Molly Bendall, Turncoat

 

and getting caught
on the border of night
politely I have to do it,
re-construct what I
didn’t want
to know, the cipher delivers
the living—the few and
their sentences flip and
swell up. I had no
treatment for it,
we couldn’t shield her
anymore, I know we’re
at cross purposes
as the heads of orchids
keep time, turn cheeks
an opening was sprung
by a latch near her dresser,
and a breeze falters inside
my sternum, letting
the slow dispatch begin (“That’s the Moon Trying to Leave the City”)

I’m immediately struck by such a wonderful tension of lyric tautness and nimble movement, the quicks and quirks of California poet and translator Molly Bendall’s latest full-length title, Turncoat (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025). Set in two sections, with a lengthy first and second as near-coda, the poems in Turncoat build into a kind of suite-cluster, offering poems and poem-extensions that accumulate, sweep and swirl across the book’s length, nearly as a single, fragmented, long poem. “when the crows / increase,” she writes, mid-way through, “it was time for / the sky to stretch / the group would never / surrender so I brought / the starving ones / milk, it helped them / burn a path / it’s not English / anymore, and when / her scarves rose / higher than the elms, / they snapped like shellfish / and filled it all with noise [.]” Bendall is the author of five prior collections of poetry: After Estrangement (Peregrine Smith Press, 1992), Dark Summer (Miami University Press, 1999), Ariadne’s Island (Miami University Press, 2001), Under the Quick (Parlor Press, 2009) and Watchful (Omnidawn, 2016), as well as co-author, with the poet Gail Wronsky, Bling & Fringe (The L.A. Poems) (What Books, 2009). In this new collection, Bendall writes a kind of epic, offering sharp and stunning threads of unease and upheaval, writing an undercurrent of tension and uncertainty, and building up the potential for conflict through the complexity of simply living in a world increasingly hostile, pervasive and surveilled. Hers is a syntax simultaneously quick on its feet and meditative, slow across lines that are somehow propulsive. “She understood it now,” begins the poem “Visualize Anyone,” “the cog behind her back, / celebrated it, even, / as her arms hung / down too far / her makeup too was amplified / feel the grooves / and teeth, if the cube / she lived in would break, [.]”