Allison Benis White

A series of letters on the death of the speaker s father that investigate loss and language s limits and ability to transcend our temporal lives"

Please Bury Me in This

Poetry. "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through which we glimpse the vivid but unsayable. White has given us a truly exceptional first collection, deeply musical and intricately haunting"—Cole Swensen.

Self-portrait with Crayon

"A powerful meditation on grief and the radiating effects of violence against women. "Because it is easier to miss a stranger / with your mother's name," Allison Benis White instead writes about five women named Wendy as a way into the complex grief that still lingers after the death of a sixth Wendy, the author's long-absent mother. A series of epistolary poems addressed to Wendy O. Williams becomes an occasion for the speaker to eulogize as well as reflect on the singer's life and eventual suicide: "What kind of love is death, I'm asking?" In the section devoted to Wendy Torrance, the fictional wife from The Shining who was bludgeoned to death by her husband, the speaker muses on the inadequacy of language to resolve or even contain grief in the wake of trauma: "A book is a coffin. Hoarsely. A white sheet draped over the cage of screaming." Ultimately, The Wendys is a book of silences and space in which tenderness and violence exist in exquisite tension. "If to speak is to die," Benis White writes in "Ignis Fatuus," "I will whisper.""--

The Wendys

Small Porcelain Head examines grief and coping mechanisms for loss in the aftermath of suicide

Allison Benis White

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