden which can come inside and get water when it is thirsty. And all these zingers are funny—and I hear rim-shots after some lines. Then he notes she has “witchy photosynthesis,” and I’m thinking about the movement of air again, the recurring imagery permeating so many poems in this collection. Photosynthesis? With the energy supplied by the sun, components of the air and water (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are transformed, carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen (and vice-versa, my biologically inclined friends). Plants are the product of the movement of air, like the wax model of the air inside the narrator’s mouth in a previous poem. What does this have to do with Thomas Campion? Is Bell just showing how silly Campion’s line was? Doubtful. Bell is recycling poetic imagery—breathing and recycling the same air and transforming it.
The surface of much of Bell’s verse is witty and, at times, irreverent, but I don’t think many readers would find the surface satisfying enough to sustain them through the entire work. Bell examines religion, life, art in his own idiosyncratic way. Often, the seeming throw-away gags are more important in the deep structure than is obvious on a cursory reading. Trust me—the surface must be penetrated (to borrow one of Bell’s images, like bacteria through a cell-membrane) in order to appreciate what Bell is truly wrestling with in these verses. I’m sorry, Mr. Collins—and Mr. Bell—but while I would love to just water ski over these verses, I wouldn’t have anything meaningful to take home to think about. No. These poems are insouciant and require a good spanking with a hose.
December 4, 2014
Transmundane. There are things I want to call this anthology and one of them is "tour de force" and another of them is "unparalleled" and another of them is "magnum opus." I actually feel lucky to have read NO PLANETS STRIKE. Bell's writing style is grimy and contemporary, ramble-y in a smart and wonderful way, obsessed with pop culture and religion and wit, hyper-introspective, at once irreverent and spiritual, which only makes his work more irreverent and then more spiritual. He is a master of repetition and trickery, getting to the good meat of a poem when you're least expecting it: like at the beginning, or after a line that you already thought WAS the good meat of the poem. His poems just keep getting better as they go along.
Of the unprecedented nine versions or adaptions or renditions or what have you of the "Zombie Sunday" poem that are included in NO PLANETS STRIKE, the one I'm most obsessed with is "Zombie Sunday (Had We But World Enough and Time)." It's this kind of celebratory gay love poem to God Himself, and with lines like "GHHF, or whomever, you are old enough to be my mother, or whatever, and all the old girlfriends are jealous. You have drowned one world already, so confident, so tall, yet when lightning flashes, I have to think, it is your knees that crack" who wouldn't be floored and drained and driven insane by the mad brilliance and weird beauty that Bell brings to such ordinary, extraordinary words? As a religious person, this poem actually made me feel like I broadened and deepened my understanding of God, which is to say: it sort of changed my entire life.
Mostly, NO PLANETS STRIKE is something like a screwball combination of a Bible and a diary and a humanist manifesto and a favorite CD and the Kama Sutra and, I don't know, a receipt to Burger King or something. What I'm trying to say is that NO PLANETS STRIKE is a poetry collection about everything, including everything. And it's very good.
Of the unprecedented nine versions or adaptions or renditions or what have you of the "Zombie Sunday" poem that are included in NO PLANETS STRIKE, the one I'm most obsessed with is "Zombie Sunday (Had We But World Enough and Time)." It's this kind of celebratory gay love poem to God Himself, and with lines like "GHHF, or whomever, you are old enough to be my mother, or whatever, and all the old girlfriends are jealous. You have drowned one world already, so confident, so tall, yet when lightning flashes, I have to think, it is your knees that crack" who wouldn't be floored and drained and driven insane by the mad brilliance and weird beauty that Bell brings to such ordinary, extraordinary words? As a religious person, this poem actually made me feel like I broadened and deepened my understanding of God, which is to say: it sort of changed my entire life.
Mostly, NO PLANETS STRIKE is something like a screwball combination of a Bible and a diary and a humanist manifesto and a favorite CD and the Kama Sutra and, I don't know, a receipt to Burger King or something. What I'm trying to say is that NO PLANETS STRIKE is a poetry collection about everything, including everything. And it's very good.
April 2, 2011
This guy is the shit. This is what contemporary American poetry is all about. He moves effortlessly through sardonic wit, deep insight, erupting chuckles, and painful truth. His muse Ramona runs all through the book, and the continuing poem "Zombie Sunday", which appears and reappears repeatedly, shows Bell's ability to peer through the exact same window over and over always seeing new things on the inside.
He lampoons his own chosen art form with such brilliance that the reader is by that very lampooning shown the brilliant worthiness in that art form when it is used by a dangerously talented treatment...tasty irony.
He lampoons his own chosen art form with such brilliance that the reader is by that very lampooning shown the brilliant worthiness in that art form when it is used by a dangerously talented treatment...tasty irony.
March 3, 2015
An exquisite collection marrying lyricism and a highly imaginative use of images and sound. This collection is simply gorgeous and a must read for anyone even slightly interested in poetry. If it doesn't send you out into the world simply yearning be able to view, create, and recreate the world as he does there is something wrong with you.
July 24, 2007
I've learned about Ramona and zombies.
September 8, 2024
I’m so glad I went back and read this — every poetry book I was reading lately just wasn’t connecting and I had started to feel like maybe I just don’t get poetry anymore, or maybe I’m not as into it? The poems I had been reading were either too bland and boring, or the abstraction was to a level that it just felt untethered to anything I could get a hold on.
Until this book. Yes, it is definitely full of its weird images, it is surreal and has flurries of wild tangents and seemingly obtuse connections…but it still hits with something real in a way the others didn’t. I understood these images, this view of America — there was a grounding throughout that kept me hooked and able to feel what Bell was expressing. There was so many incredible, fresh images I kept highlighting, and lots of poems that I just wanted to re-read to experience in full again. I was particularly fond of the Zombie Sunday poems, and most of the Ramona ones kept me captivated as well.
So GHHF (ifkyk), thank you for bringing this book in at just the moment I needed to ensure that I wasn’t crazy, poetry can be abstract and weird and beautiful and grounded and I can still like it.
Until this book. Yes, it is definitely full of its weird images, it is surreal and has flurries of wild tangents and seemingly obtuse connections…but it still hits with something real in a way the others didn’t. I understood these images, this view of America — there was a grounding throughout that kept me hooked and able to feel what Bell was expressing. There was so many incredible, fresh images I kept highlighting, and lots of poems that I just wanted to re-read to experience in full again. I was particularly fond of the Zombie Sunday poems, and most of the Ramona ones kept me captivated as well.
So GHHF (ifkyk), thank you for bringing this book in at just the moment I needed to ensure that I wasn’t crazy, poetry can be abstract and weird and beautiful and grounded and I can still like it.
December 8, 2008
good balance between irreverant and grim tones, doesn't take himself too seriously. Poems like the 1st 2 and the last one (On the Typeset) would become cloying in a collection of similar silliness, but here they lighten the darker tones of the more serious poems. I also loved that he has about 10 poems in this called "Zombie Sunday," all more or less about the death of God, but the set of Ramona poems were less interesting, and then there's the usual poetry incestuousness (who wants to read poems about why a poet does or does not like John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot? I'm really sick of this shit).
March 11, 2009
I liked this. Very balanced, with only a few poems falling flat for me. Ramona and "Zombie Sunday"s hold it all together. Although I've been trying to avoid an excess of similes in my own work, Bell constantly surprises with the striking images he can make from the "like" and the "as." Nice work.
December 9, 2008
Intelligent, soulful, honest poems with a soft, even tone that moves you on to the next word, the next line. A refreshing break from the dominant contemporary NY/language school that I find inaccessible, empty and jarring. I love these poems by Josh Bell.
July 21, 2007
I like Josh and I like this book. It's really morbid.
What I learned from this book: I learned a lot about Zombies.
What I learned from this book: I learned a lot about Zombies.
May 29, 2008
What a book! So fresh & unique
October 2, 2008
Incredibly unique, but it flows really well and all feels quite natural. Josh Bell makes me proud to be from Indiana :)
July 27, 2014
Gentle handed holy father-- holy fuck.
November 11, 2014
Hallucinatory
August 28, 2016
1.5 not much of this worked for me. when bell slows down to focus on a particular image or scene it's great but most of the time the lines swing from object to object too quickly to really appreciate
March 6, 2008
tremendous poetry - very fluid created world.
i want to know romona.
i want to know romona.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews