“Whatever was going to happen hadn’t been named yet.”
Look for a review of Carrie's new work in Drunken Boat this summer (till then, check out issue 23). Here's something that might be in it. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you read the fuck out of this book.
The Land Is a Painted Thing by Carrie BennettMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This exquisite, unsettling, atmospheric, horrifying, and empowering book makes the world feel strange. (Read: If you like Ishiguro's Never Let me Go, you'll love THE LAND IS A PAINTED THING.) Strange inside the world of the text, yes, but also (after or during your read) the world outside of it. Really. Go read the first 3 poems and go for a walk. See how you feel (you'll feel...different). Maybe that's partly because THE LAND IS tampers with time's passage and what we have come to expect a poem to do: here, prose blocks (moments) that want to link but seem compartmentalized by an unseen force cause the book (or, much more accurately, the experience) to nudge at the boundary of what prose poetry can be. It's an avatar of a new class of (slipstream?) writing that does things poetry should do more of.
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