Debt to the Bone-Eating Snotflower

In her fourth collection of poetry, National Book Award finalist and Lannan Fellowship winner Sarah Lindsay presents a lyric menagerie of bizarrely imagined personae and historic figures, revealing their long-held secrets alongside surprising scientific subjects and discoveries layered into quirky, dark-edged, sometimes macabre but always intimate and graceful poems. Imbued with a buoying sense of respect for the different, the unexpected, and the challenging, Lindsay’s poems are alive with wonder. And when asked the obvious question about the title, you can say, “A ‘bone-eating snotflower’ is the inelegant slang for the worm-like creature, Osedax mucofloris, that feeds on the carcasses of minke whales in the North Sea.”