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.
