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. In these prose poems, she uses paintings and sketches by Edgar Degas to frame the speaker’s abandonment by her mother. Indeed drawing, painting and sketching are the perfect metaphors for this speaker’s obsession…In essence, Benis White is exploring what humans are when they exist, and what they are when they disappear.—Boston Review
White’s poems are meditations on beauty...but they are less about aesthetic rapture than raw fear, attempts to the escape the harsh realities of separation and death through the “enchanted order” of art: “I want my life stilled inside a frame”… at its best, that studied elegance becomes a hauntingly depersonalized lyricism that captures the elusive, third-person quality of memory: “Just as a house appears in his mind out of nowhere, late at night, lit from inside, trying to remember itself, room by room, as it burns.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
I fell for these prose poems the moment I started to read them, and I liked them even more once I figured out their donnee ... This technique of double exposure – one title, two topics – works so beautifully at the level of the single poem because White works so thoughtfully, at such striking levels of generality, at the level of the sentence: you could take her best sentences and print them separately as individual poems.—Rain Taxi
Allison Benis White impresses with her ability to convince us that this could in no way be her first collection ... Precise, declarative, intelligent, Benis White's words are not limited to personal memories regarding familial connections or meditative references to Degas's oeuvre of paintings; they also concern themselves with wisdom and self-education ... through the eyes of you the reader, the detective, the scientist, the player, the suffering.—Bookslut
White does more than merely demand restitution; she creates it, through the sacred art of recollection…Throughout her debut (appropriately declared “heartbreaking” by Cole Swensen), White offers a sustained textual refutation of the notion that the world is reducible to an idea, partly by arguing that memory, despite the most devastating acts of historical and personal erasure, has elephantine resources beyond our finite knowledge and is ultimately incapable of being consumed.—Sentence
Reading White’s first collection of poems, I imagine a sketch of superimposed circles, each circle certainly a circle, but never an exact replicate of the circles previously drawn. Though the larger shape of the book is clear—meditations, through Degas’ art, on the trauma of abandonment by the mother – each poem offers its own distinct circle, its own insufficient but necessary angle into the author’s experiences of her mother’s absence.—Gently Read Literature
The poems read more like nesting dolls than jigsaw puzzles—each layer is new and complete. The narrative threads that develop throughout the collection offer just enough grounding (particularly in the dance poems and those that have direct narrative connections such as “The Bath” and “After the Bath”) to keep a reader within the world of these poems while allowing the linguistic airiness that seems key to achieving the depth of connection that makes this book successful.—Mid-American Review
Allison Benis White's Self Portrait with Crayon reaffirms the lyric poem's potential for rendering the impact of traumatic loss nearly visible. And it does so by demarcating an almost architectural space of desire, tracing lack via presences . . . The speaker invites the reader to perform a sort of gestalt cognitive operation, wherein the mind fills in the missing lines to complete a figure.—H_NGM_N
