No Planets Strike

“Bell delivers on his promise to ‘burn the very Latin from the world,’ insisting on grief-stricken gutturals often undercut by wry or Dadaist humor that prove him to be one of the most tonally versatile young poets working today.”—Tanya Larkin, Boston Book Review

“Edgy in both senses of the word. Josh Bell populates his daft American heartland with the runaway muse Ramona and her clones. The resulting landscapes are as dangerous, funny, and drop-dead gorgeous as those in a Road Runner cartoon.”—John Ashbery

“Josh sings as if he had both a feather and a pistol held to his throat—objects that somehow (so absurd and surreal is his world) merge into the same provocation. He’s tickled and he’s frightened; he’s at once hilariously and seriously voluble. Reeling from a sense that the universe cudgels us (that most contemporary of feelings), he yet boasts, rightfully, of his devices, which, wrongly, he calls ‘rusted.’ Everywhere in this dazzling collection he vindicates the idea that ‘we’re at the fingertips / of so much force; it makes us / feel like singing.’”—Calvin Bedient

“This is not a book for the agoraphobic, the acrophobic, or the erotophobic: Josh Bell’s fierceness of wit, his deft lyricism, his ability to swing adroitly between dictions high and low, combine to create a world that is savage and irreverent, yet fraught with longings spiritual and corporeal.”—Cate Marvin

“Josh Bell’s No Planets Strike is a scary and deeply moving voyage through a wide spectrum of very American self-confrontation. With a voice that can move easily across many dialects and moods—a voice that can mutter, ‘Ramona, I can’t sleep, I shot / too many Indians. I shot and shot / but they wouldn’t fall down’—this powerful first collection reminds us of all that is untranslatably American in our experience, as well as our language. It is a mesmerizing tonal range Bell achieves—‘reach[ing] for the sky’—being grounded down by a reality of deep psychic and national orphanhood, one that is, as well, bravely clear-headed, capable of grief without self-pity, filled with dark humor—sassy, witty, caustic, dying to love and be loved, trying not to sell out to powers visible and invisible. This is a speaker who has seem too much, felt too much, who cannot bear much more, but who still believes in us, and in his job, enough to try to bring back an accurate report from the large and the small broken heart.”—Jorie Graham