What It Doesn't Have to Do With

Reviews / Votes

The humor of Lindsay Bernal is rife with allusion to the history of American poetic tradition and cut with merciless self-reflection . . . or as Bernal herself says, 'Something there is that doesn't love melodrama.' But this is not a book of self-involvement or melodrama. These poems question what we take for granted about language and the ways our own words can bind us: 'Darkness doesn't descend suddenly at all.' -- Jericho Brown * author of The New Testament * The poems in What It Doesn't Have to Do With feel like right now: this raw moment and this vertiginous landscape and a used-up world. Emojis and a mouse named Heathcliff and Mark Rothko. The aching body and the wounded heart. Reading this book, I smile. I wince. I want to turn off all the lights, everywhere, and let in the light of the sad moon above. -- Paul Guest * author of One More Theory about Happiness * Has there ever been a poet so wry and yet so generous of heart? I can only think of Lindsay Bernal, whose irreverent voice somehow harmonizes truth's cacophony with the warm hum of doubt. In What It Doesn't Have to Do With, she gives unsparing attention to the awkward, the ambivalent, and the tiny ecstasies of minor moments, asking always, 'Tender or horrific?' That the answer is both betrays the uncanny feeling and intelligence of Bernal's stunning first book. -- Jennifer Chang * author of Some Say the Lark * Bernal uses a contemporary, sometimes humorous, voice to confront serious issues and the struggles one encounters on the road to defining "the self." * Geneseesun.com * Complicated, beautiful, risky, and successful. . . . Bernal's poetry thrills as much as it illuminates. -- Claire Denson * Glass: A Journal of Poetry *