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.”