(made) by Cara Benson

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Praise for (made):

“In this book illuminated with language, these prose poems lyrically scrutinize the everyday in a pileup of evidence. Isolated in cars on the interstate, people come together to crash or pile into nightcourt, assigning blame, relations askew in this atomizing economy where hands touch to exchange money, where billboards commandeer attention. It’s easier to take credit than responsibility. But how do the quiet encounters add up so that one by one individuals are also connected – comrades? “These are the people,” Cara Benson explains, accounting, too, for the bats, spiders, the sated cats, a sunflower that achieved its bloom – the many agents of a (made) world. Thank goodness Cara Benson is noting down the details, in language (made) into poetry, and poetry (made) into this gorgeous book.” —Kaia Sand

Reviews:

“What seems straightforward becomes a puzzle” —Crystal Hurdle for Canadian Literature

“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

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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.

March 2010 | Poetry
5.5×8.5 inches | 72 pages
Condition: New
ISBN 9781897388563
$17.00