Quirky, macabre, vivid, and fascinating, Sarah Lindsay’s poetry in Twigs and Knucklebones melds science and art with astonishing facts that might just be true: 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 surreal: 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.”
