“In the exquisite, enigmatic, finely calibrated poems of Turncoat, Bendall plumbs the deep sense of unease running just under the surface of twenty-first-century life. ‘I barely saw,’ her speaker reports, ‘the future behind us.’ Terse yet expansive, disjointed yet seamless, these poems fashion a mode, and a world, entirely Bendall’s. Don’t ask how she wrote these stunning poems — just read them, and have your mind quietly blown.”

Donna Stonecipher, author of "The Ruins of Nostalgia"

“The poems in Turncoat inhabit a world where the difference between being watched and being the watcher no longer exists. Paranoia abounds as Bendall creates a syntax all her own: ‘how do I register myself? / am I beating? / is air leaving my mouth?’”

Eloisa Amezcua, author of Fighting is "Like a Wife"

“Bendall’s fascinating and challenging new collection, Turncoat, leads us into ‘The Vague Territory of the Present.’ Bendall makes us unnervingly aware of how enmeshed in a surveillance society we already are: ‘Calculating now what’s permissible, and what/we’re barred from even considering.’ But within the straitjacket of repression, Bendall enacts a Houdini-like escape. Her restless erudition and formal skill shape and reshape identity: ‘I’d invent a stitch for my sentence so its pulse would skip.’ It’s in those syncopated gaps that the turncoat resurges as an agent of resistance.”

Elizabeth Robinson, author of "Excursive"