Mount Clutter

“The closest thing to a sincerely new brand of poetry to come along in quite some time” from the National Book Award finalist (Pedestal Magazine).


The poems in Sarah Lindsay’s debut, Primate Behavior, have been hailed as “dark-edged . . . with a buoying sense of respect—for the different, the unexpected and the challenging” (Publishers Weekly). Her new collection, Mount Clutter, is the product of an immensely original and exhilarating poetic sensibility, ranging wide across a highly distinctive imaginary landscape. In a voice that is distinctly her own, Lindsay probes the uncharted territories of history’s curious little corners, reanimating obscure accounts of strange discoveries and bizarre scientific findings. A stunning sequence on the discovery of the Bufo Islands imagines what it means to encounter something as yet unnamed, unknown to human history, but bursting with possibilities. Lindsay similarly breathes new life into literary classics and ancient Greek myths, taking, for example, the well-known motif of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld and transforming it into a hauntingly resonant portrait of the vicissitudes of loss. Lindsay’s poems exude an extraordinary ability of fusing the outlandish and the little-known historical minutiae with the unmistakably familiar markers of the human experience.

“[A] vision that beckons the reader after it into unexpected recognitions.”—W. S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet

“Lindsay is blessed with the sort of X-ray vision a philosopher would kill for . . . Her poems open doors to other worlds and other ways of seeing.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Erudite and whimsical.”—Greensboro News & Record