"In her moving book-length
meditation on language and bereavement, Please Bury Me in This,
the poet Allison Benis White writes, "In the museum of sadness,
in the museum of light-- // I would climb so carefully inside the
glass coffin and lower the lid." The book enacts just such
an attempt, to enter the space of the unspeakable--the suffering
of those lost to suicide--and to speak there, but the gestures of
longing remain fraught, haunted by hopelessness, destined to begin
and begin again. The suicide note, the letter to the dead, the message
scrawled by a death camp victim and buried in a jar--they resonate
as modes of singing, of reaching toward the inaccessible, whose
radical mystery remains, and therein resides a measure of the music's
beauty, its power to hold us, if only briefly, in its glass. Out
of the mouth, a ring of gray against a wall. Out of emptiness, a
listening, an inconsolable compulsion to ‘assemble the soul.’"
Judges Citation for the 2018 Rilke Prize
"Allison Benis White is a
poet driven by duende, what Federico García Lorca called
“the true struggle,” in which an artist sees the possibility of
death up close—so close it burns her blood “like powdered glass.”
In her extraordinary new duende-driven collection, Allison
Benis White writes so intimately of our proximity to death that
each line becomes, as she writes in one poem, like a mouth “open
to snow.” "
Idra Novey
"In Please Bury Me in This, Allison Benis White
articulates loss as the vine that winds, hungry for contact, into
and around emptiness to become something beautiful. Her delicate
and elegant furor scribendi reads like a lucid dream in which mortality—the
wonder of it, as well as its attendant terrors—is made palpable.
“Not fonder, not fonder—the heart grows stranger,” she writes, in
a clarity so accurate it hurts. This book haunts."
Amy Newman
"“I am you gone,” writes the narrator of Allison Benis
White’s engrossing and sorrowful new book. Please Bury Me in
This is an extended elegy, not only for the dead, but for writing,
for poetry itself. Run through by white space, these pages hover
somewhere between a poetic line and a sentence—‘I am writing you
this letter./ I am trying to understand sentences,’ says the narrator
and, later, “these words, their spectacular lack.”….While the book
suggests some additional concerns, addiction, for one, the unrelenting
gaze at mortality is the central action and activity of this powerful
new volume. Please Bury Me in This is, again, in White’s
compelling words, “the softest howl.”"
Lynn Emanuel
"Allison Benis White’s sentences and fragments move
very delicately around something absent at their center, delineating
that something more and more precisely until, finally, we know it
absolutely and intimately without, still, being able to name it.
Haunting and resonant, these images all fall perfectly, exactly
where they're needed, building up into a whole that extends far
beyond this extraordinary book."
Cole Swensen