Solip Schism (Blue Bag Press, 2024)
“O Eric who “bayonetted the tsar/ until our hands were liquified”! Eric who, world-like, “wanes and rings/ its jaunty bells”! Yes, here there is something of the expansive, wandering Beat, who refuses the global situation of a commodified subjectivity. Perhaps “the lattices of communion" are indeed unspeakable—and yet Eric speaks, invoking doom (thank god): “A dozen Erics falling right now from various heights.” O Eric who spits up the “logocentric” demands of American empire!”
—Eric Sneathen
Farce Poetica (Spiral Editions, 2022)
An experiment in the reality of poetics and an obliteration of didacticism. Farce Poetica strives to destroy itself before it can become ideological.
"when a (poem) "means" / it is on its way to becoming / proverb which is the nucleus / of propaganda"
I Don’t Know What an Oboe Can Do (No Rest Press, 2020)
A small collection of works from 2013-2019.
”I am of no particular mind. And the mouths in me say yes, yes. Though there is something so peculiarly Benick’s own— a strange, imagistic lyric, simultaneously philosophical, earnest, irreverent, casual, and sensal. This sensibility or refusal to perform singularity is part of what I find so vital here. Too, how rangeful and emotional the material, and how rendered by place and vulnerability to place that material seems to be. Such poems are touched and made by world and pulse and what is undone, unknown, and uncertain. They reorient me again and again and so I will always want to read what this poet writes. See: Certainty is an empty mineral. / I must have been a ram, trying to move through love / with my skull. I still can’t see you and not see the rain.”
- Aracelis Girmay
The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019)
The George Oppen Memorial BBQ could be considered a ritual, an invocation, a celebration, a protest. Its characters and landscape are an amorphous, chimeric Promised Land where retributions are real, demagogues are punished, and freedom is a call for both daiquiris and rumination. It is a network against austerity and homogeneity. It is a commune with enough space for the deepest of privacies. It is a place to destabilize the Western canon, to make cracks about Schopenhauer, to exile white messiahs, to mourn Fred Hampton, and Fela Kuti, and Federico Garcia Lorca. It is a brief rupture in time and space where possibilities are freed of their enclosures, where unrest is realized and invigorated. It is the moment when all the lights go out, right before the riot starts.