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Poems set in a state of heavy surveillance as the speaker navigates uncertainty and shifting realities. Through the poems in Turncoat, Molly Bendall’s sixth collection, the speaker and other figures dwell under the ever-present eye of surveillance by unspecified authorities. Mistrust and dread become part of the fabric of their lives, as they never know who may be a turncoat—a person who disguises her allegiances and traffics in betrayal. These poems employ an invented paranoid syntax meant to evade oppressive surveillance. A series of intimate and darkly humorous incidents press the speaker to continually adapt to unseen—or even nonexistent—dangers. Haunted by a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about whether old friendships may have been compromised, or if spaces could disappear overnight, Bendall’s poems coax the reader to step across boundaries and snares, alternating between episodes of interrogation and flight.
