Self-Portrait with Crayon (CSU Poetry)
It's rare to find a book of poetry that makes a reader remember why one reads poetry, but Allison Benis White has written one. --Boston ReviewHow do these poems do what they do? Degas-rich, fear-rich, memory-rich, the tone of the book feels beautiful and rendered while simultaneously impulsive and storming...I can't get this book out of my head. --The Kenyon ReviewI fell for these prose poems the moment I started to read them, and I liked them even more once I figured out their donnee...you could take her best sentences and print them separately as individual poems. --Stephen Burt, Rain TaxiAllison Benis White'sSelf-Portrait with Crayonreaffirms the lyric poem's potential for rendering the impact of traumatic loss nearly visible. --H_NGM_N"A fugitive mother haunts these prose poems where absences are presences that 'briefly in the air crown the shape of what is no longer there.' Although Degas -- another motherless child -- provides conceptual armature for Allison Benis White's portrayals, this book might beA Season in Hellfor our times. Its descents, sudden and disorienting, exert enormous pressure; there's a narcosis of the depths in the voice, a refusal of return to mere surfaces that echoes Rimbaud. Yet White's poems are also intimate as a box of pins -- bright sharps she pricks into the map of orphan-world, to mark each site of betrayal and bewilderment." --Robert Hill Long, author ofThe Work of the BowandThe Effigies"An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting." --Cole Swensen, author ofOursandThe Book of a Hundred Hands"I found myself thinking of Frost as I read these beautifully disturbing poems -- 'The whole great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper, carrying the spirit deeper into matter.' Allison Benis White does just that, pulsing between a childlike wonder at the things of this world, and a seemingly hard-earned self-consciousness at the difficulty in naming them -- in these poems a mother is missing, a God is to be feared, the snow is broken, and yet, 'maybe this is enough: to lose.' This is an amazing debut." --Nick Flynn, author ofSome EtherandBlind Huber