Isabel Neal is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. Drawing from a rich lineage of experimental feminist poets, which includes Gertrude Stein, Julia Story, Sarah Vap, and many other innovative practitioners, Neal delights in making language strange again. Here, the grammar is faultless, but words do not mean in the way we expect them to. Within these flawlessly constructed sentences, we discover a provocative fragmentation of meaning. The end result is poetry that reflects incisively on the circumstances of its own making, and prompts us to reconsider everything that we have come to believe about language, its uses, and its supposed limitations.
Isabel Neal is a poet and educator from New England. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she now teaches in the classroom and with a literature-focused experiential program. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Guesthouse, Honey Literary, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. The recipient of residencies and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Mountain School, and the Rackham International Institute, she is at work on her first book.