(made)

Overview

These prose poems / juxtaposing the individual / intertwine / objects and occurrences repeatedly / a cosmological chronology / inhabits. Why /narrative tension / mention / barbed wire / pieces accumulate / Rather than a direct or linear / of the universe this / These / references to certain / prose poems / repeatedly / if altered / time it indicates / a filled space / that which surrounds it. called (made). They In the magical dictionary of (made), Cara Benson renders hotel facades in "marshmallow" � not a color, but the surface � a substance I associate, at least in North America, with outdoor recreational fires. That hotel is going to burn to a crisp, in the social and planetary imaginary of Benson's intense work. What's particularly successful about this collection is the fact that �this projective, impossible, ruined image �does not have a place in the book, but, rather, appears/can appear: in the body of the reader: reading. Images are tracked not just for their futures but for their past versions ("garbage") - in which we "wander, but delete, too." "How can you aim a fire?", asks Benson, in the "cold axis" of an aftermath in which the earth is an "orange" orbiting or attracting the "jagged spark lines" of the sky. What breaks the sky? This is writing from the holocene. It's not trajectory. It's not narrative. It's vibration. - Bhanu Kapil

Author Biography

Cara Benson is a Dusier, Black Radish, Belladonna, BookThug. (made) is her first full length collection. She edited Predictions out with Chain and edits the online Sous Rature. Benson is an active committee member of the PEN Prison Writing Program and teaches poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility for males. Her online home is www.necessetics.com. Her chapbook Quantum Chaos & Poems: A Manifet(o)ation won the 2008 bpNichol Chapbook Award.