2 of 3 on Carrie Bennett's The Land Is a Painted Thing: a book review for Drunken Boat

July 10, 2016 Marco Maisto

Below is an excerpt from my review of Carrie Bennett's new, strange, and powerful collection of prose poems. This post was first published by Drunken Boat in June, 2016. Have a look at the full text--Medium says it only takes 8 mins to read.

...The Land Is A Painted Thing, Carrie Bennett’s second collection, reads like the first and only poetry of an offshoot-world of our own, where all modes of expression have failed some unfathomable evolutionary test. So it’s fitting that the story Bennett tells in these prose poems is haunted by a tone that feels both elegiac and inchoate. The axis of that haunting is a speaker who seems only dimly familiar with the structure of the world around her: 'I learned that all living things must be still to survive. I became a smoke stack, a statue, a slow and silent stalk.' (ANATOMY OF DREAD) While the speaker’s voice is intimate and personal, it is just as much the echo chamber of a volatile, barely conceivable universe. . . Reading The Land Is a Painted Thing reminded me of reading the likes of David Markson, Italo Calvino, John Yau, and Laura Sims for the first time.

From "Our mouths were a stunted rosebud. Deterritorialization & Becoming-Strange in Carrie Bennett’s The Land Is a Painted Thing," published by Drunken Boat, 2016