(Antiphony, 2026)
The first line of Terracotta Fragments, “my mother’s head tumbling down the steps of the Colosseum”, introduces several of the book’s concerns: a physical commitment to discontinuity; a series of quilting points between the mysteries of antiquity and the ruthless familiarity of our world; an Orphic sacrifice of melody in exchange for knowledge of Hell, shredded and scattered between the Amalfi Coast and the JSTOR archives, the Hotel California and Ronald Reagan National Airport, which is also Hell. Benick’s fragments accumulate into a chant of glass shards on a cracked screen that spell out: all these images are going to kill you. But that’s okay, as one of the only moments approaching enjambment makes clear, “I write a quick list on the R train / three things worse than death— / dialysis, Red Delicious, eternity”.
—Emily Martin
(Long Day Press, 2024)
In Memory Field, Benick recalls objects of consciousness as altered by the materials of space and time and examines the social and ontological imperatives of what it means to be a body at any given moment. A "travelogue of forgetting" in the Proustian sense, Benick's text embraces the impossibility of accurate remembering and concedes to the liminal overlap of fact and fiction. In distilled fractions of experience, Memory Field holds the place where life once was - in ruin, in metonym, in loss.
(Beautiful Days Press, 2023)
A thicket of variables flashing with relation. Lit with dark. Fabular and renegade. Synaptic and sounding. With a desperate vision. At the edge of life. 'the fox hunts' is a vast-little book of lyrical implosions, vanishings and crises, catastrophe and absurdity and secret beauty all at once, “in the war on every corner.” I go to Benick’s work for this audacious sound—critical to me. How everywhere here are new structures for thinking about processes of tyranny but also the tender, secret thing inside the throat.
—Aracelis Girmay