In Molly Bendall's fourth book of poems, the verbal underworld of doing and undoing-oath, love charm, prayer, curse-becomes a refuge of tenderness and malediction. One of her generation's most subtly imaginative poets, Bendall overhears-and whispers to the reader-a lost language which is by turns brainy and promiscuous, clueless and inscrutable, bewitching and bereft: a voice skirting a strange silence, a "goblin market" of snares, cures, trifles, and metiers inconnus. Under the spell of these poems, worlds once imagined break into growls and fingersnaps undoing the rough magic of...

Poetry. "In these intensely female, lively luscious songs it's Colette meets Beyonce meets Lil Mama meets Cixous and in comes Kristeva meets Molly Bendall meets Gail Wronsky, and therefore streams continual surprise--eros kisses big bad boogie man theory and 'word as noose' slang jumpstarts high-flown lingo and it's all so playful and yet deadly serious--how these poems issue from one urgent, collective, Medusa-like mouth, one it's high time is heard"--Gillian Conoley.

Witness to the late and sorrowful pact between predator and prey, spectator and species, Molly Bendall's fifth book beckons the reader into the enigma of animal relation. -What's left?- she asks. The answer is past remembering, attuned to extinction. Forsaking the names of creatures, Bendall returns like a sleepwalker to a painted habitat of swamps and savannahs, of captivity and display. At once playful and melancholy in its sifting of ritual discretion and shame, Watchful brings every sense, every measure, to bear on the blood mirror of the human.