About the Book.
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 unrealized 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.
About the Author.
Lindsey Webb is the author of the chapbooks House and Perfumer’s Organ. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Clarence Snow Memorial Fellow and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books. Plat is her first book.
About the Moderator.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, and the Brooklyn Rail.
Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.