REVIEWS OF THE WENDYS |
The French theorist and poet Hélène Cixous defines the writer’s journey as an “ascent” downward, a climb up towards the bottom where we learn to die. We need to see the scene of the crime, Cixous explains, where the struggle for power takes place. In her book, “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing,” death, dreams, and roots form a circular realm of self and other. In The Wendys, we don’t just play these roles, but witness the drama unfold.
—Quarterly West
The confiding tone of the first two words, the line breaks on “absence” and “beautiful,” the blurred pairing of human and animal, “footprint” and “word,” all leading to the tragic juxtaposition, in the last couplet, of “I was” and “I am,” and the poet’s mastery of white space, its mysteries, and its silences pulled me completely into the world of this and all the other Wendys.
—Washington Independent Review of Books
White’s The Wendys appears as a series of linked poem sequences, unified only by their heroines’ first names and untimely deaths. Here, we encounter Wendy Darling, Wendy O. Williams, Wendy Given, Wendy Torrance, and Wendy Coffield, whose redacted narratives inevitably invite our imaginative work. Dedicated to the author’s late mother, Wendy, the poems also explore grief as displacement and distraction, tracking the mind’s ambulatory restlessness in the wake of tragic loss. As White’s speaker explains, “Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother’s name, young and doomed.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
White puts herself on the line to plumb death and its awful impact in poems that are teardrop radiant but never sentimental. To face the loss of her mother, Wendy, she probes the deaths, sometimes violent, sometimes self-inflicted, of five other Wendys . . . However disparate, they are linked by a sense of unassuaged longing (“Take me, take me, across the universe”) and White’s ringing voice. —Library Journal (Top Spring Poetry)
White has a way of cutting to the heart of things without dwelling there to stop the bleeding. The poems in The Wendys linger in us because they are, like life, unresolved and urgent and complicated. She writes: “If you open your mouth, if a book is the axe for the frozen sea inside us./ Once a man hit me so hard a fist of light splintered behind my eyes./ It’s been so long since I’ve slept through the night.” White’s refusal to look away—in fact, her insistence that we look, and slowly—is what makes The Wendys so crucial and such a comfort for anyone grieving, or loving, or trying to endure. —Kenyon Review
|
|
REVIEWS OF PLEASE BURY
ME IN THIS |
“I want to tell you something memorable,” White writes, “something you could wear around your neck.” Yet this stunning collection does much more, confronting instead the philosophical problems inherent in our desire to memorialize the lost other in language. . . Approached with that in mind, the work’s fractured, ambulatory structure surprises and delights with its verisimilitude, especially when considering the actual workings of the mind when engulfed by grief. . .For White, what is truly meaningful resides in the aperture between two words, the threshold between rooms in “the museum of light.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
White meditates on mental health in this spellbinding
collection. . . Her primary investigations concern the liminality
and ever-imperfect definitions of feeling, the duality of emotions,
and language’s role as a medicine and a mirror. She draws inspiration
from numerous women writers—and borrows text from family members’
writings during the Holocaust. . . White’s courageous and provocative
collection inspires hope by reminding readers that strength can
be found in the most desolate places: “What is more beautiful than
the hopeless singing?” —Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
This new work confronts mortality in the lucid, meditative
strings of sentences that are the hallmark of this excellent writer.
In fact, the work is dedicated to her late father and to the four
women she knew who took their lives. “I am writing you this letter,”
she explains, and throughout there’s a sense of her trying to understand
(“I can only imagine…death as not thinking”), acknowledging her
inadequacy to the task (“these words, their spectacular lack”).
. . Poetry has always wrestled with death as both dark lure and
terrifying unknown, and White’s contribution is heartfelt and true,
both deeply personal and embracing. —Library
Journal
As is the nature of anything sublime, White’s collection of poems
combats easy synopsis or concise abbreviation. I’m inclined to call
them elegies of a sort, if, as Mary Jo Bang suggests, we understand
that the objective of an elegy is 'to rebreathe life into what the
gone once was.' But the elegy that extends throughout PLEASE BURY
ME IN THIS is as much about the haunting insufficiency of language
as it is about the cruelty and greed of time and the disunity with
which it can frame one’s life. . .The beauty and the power of these
poems, then, lies in the acknowledgment of this and the persistence
to search anyhow; a gesturing, a reaching toward, that constitutes
its own species of expression; its own grammar of grief. —Electric
Literature
White’s book presents itself as a letter but is, at the outset,
spectacularly unimpressed with the power of words in the face of
life and death. The world here feels blighted but also bright. She
has a terrific musicality in her diction and the reader can hear
her listening closely for patterns and repetitions like in these
lines: “As in my father pulling me up by the wrists saying, This
is the problem with being alive. // And years later, deliriously,
when he was dying, Do you have the blood flower? // I was taught
to chant ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ as I tore off each petal
in my room. // You are not alone in your feeling of aloneness. //
Yes, I have the blood flower.” —American
Poets
This imagistic accumulation pushes White’s speaker to the extremity of emotion. In this sense, her poetry combines the associative language of experimental poetry with the psychological intensity of confessional poetry. Emotions that would have been stated directly in the hands of a confessional poet—mourning, loneliness, suicidal urge—are approached more gingerly, as White places one sentence at a time like a heavy weight, her breath withheld.
—The Kenyon Review
The entire collection dwells on the variation of absence in White’s life, and the language she uses is just as lyrical, moving, and original as in her earlier work. Like White, we survive, and after reading her poems, the reader is left pondering what it means to be a survivor, to live, to be alive, and in order to do so, one feels compelled to read White’s poems over and over again.—The Los Angeles Review
“We must make meaning to survive,” muses the speaker of Allison
Benis White’s Please Bury Me in This, a book-length lyric
hybrid work in the voice of a woman in the throes of suicidal ideation.
The ways in which institutionalized and internalized violences affect
mental health are numerous . . . Violence doesn’t simply stop once
the physical and verbal acts have been committed, and White’s work
demonstrates this again and again. It is a testimony for the testimony:
“word by word the mouth assembles the soul.” —Ploughshares
|
|
REVIEWS OF SMALL PORCELAIN
HEAD |
Muriel Rukeyser said of poetry:
“We wish to be told, in the most memorable way, what we have been
meaning all along.” That’s how White’s book felt to me. Her poems
that use dolls to embody the awful stillness of loss were intimates
of my own grief. And she wrote about it with such tenderness, intelligence,
and clarity that I understood my own losses better…Perhaps I should
just say get thee to a bookstore or library. Buy it for your friends,
your family, your enemies, your neighbors, or steal their copies,
but read it.—The
Rumpus (The Last Book I Loved)
A doll’s “small porcelain head” may seem like a frangible
thing, but in White’s mysterious, moving collection, delicately
envisioned but indestructibly wrought, dolls are solidly there—able
to “dance violently/ without the threat of consummation or injury.”
It’s humans who are breakable, tentative, and open to anguish, as
evidenced by one haunting figure whose suicide note ends the collection.—Library
Journal (Best Poetry 2013)
The poems in Small Porcelain Head possess a power that
is at once mythically, even atavistically childlike, and also unsettlingly
adult in its post-Lapsarian consciousness...The dolls, of course,
provide a way of writing about God, nada — whatever it is that does
not talk back even to our most violent wishing — and to explore
what the speaker can/must make of that brokenness. “If description
is a living thing,” White writes, “dark cherry hair and glass eyes,
tilted away — I want to say something that will look at me.”—Los
Angeles Review of Books
White’s new collection is a book-length elegy for a suicide...Like
the angst Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein finds in his creature, White’s
speaker would uncover in her doll the voice of a dark, existential
despair. Instead of bringing the dead to life, however, White’s
speaker wants something less theatrical, though no less ambitious:
to bear witness to the narrative of her friend’s agony.—The
Kenyon Review
Allison Benis White brilliantly transforms the doll into something
like an objective correlative for the enormous grief and bewilderment
surrounding the suicide of a friend…[she] has created a lavish meditation
on loss and transformed what might have remained inexpressible grief
into poetry that is epiphanic, contemplative, terrifying, and consoling.—Pleiades
White’s attention to detail while offering abstract discussions
of time, grief, and mortality is truly stunning. Presented in prose
vignettes, the book creates a readerly expectation of wholeness,
a coherent narrative, and a sense of resolution, which the poet
works to undermine...It is this discontinuity between form and content
that renders the work so profound.—Colorado
Review
White’s poems, however, are about so much more than one person’s
suicide: they explore the complex ways we relate to life and death...they
are poems of woodworking and glassworks, of painting and construction,
of working with the hands because the mind is breaking.—The
Iowa Review
Allison Benis White is out for a metaphorical stroll with Gertrude
Stein and Jean Valentine...There are (at least) two ways to read
Small Porcelain Head. One is with unfettered admiration
for Allison Benis White's brilliant, highly accomplished work. The
form functions as a sort of safety net for psychic pain and open-ended
spiritual probing...The other way to read this book is with your
heart. It wants to get inside, and it will.—Bookslut
Readers may find that they return to Small Porcelain Head
again and again...the meditations and images ameliorate each read,
become more potent and insightful. As White suggests, “the desire
to make and to cease are equal,” and each poem here seems to be
doing just that: opening up to another poem while destroying the
previous, coming into being just as it leaves. But take comfort
from these poems if you can, White tells us: “[I]f death is a failure
of imagination, we are alive.”—32
Poems
“For the easily broken heads of bisque or china, tin heads, made
separately, cut and stamped from sheet metal, welded together, then
painted or enameled” are all “shattered” and their metal replacements
are “not enough.” It never is, and the yearning for what has been
lost is the dark side of desire under these poems, the need to feel
and the need to not feel, the twin driving forces in a book that
might just make you weep.—Mead
Hers is an unusual empathy that is so dark, steady, and clear it's
as if her friend is influencing her when she says, "As with
every revelation, midair, oblivion / is realigned and clarified:
I want to die / then decide"...Read Small Porcelain Head
to deeply consider whether it's possible to have one thing in this
world we can keep, "one thing" to "love carved from
everything."—LitBridge
|
|
REVIEWS OF SELF-PORTRAIT
WITH CRAYON |
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
How 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; these poems always seem to
me to have it both ways. I can't get this book out of my head.—The
Kenyon 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
By including hair pins, dancers, and velvet hats
in scenes haunted by an absent mother figure, White instills these
vestiges of feminine existence with a sense of disquiet, in which
abandonment and grief reside beneath a pristine surface ... All
points considered, Self Portrait with Crayon is a truly
spectacular debut.—Pleiades
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
|
Self-Portrait
with Crayon
on goodreads
ADDITIONAL
REVIEWS
The
Rumpus
ForeWord
Reviews
On
the Seawall
Cutbank
Reviews
John
Gallaher
Book
Punch
Poets'
Quarterly
Virgin
in the Volcano
|