Ligatures

Dos Madres, 2019

Newton and Blake arise, unbound, as do preachers, botanists and birds, together, all, for the first and last time, as both reason and revelation tremble before what’s ahead for us all. With extraordinary eloquence, acuity and wit, Joel Bettridge allows us, for the length of his cadences, and even longer, to believe a new earth is possible, one we clearly don’t deserve, but that his poetry forbids us to forsake.” — Joseph Donahue

 “Alchemist, botanist, reluctant prophet, Joel Bettridge comes to us announcing that ‘We love what they call fantastic and heretic.’ And it’s true: in these insistent litanies, suffused with code-switching and historical synchronicities, the fantastic and the heretic continuously offer the promise of holiness and love. ‘May you inherit the inscrutable,’ declares the poet, knowing full well that his poems are part of that inheritance, but relying on his hypnotic rhythms and tantalizing visions to keep us reading. Thus we discover that with Bettridge, we are counted ‘Among the bamboozled, the hoodwinked, the starry-eyed losers,’ and yet ‘among the slag and the splendor, counted among such a nation of priests.’” — Norman Finkelstein

“The world is gorgeously rendered and yet still irremediably awry in Joel Bettridge’s Ligatures: here we discover ourselves, ‘eyes skinned back with apocalypse.’ These poems excavate distinct and strange histories so as to make all such histories simultaneous with our dark and rupturing present. Bettridge demonstrates the end times with rigor, delicacy—even tenderness. And as the knot tightens, he works with painful incisiveness to circulate a new and defiant current through our home-not-home in its fallen, falling state.” — Elizabeth Robinson