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 that: 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

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 failed 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.