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9781945588426

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'Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother's name, ' Allison Benis White writes an extended eulogy to women named Wendy, none of whom and all of whom are her mother. In these carefully made, sorrowful poems, Benis White teases the seams between self and other, between fiction and 'the real' of the mother's lost body. In the book's gorgeous final sequence, Wendy Darling plummets to the earth in achingly slow motion: 'I am lowering my mouth / over her mouth, ' writes Benis White--evoking the eros of poetry's ancient desire to speak to, to breathe with, the dead. These poems teach me how to mourn, which means they teach me how to love. --Julie Carr In these nuanced, incantatory poems, Allison Benis White addresses and inhabits five Wendys, each an archetype and a dimension of self, each 'peeled down to [her] voice.' Violence presses in on all of the Wendys, red or white, blood or milk, sugar, smoke, air, the page, and the prominent white space that demarcates and effaces voice and self. The poems are hushed, personal, spare; language breaks through an enigmatic privacy into a sapphire epiphany. Here, speech is grief. Here, 'the living are the dream of the dead' and the poem is the hallowed interface. --Diane Seuss

In these nuanced, incantatory poems, Allison Benis White addresses and inhabits five Wendys, each an archetype and a dimension of self, each 'peeled down to [her] voice.' Violence presses in on all of the Wendys, red or white, blood or milk, sugar, smoke, air, the page, and the prominent white space that demarcates and effaces voice and self. The poems are hushed, personal, spare; language breaks through an enigmatic privacy into a sapphire epiphany. Here, speech is grief. Here, 'the living are the dream of the dead' and the poem is the hallowed interface. --Diane Seuss

Author Information

Allison Benis White is also the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside.

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