DAY 19: CARA BENSON, HOOLIGANS

(click for audio)

December 15th: Cara Benson

Gooseberry Kiss

I, too, am a monster. We
becoming don’t ask words / becoming.

Her lightning face / oh my lovely.
Darling daughter…

Who knows how much of me sleeps / sits alone in the silent?

Some buildings loiter, loiter –
and that is why I have seen suddenly everyone is a rat.

I was that race at that moment.

Skinly suited thing resembled barking blue dogs. Sure.

So out of this barren fuckscape, henceforth I predict.
A bucket with holes on purpose is full of feeling!

I will never steal the result of her own split preoccupations.
Home is other people, (not) lucky meaningless nouns.

While she forever barefoot slick with wanting.
That’s a long fucking time, little lamb.

Goodbye and goodbye bundled in shoe boxes from my poem candy.
Just think about it, “Did I set the living room on fire again, America?”


Language curated by Cara Benson from Advent calendar contributor poems Dec ‘09.

Cara Benson is a poet, educator, sound artist, and activist. Her full length book of interconnected of pre-elegiac prose-poem texts for earth plants humans animals called (made) is now out with BookThug. www.necessetics.com

homage to lucille | Cara Benson

her words were all that.
showed how sound could
roll itself out
in such full places as those
poems. no small things. those
lines were big.
a little word like i from her
in a tasty whip of a poem
it said more than most did say
it moved more than most did move.
her words were mighty words.
her words were magic words.
i want to know poems
all over again. to hear and
be under her spell.


Cara Benson

Day 12: Cara Benson

Cara Benson edited the interdisciplinary book Predictions for ChainLinks and author of the forthcoming books (made) with BookThug and Protean Parade with Black Radish. Other work is included in: Belladonna Elders Series #7 with Anne Waldman and Jayne Cortez, NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books), and Imaginary Syllabi (Palm Press). Spell/ing ( ) Bound, a tri-partite art objet with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Kathrin Schaeppi (ellectrique press), and Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (BookThug), which won the 2008 bpNichol Prize, will always be two of her favs. Benson edits the online Sous Rature and is a proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv.

Cara Benson on Marianne Apostolides

Cara Benson edits the online journal Sous Rature. Her book (made) is forthcoming from BookThug.







Swim by Marianne Apostolides
BookThug 2009

If ever there was a feminist beach read, Swim is it. Get ready for a Lacanian submersion in language as a swimming narrator seeks through strokes and breath a metaphor for her failing marriage. As slippery as water is the chronology as story surfaces and dialogue - did someone say that? - folds in the waves of the lines. Subconscious rises at great risk. Birth, betrayal, bite. Consider yourself warned.

1-blush astonish surrender pulsing count laps



2-gasped



3-rolled over to hug my partner



4-cause you to count your breathing



5-swims [I know it’s obvious, but boy…



6-blue wave



7-“Shush, she’d say, then read a story - spoken, soothing - the words not grasped as logic - discrete, defined - but rather as sound with rounded intention - offered as maternal/love, directly onto the body.”