Thrown Voice

Isabel Neal is a poet, writer, and teacher living in Maine. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. This is her first collection. Rae Armantrout is the award-winning author of eighteen books of poetry, most recently Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble.

“Rarely is language handled with such genius restraint that it can capture without holding fast, without stopping life’s next moment. Isabel Neal’s ability to withstand, to ‘look for longer’ without pulling from the natural world its constant shifts and movement, remains stunning and breathtaking throughout this debut collection. These poems resist spectacle, they arrive in the before or after times, the doe or fawn, also shaken by encounter, slipping back into bush; the heron, also caught by our downfall, as fish and plastic are taken in with one bite. These exceptional poems turn back on themselves, redefining what might be: ‘What if fearing / being led, I lead?’ Thrown Voice will travel with those lucky enough to traverse our landscapes with it.”—Claudia Rankine“Like no other book I’ve read by a young writer. She is interested in what the world is doing when we aren’t there to see it. . . . One could picture Neal as a kind of minimalist troubadour poet—one whose beloved is the very land and water. A subtle eroticism is spread broadly but also thinly over the surface of the earth.”—Rae Armantrout, from the Foreword“Neal’s lyric is a voice thrown outward ‘like a net.’ Entangled in her ‘held / and holding word,’ thought, sensation, and place reticulate, patterned precisely. This is visionary ecology, full of ‘haptic sight.’”—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man“What a brilliant collection of poems! It feels like I have been waiting to read this book for years, with its attention driving my imagination to see the world as I once thought I knew. The economy of breath from just enough words is the threshold to step through ‘though I didn’t believe this / within, without.’ Now I believe and follow ‘Like the mark an animal makes / across drifted fields.’ I am now a lifelong fan of Isabel Neal’s poems, and it is good you are holding this book, ready to join me!”—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return