Overview

By any standard, What Shall I Buy for Your Darkwild Powers, Willem? is a ferocious, glittering arrival: a book that arrives on trembling hooves and speaks in tongues, yet whose vision is unnervingly precise. These poems - some purring like lullabies, others crackling like static from the mouth of a TV on fire - belong to a world both entirely invented and painfully familiar. In Martijn Benders' second collection, language is a delirious site of resistance and tenderness, where lyricism is forced to wear a clown mask, and irony is pressed to confess its love for something real. We are in a domain where beauty refuses to queue politely and ""poetry"" is a tongue grown in revolt against the body. One cannot read these poems and come away untouched: they lurch and sway, they mutter and howl. They seem to invent their own atmosphere: a mixture of bureaucratic afterlife, neon-lit nostalgia, feral tenderness, and spiritual prank. The voice in these poems - or rather, the choir of conflicting voices - is acutely aware of what's at stake: the failure of metaphor post-9/11, the decay of political language, the commodification of authenticity. And yet, the poems don't despair. Instead, they scavenge. They eat the ruins and spit them back out as strange, unforgettable images. A rooster pecking through the afterlife. A therapy session disguised as a moon mission. A ""doughy, pleading"" child given the gift of an eraser. Each scene flickers, breaks, and reforms like a VHS tape dubbed one too many times. Benders is not interested in conventional lyric closure or the neat packaging of insight. His poetry delights in the barely held-together. Sentences collapse midway and emerge changed. Repetition mutates meaning. Aphorisms stumble into absurdity. The recurring presence of workplace ephemera - memos, soap dispensers, wheelie-bins, motivational slogans - is not a gesture toward realism, but an invocation of the modern sublime: the poetry of entropy, of the unglamorous mechanisms that grind behind our daily performance of normalcy. If our ancestors believed in fairies, we now believe in performance reviews.

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